Prep for a Cloudy time ahead - Adopting Cloud

Moving Development & Testing to Cloud:

• Development and test environments soon will be all on Cloud, as strategy to move from on-premise infrastructure and application installation into cloud for temporary needs seems surely beneficial to businesses
• Even for doing POCs and evaluations before taking up journey to implement a software can be better handled by using a Cloud for the time needed

Deploying Business Process to Cloud:

• Review OOTB Cloud service offering
• Map & align current business process to OOTB offering
• Configure the service offered
• Integrate the service to rest of the ecosystem (other clouds/non-cloud systems)
• Migrate data, Test & Adopt

Hybrid & Mix: 

• Many businesses are gong with Hybrid approach by carrying combination of on-premises, private cloud & public clouds
• Even going to multiple vendors for different cloud services is seen often as per recent market research on customers using Cloud

IT Department:

• Need for new learning and skills 
• Prepping for right partnership for journey to Cloud
• First Cloud experience & Maintenance to upgrade/enhance/support Cloud services afterwards

OBIA Procurement & Spend Analytic Module version 7.9.6.4

Procurement module of OBIA 7964 provides wide level of content for reporting on purchasing process related data. Procurement and Spend analytic module provides reporting capabilities on most of the required data for procure to pay cycle. This module allows users to analyse spend(direct/indirect), identify saving potentials, recognize supplier performance and assist in decision making to improve procurement performance.

This Oracle OBIA module has 4 dashboards under Procurement & Spend Analytics:

1. Spend Analyzer
2. Procurement Performance
3. Supplier Performance
4. Employee Expenses

Each of above dashboards contain various pages with overview and detailed reporting. These pages provide key metrics reporting around these areas for various level of business users like Procurement Manager, Purchasing Leads, Buyers, Sourcing Managers and AP Analysts. 

Spend Analyzer: 

Provides access to overall spend overview along with providing insight into spend by product category, by supplier, by Organization and Item level spend details. One can review direct and indirect spend by selecting specific product categories to segment the data. Oracle also supports reporting Spend using UNSPSC commodity category hierarchy. You can slice and dice to review Spend data at various levels using organization dimensions and their attributes like organization, business unit, cost center, buyer. Spend Analyzer dashboard also provides reporting on key metrics like Payable leakages, Invoice Price Variance, Avg invoice price, Saving Potentials, Off contract spend etc. 

Procurement Performance: 

Provides overview of how well procurement function in organization is performing along with detailed analysis on Purchase Order, Off contract purchase rates, Rejected amounts, On time received amount, Outstanding PO Amount, Metrics around Requisitions and various other key metrics. Content in this dashboard also enables users to analyse time trends, aging of requisitions and PO leakage.

Supplier Performance:

This dashboard allows buyers and purchasing managers to engage better with Suppliers by tracking their performance. The content under this dashboard allows users to do trending analysis, review exceptions, monitor quality, price and delivery performance, and understand payment performances. Buyers can quickly review top 20 performing suppliers using configurable supplier scorecard considering quality, delivery and pricing performance. One can also quickly identify which supplier's rejection amount is in Top 10 or which suppliers are delivering early or late. 

While Oracle provides lot of metrics in reports and presentation layer for each of it's functional modules, any requirements to build additional metrics can be easily achieved by using or extending the logical and physical layer content. 

As part of release 11.1.1.7.1 Oracle has additionally build content around "Sourcing Analytics" which allows users to analyze the negotiations with suppliers, supplier's responses and eventual contract award decisions. The intend is to allow insight into saving potentials by leveraging information available around this process. 

Oracle Mfg Analytic Module 7.9.6.4 - Pegging Data pull query issue

7.9.6.4 version is the first release of Manufacturing Analytic module as part of Oracle's Business Intelligence Applications offering. We ran into an issue in a recent project where the out of the box query which is supposed to pull "ASCP Pegging" data from ASCP instance wasnt fetching any records.

