Fueling supply chain with retailer's POS data - Oracle DSR

When recession hit the market, the impact on CPG industry was inevitable. With customers trying to save every penny possible, the competition in market for providing best quality product at minimal price possible has surpassed all previous levels. Everyone is trying to get the most of every dollar they spend. Few most common CPG industry specific issues can be easily listed as:

• Lost sales due to out of stock conditions
• High inventory carrying cost due of misplaced stocking
• Promotion expenses going in vain
• Loss of margins due of expedition costs
• Increasing IT Complexity

Circumstances like this call for nothing but best in class, efficient and optimized business processes which are driven by one and only goal, increasing the profitable revenue making.

The road to accomplish this target is anything but smooth, need is to ensure that the supply chain backbone transforms into an efficient value chain. The value shall be visible and transparent to every stakeholder, be it an internal department(e.g. sales, marketing, operations) or an external vendor. With growing capabilities at retailer's end to capture demand at the point of it's origin, need is to build processes to capture this demand data and utilize it to drive the supply chain. Problem in gathering and utilizing this information is variety of retailer's POS capturing systems, standards and granularity.

One of the AMR Research paper clearly outlines this fact by saying "The Bottom Line: Consumer products manufacturers must centrally manage all demand signal data, including POS, to create a Demand-Driven Supply Network (DDSN) that improves demand visibility to reduce stockouts by more than half and increase Perfect Order performance by 17%"

While in today's generation of supply chain, availability of data is lowest of concerns, problem is with managing this high volume and ensuring the accurate required information is made available to upstream for planning. With variety of sources of POS data, the need to capture and cleanse it prior to it's availability for being used in planning is of high importance.

Oracle's Demand Signal Repository product has shown thought leadership in this direction, by providing a collaborative demand signal management platform with best of breed functionality and reporting capabilities.

Oracle's DSR datasheet points out it's three key capabilities:

• Capture and manage large volumes of disparate external demand data
• Analyze, report and take action based on Day/SKU/Store level insights
• Integrate clean, harmonized demand data to external applications

DSR empowers you to:

• Greater visibility of data to better sense, shape and respond to demand
• Reduce manual effort and cost
• Simplify collaboration across teams and applications.

(Read more about DSR@ http://www.oracle.com/ocom/groups/public/@ocompublic/documents/webcontent/018927.pdf

Oracle VCP Product and processes

Bajaj Electrical success story - Oracle ERP, JDE, Demantra & Siebel

A video presentation on Oracle's yet another success story on a big bang implementation of Oracle ERP, JDE, Demantra and Siebel.

Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning(ASCP)

ASCP module forms the core of Oracle's APS suite, with its holistic global supply & distribution planning functionalities. With ASCP you can plan simultaneously for all your manufacturing plants & distribution houses at different granularity of time in a single plan, which considers the latest demand, forecast, sourcing rules, current inventory and production levels. ASCP offers a variety of plan options and plan types, which can be used to model individual business supply chain planning needs. In general, ASCP implementations start with an initial phase of "unconstrained ASCP plans" usage. In due course of time and with planner's readiness towards understanding the inputs, setups and results, one can move forward with "constrained" ASCP plans (e.g. EDD, ECC & Optimized plans).

Why MRP isn't sufficient?
Becasue:
- It is sequential in nature
- It plans based on unconstrained production, storage & transportation capacity
- It does not optimizes the supply recommendations
- It has no decision support capabilities

Few of major features of ASCP module can be listed as:
- Global Visibility
- Rapid ROI
- Supports Centralized & Decentralized planning
- Supports mixed mode manufacturing
- Holistic Plans for high level planning & Detailed scheduling
- Finite Constraint based Planning(CBP) & Scheduling
- Optimization across multiple Objectives
- Online Replan & Simulation capabilities
- Supports Global Order Promising(GOP)

A good definition for ASCP, found in Oracle documentation:
"Oracle ASCP is a comprehensive, Internet based planning solution that can rapidly and significantly improve supply chain performance. ASCP is based on Oracles' Internet computing architecture, third generation Oracle memory based planning engine technology and proven constraint based planning & optimization technology."

For more details:
Oracle's ASCP offering page link: "http://www.oracle.com/applications/planning/SCMP.html"

R12.1: Service & Spare Parts Planning (SPP)

In this blog I would try to share my exposure on Oracle's new release Service Parts Planning, based on a recent Oracle Webcast.

