The need to have access to demand data to capture insights, analyse and respond quickly and appropriately has been around for long in CPG market. The economic turmoil across the globe has added to complexity of projecting demand for CPG goods. Consumers today are spending less and wanting more and better return on their spend dollars. Social media has gone to a new high of usage and is playing a bigger role in consumer's decision making for selecting products. Amount of data present in various forms in various systems is absolutely humongous in size and scale.
Imagine a world where any data which can convey a story about market demand is available for analysis. Though getting every data out there into a system may not be do-able for every business, but atleast having access to key data streams which are classified as indicator for demand can itself be a big step forward. Some of the well known demand indicative elements are POS, Store inventory, Syndicated data, Consumer sentiment captured from big data, etc.
A business intelligence(BI) initiative to capture all such data to gain valuable insight of market/consumers has become critical for CPG companies. Like any BI initiative, few things to keep in mind while embarking a BI project journey are:
- Never forget that business goal is to gain insights by implementing BI
- Thus ensure that these "insights" are identified upfront
We are seeing quite few companies are using Demantra as backbone for forecasting and S&OP process. These companies wish to use data lying in Demantra and S&OP in Oracle BI application for achieving a common reporting center, calling it often Demand Analytics. Building a Demand Analytics layer in your enterprise can help planners, managers and Chief's of company in various ways. Demand Analytics can quickly provide answer to questions like:
- Which are my most profitable brands?
- Which customers are giving me most business?
- How is my newly launched product doing in stores?
- Where am I running into Out of Stocks and for which products?
- etc..
Oracle BI apps are already being offered in various areas of business like Mfg Analytics, EAM Analytics, SCOM Analytics etc. For Advanced planning business users community(demand planners, supply planners, demand manager, supply managers, operations manager, S&OP planners and managers, COO, CIO, CFOs etc), Oracle has provided Advanced Planning Command Center and Oracle Demand Signal Repository as two key solutions for planning analytics space.
Oracle DSR: Oracle DSR is more focused towards capturing various demand signals/data from external and internal sources, cleansing and harmonizing it all to report in a BI presentation layer for easy reporting for business. Demand signal repository thus acts as a central warehouse for all demand related information providing business value gained from the insight of demand data in DSR. Also with data elements from DSR integrated to downstream applications like Demantra Demand Management, Demantra Consumer Driven Planning(future release), Demantra PTP, Agile PLM etc, there is richer value which downstream applications and users can realize.
(Read more @ http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/ebusiness/planning/053299.html)
Oracle APCC: Advanced Planning Command Center module provides a robust BI analytic layer over Oracle's Value Chain Planning modules, specially ASCP and Demantra. Latest version of APCC allows supply planners to almost do all their day to day ASCP work using simple and better APCC user interface. Additionally APCC allows publishing Demantra DM data as demand plan with option to publish 15 custom forecast&history measures and custom hierarchy into APCC. APCC also support S&OP and IBP processes using demand, supply and financial information from Demantra, SNO and ASCP modules. This module though is more manufacturer's internal operations and planning process centered.
(Read more @ http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/ebusiness/planning/053296.html)
A third option which we see clients considering is building a custom VCP Analytic solution using Oracle BI as platform with feeds coming from ASCP, Demantra and other planning applications. This option though is found more common among clients who find Gaps in std APCC offering due of variety of custom sources they may have. If there is lot of ETL work required for feeding APCC with required data from 3rd party sources then considering this 3rd option may become a better choice. Also for clients who already have a strong BI solution footprint are seen to prefer building additional metrics and subject areas on existing analytic solution.
(Read more about OBIEE offering @ http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/ent-performance-bi/enterprise-edition-066546.html)
