Demantra 7.3 release - Features Part2 - NPI

7.3 simplifies New Product Introduction cycle, by providing following abilities on worksheet application itself:

- create new product based on existing product
- manage product launch and life cycle end
- cannibalization of existing product

Instead of using Demand Planner > Member/Chaining Management application which was quite complex for end users. This new functionality gives end users a simple and faster way of managing new products introduction.

This function has been provided as a level method on worksheet application. New level method "Create similar product" is context based and is called from existing SKU from which the history shall be copied over to NEW product. Filters of worksheet are used for managing combinations and target location members. The option of setting a launch date and cannibalization% is also provided.

Overall this functionality eases out end users life, who have been using sophisticated Demand planner>Member/chaining management till date.

Demantra 7.3 release - Features Part1

Demantra's much awaited 7.3 release happened as promised by Oracle in mid of august09. The current release has lot of new functionality changes and enhancements, from simple ones like UI changes to complex ones like CTO offering.

Complete list of documentation is available in Metalink Demantra document library.

(http://oracledemantra.blogspot.com/2008/07/demantra-documentation-on-metalink.html)

Internationalization:

Open the CWB login screen and you would see the first change, which appears as "Language" button at bottom of logon screen.

This release has internationalized the product by supporting, 8 languages (Russian, Japanese, Canadian French, Korean, Spanish, Chinese and Portuguese), by making web based applications available in these languages for end users.

You need to pick the language at time of installation and only one language per install is supported.

Remember that, the language support is targeted for business users and not for implementers, so don't be surprised when you see your good old Business modeler menu options still showing up in English.

more on 7.3 release features will be posted soon.....

The S&OP Sweet Spot on Manufacturing Executive

The S&OP Sweet Spot on Manufacturing Executive

Abstract: In order to respond quickly to rapidly changing markets, manufacturers are striving to find tools that help them easily link financial plans with operational plans.

During the holidays, cookies are in high demand. Elementary school students are selling baked goods as part of their school fundraisers, and supermarkets and restaurants are upping their orders.

That's a good thing for Otis Spunkmeyer, a San Leandro, CA-based cookie manufacturer that has seen its revenue nearly double over the past five years. But all of this holiday season activity puts pressure on the company to reconcile sales forecasts with inventory and production operations.

Until about a year ago, Otis Spunkmeyer was using Excel spreadsheets to summarize sales forecasts for the annual budgeting process. That approach limited the number of people who could access the information. In addition, it did not always accurately reflect what the sales force was seeing and could not tie financial forecasts with production. The company was often at risk of making too few or too many cookies.

Complete article ....................Posted using ShareThis

Waiting for Demantra 7.3 release......

Demantra 7.3 is being expected to be released in a month or two, and we are looking forward for some most sought after features availability in it. While previous few releases were mainly focused on integrating Demantra application with various Oracle products, this release is going to provide more features within Demantra product.

Few key features to look out for could be:

1. Support for CTO (Configure To Order) to derive dependent demand within Demantra. This feature existed in ODP and thus with this feature being available in Demantra, it would surely cut down a major missing functionality

2. Integration with Hyperion for importing Budget data into Demantra, which might come handy in S&OP process.

3. Support for Engine run on Linux will mean you no more need to have Demantra Engine on windows server, but still for Administrative tools like Business modeler etc, you would need windows box.

4. Improved NPI capabilities and worksheet performance

......am waiting to see how 7.3 release would impact product's demand in market.

S&OP Process - Post1 - New Product Planning process

Step1: New Product planning process

Planning process for new product launch forms the first step of the larger S&OP process. This sub process shall support forecasting demand for the new product being launched. Statistical Quantitative forecast most of the times is based on the fact that future demand will resemble the historical sales. For improved forecast accuracy, qualitative information shall be incorporated into quantitative forecast numbers and a combination of it shall be used as Baseline forecast.

But for a new product with no historical sales data present, one needs to look at their product list for items with similar attributes and characteristics. Once identified historical sales of these existing product shall be mapped as history of the new product. Later a quantitative forecast can be generated out for this new product.