Oracle's R12.1 APS suite has a new product in offering "Spare/Service Parts Planning", which is focused to answer the need of an advanced, automated, exception based planning application of Service industry. Sectors which can highly benefit from Service Parts Planning are Industrial Manufacturing, Aerospace, High Tech & OEMs. As volume of spares in these sectors is significantly large and forecasting amount of spares to be available at various stocking location in a Service industry supply chain, itself is a painful job. Besides forecasting, safety stocks calculation, and replenishment planning are two more complicated processes in this industry and the complexity of it can be easily imagined considering number of spare parts involved in Services.

Research shows that After-market sales forms more profitable part of business, as compared to profit earned by sales of original equipments. Also the amount of money involved in Service sector of business is huge and thus becomes a potential market to target for improving the current form of supply chain planning system.

Service Supply Chains are more complex as flow of material is not one way,. Spares flow from Suppliers to Warehouses to Service Technicians, while defective parts material flow backward for repair or replacements. In a standard Service supply chain, the complexity if pretty high because of various locations and spare parts volume. This needs an application which can handle forward as well as backward material flow, so that smooth material flow can be achieved.

For company's who have Service as a key contributor and part of their business and it's growing at a fast pace, SPP can be a best of breed solution for all of theirs Service Parts Planning needs.

What SPP has to offer:
1. Forecast accurately with build in Demantra's Forecasting engine
2. Replenish spares based on Single plan model
3. Distribute spares using SPP's plan
4. One single UI to carry out all 3 above processes for improved productivity
5. Forecasting based on Shipments, Spares Usage, and Returns
6. Plan based on Service parts failure rates calculations
7. Integrated with various APS modules like Demantra DM, CP, IO, and ASCP.

Benefits:

• Reduced inventory carrying cost for Spares
• Increased Spares demand fill rates
• Improved Customer Service Levels
  

SPP is available in Oracle's R12.1 APS product release and is completely integrated with EBS R12 and EBS 11i10. It can be implemented along with any APS module or can be even implemented as a stand-alone application. In a stand-alone environment, the SPP product can be easily integrated with other ERPs through APIs and legacy integration.

For more information on product offering and capabilities, review documentation available in Oracle Metalink.

Importance of Collaborative Planning (CP)

Most of the industries have their various departments managing their shows on their own and for themselves. Manufacturing crew works for a production plan which utilises the available resources to most, with more number of longer batch runs and try to achieve new production records every month. Working in a motor manufacturing industry I have seen closely how one used to focus on efficiently producing maximum numbers and achieving targets set by manufacturing team, which were not most of the time exactly in line with organisation's targets. In similar fashion we used to see around us other departments like marketing, sales, supply chain working in their own island of comfort, remaining untouched from other

Going solo is not a workable solution in today's work environment, one need to have proper communication channel and portal for sharing information, exchanging point of views and reaching to a consensus plan. All the latest application providers today have this agenda in mind and thus most of them support collaboration.

An online collaborative work environment can be utilised for communication, alerts management and in decision makings. It in one hand where brings visibility to the organization, on the other hand the results of such an environment returns in form of increased profits, sales and service level.

Oracle's Oracle Collaborative planning module which is part of their APS offerings, has capabilities for internal as well as external collaboration. Internal collaboration provides multiple enterprise planning environment, where planning time can be reduced and pro-active actions can be taken during plans execution. External collaboration with suppliers provide information regarding incoming supplies plan, utilising which supply chain plans can be created. Two-way collaboration is beneficial to both the parties, as they with empowering information are in better state of managing operations.

http://www.oracle.com/applications/planning/SCC.html

Oracle's APS product offering R12.1

Oracle's APS product offering R12.1

Oracle unveiled recently set of new products/modules under it's Advanced Planning Suite portfolio. The list now compromises of following modules:
Existing:
1. Advanced Supply Chain Planning (ASCP)
2. Demand Planning- Demantra
3. Collaborative Planning (CP)
4. Global Order Promising (GOP)
5. Inventory Optimization (IO)
New:
6. Manufacturing Operations Centre
7. Advanced Planning Command Center
8. Service Parts Planning (SRP)
9. Demand Signal Repository (DSR)

We will get into details of each of them in later blogs, keep watching this space. :)