Further analysis resulted in a possible bug with the SQL extract query for this task. Current query was trying to join Full Pegging table(MFP: MSC_FULL_PEGGING) and Plan Name table(MP: MSC_PLANS) using Organization_Id. In a typical ASCP environment plan definition is owned by a certain organization and you wunt have an ASCP plan for each inventory organization. After removing this not-needed join, the query started fetching data as expected.

Demand Analytics within Oracle, What are my options ??

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)

Oracle's first "Value Chain Summit" is here..

Join fellow users, partners, and luminaries for the Oracle Value Chain Summit in San Francisco to learn how Oracle is helping companies transform supply chains into value chains to gain competitive edge. This thought leadership..

Click on link below to get more details of the event..

http://www.oracle.com/webapps/events/ns/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=157624&src=7531558&src=7531558&Act=50

Trends for 2013: 'Big Data' Gets Bigger - eMarketer

"Big Data" brings great insights.. turning these insights into actionable items can lead to significant benefits for retail and CPG firms.

Emarketer.com captures the current and future probable state of Big Data in their recent article. Click on the link below to read the complete article.

Trends for 2013: 'Big Data' Gets Bigger - eMarketer

New "Guided Resolution" for Demantra

After a good success of Oracle Community concept released earlier by Oracle Support, we are seeing them taking another step forward in form of "Guided Resolution" for Demantra application. The concept basically better organizes previous resolutions for known or fixed issues related to Demantra product. 

They have started with five topics:

• Data loading related issues (Note Id 1461899.1)
• Data loading issues not related to error codes (Note Id  1468884.1)
• Workflow related issues (Note Id 1353217.l)
• Worksheet related issues (Note Id 1486639.1)
• Engine related issues (Note Id 1486634.1)

Guided resolution page look:

Refer to below note for more details around what is this new concept and how to use it. 

How to Use the Demantra Guided Resolution, a Proactive Services Tutorial.  Note 1473992.1

ASCP - Unconstrained Plan

Few basic characterstics can be listed as below;
An unconstrained plan:
- doesn't consider manufacturing capacities (material & resources)
- assumes infinite capacity
- results are same as traditional MRP
- simply is an statement of what all resources would be needed to meet the production schedule
- can come handy in long term decision making for resource requirement planning

Oralce's ASCP module can be used for unconstrained planning as well, unconstrained ASCP plans are usually like baby steps towards more complex, holistic, constrained & optimized planning ASCP world.

Unconstrained ASCP plans thus form an integral part of ASCP implementation, as it can be used for getting familiar with application, as well as in verifying the ASCP outcomes. You can compare the unconstrained ASCP plan recommendations with your MRP plan results and thus can validate the basic ASCP setup.

Two important aspects to be focused on while running ASCP unconstrained plan should be:
1. Try to duplicate results of legacy MRP system.
2. Increase familiarity & confidence on ASCP application.

Steps to implement an unconstrained ASCP plan:

1. Create DB link between transaction source(ERP) server and APS(Advanced Planning & Scheduling) server

2. Setup collection program

3. Run collection to copy supply chain model from source instance to APS server

4. Define an ASCP plan and setup plan options.(with no constraints)

5. Launch the plan

VERIFICATION: Unconstrained plan is designed to produce identical results as that of legacy ERP system. This becomes useful in verifying implementation and in building users confidence with the ASCP application.

Dashboards in SCM

Got bored of running into summary details of each and every report to get a high level picture ? Ever thought of having a platform where you can have all the information at your finger tips(literally at finger tips), if yes then you should not ignore the power of Dashboards.

The importance of having dashboards in today's growing supply chain is quite clear, as the need of having visibility of data across the chain is required to move towards being a demand driven network. Dashboards can be utilised to provide an accurate high level picture of how well are the components of supply chain performing. It provides a manager a wonderful tool for reviewing the statuses and for remainging updated with execution statstics. Managers can easily grasp the information by just looking at the various graphs and tables, which can be also utilized in thier meetings with higher management.

A well customized dashboard application inline with the user's requirement and role can serve as a daily cutom newspaper for all the updates and happenings.