Picture: Product Launch Flow ***

A new product launch can affect the sales of existing products under same product line. Say the recent launch of Apple's "3G S Iphone" will surely impact the sales of it's existing old 3G model. (Well in this particular example with Apple reducing the price of old 8 GB model by half might shadow down the effect to some extent). But usually in such cases old product faces lower demand with consumers trying to grab the latest model release. This effect of reduction in the sales volume, sales revenue, or market share of one product as a result of the introduction of a new product by the same produce, is referred as Cannibalization.

Another commonly seen effect is phase out of an existing product, which is getting replaced by a new one. Effect of this process should be incorporated into the baseline forecast calculation.

Setting up New Product Planning process in Demantra:

Oracle Demantra and it's integration with EBS provides the features required to build the new product planning process on it. Collect new product codes from EBS into Demantra by using NPI setup form on DM system administrator responsibility. Once the new product is visible in Demantra, use the Member Management feature under Demand planner application to create combinations where this new product shall be sold. zero history can also be created for this new product and selected location level member's combination. This will allow users to pull up these combinations into worksheet and manually enter or adjust the historical sales information. Next step in the process is to map the historical sales from existing combination to new combination, which can be achieved using Chaining Management feature. A Chain is created and executed to copy sales history from existing combinations into the new combination. Once done, the new product at selected locations will have historical sales data, which is utilized by the Analytical Engine for calculating future demand of this new product.

It can be ensured that new product's demand prediction follows the shape of previous product launches, using Shape modeling feature of Demantra. As many as 8 distinct shapes can be saved and used under this functionality.

...........................next step in S&OP process "Demand Planning/Review".............................................

*** picture reference: http://www.winningware.com/images/LaunchFlow.jpg

How to extend Calendar to 2030 in Demantra

Problem: Demantra has calendar with dates only till 2010, as you could have possible seen in table INPUTS too. With 2009 going on, customers need the calendar to be extended way further in future.

Solution: Oracle has released a patch for this and is now available on Metalink for download.

Details: If your version of Demantra has INPUTS table extending only till 2010, then you need to refer to metalink note (551814.1). Based on which version of Demantra you are running, you can download specific patch to resolve your problem.

Remember that this patch would only populate standard columns and any custom columns representing your custom calendars will need manual intervention. You can populate your custom column upto 2030, once this patch extends the records to dates till 2030.

Metalink note: 551814.1

Demantra Versions applicable: 6.2.6, 7.0.2, 7.1.1, 7.2.0.X

Demantra 7.2.1 integration with Siebel 7.8

In response to a mail query:

"Newly released integration pack between Siebel 7.8 with Demantra 7.2.1 is now available for download from Oracle, after prior approval from Oracle Development team. Remember this integration package is still a controlled release targeted only for a specific customer segement.

NOTE: This release isnt a public one.

Metalink note id 470574.1, shall be referred for more details about this release and for patch name and numbers. "

Notes from Today's Webcast on "The Key to Optimizing Demantra Worksheet Performance"

Today's webcast was another session full of information on how to ensure that you are getting best performance from Demantra worksheets. Few key points to take away were:

1. At times JAVA is the culprit for a degraded performance of worksheets

2. End users machine specific setups can help improve performance as well

3. Database maintenance plays key role too

4. Application server settings based on number of concurrent users comes handy too.

The session covered various issues and resolutions for them, it was nicely presented by dividing in short term and long term solutions.

Short term solutions which were discussed in today's session focused on:

- Ensuring End user machines meet minimal system requirements

- Setting up the heap size (Xmx) to maximum possible

- Guidelines to end users for minimizing other applications run during Demantra usage

- Worksheets shall be reviewed and usage of filters is highly recommended

- Setting up params related to Application Server (like MaxUpdateThreads, etc.)

- Running Rebuild_Schema procs to ensure no chain rows exist

- Running Drop_temp to ensure temporary tables aren't eating up space

In long term strategy, few key suggestions were:

- Ensuring strong network connection for end users

- Providing separate tablespace for key tables and their indexes (e.g. sales_data, mdp_matrix etc.)

For complete session coverage and details of all the solutions, you can go to Oracle Community - Demantra Solutions. (or refer to metalink note 800030.1)