High Marks for Oracle

A couple of day ago, a research revealed that Oracle has been recognized for offering high vertical specialization capabilities for small and medium sized businesses. It has become a larger trend for business solutions to target the small to mid-sized market and this is a good development because both the smaller companies can already employ affordable and high end ERP solutions while business solutions vendor can get a wide market base from this section. As SAP indicated in their website, more than 65 percent of its customers are from the small to medium sized enterprises.

Okay, so going to back to Oracles high marks, Forrester Research, a leading independent research firm recognized Oracle's contribution to smaller business with a high mark for its innovation in providing vertical specialization capabilities within the public sector, financial services, utilities, telecom, retail and wholesales industry.

The Forrester Research report was published August 13, 2007 and was entitled "Competition Intensifies for the SMB ERP Customer". There were 25 ERP vendors addressing the business requirements of SMBs reviewed by the Forrester Research analysts. As the report stated, "Oracle Accelerate "represents the centerpiece of the vendor's go-to-market SMB strategy." The report also pointed out Oracle Accelerate application "solutions catalog identifies 70 target industry segments across four product lines (i.e., Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle's JD Edwards, Oracle's PeopleSoft and Oracle's Siebel) and 72 geographies/localizations to offer more than 20,000 possible solutions."

Tony Kender, Oracle Senior Vice President, Global SMB Business Unit
Said: "We continue to hear from our SMB customers that in order to succeed, they require applications that deliver out-of-the-box, industry-specific capabilities to address their unique business requirements. We are pleased to see Forrester's study validate Oracle's strength in delivering vertical specialization capabilities across multiple industries."

Oracle Accelerate has been developed by Oracle specifically for small and medium sized businesses so that these companies, along with government entities can get comprehensive business solutions which are low-cost, low-risk, and the same time very industry specific functionalities. The main benefit to be derived from this application, aside from its very low price, is that it can provide for pre-packaged applications which can be rapidly implemented. Another important aspect of Oracle Accelerate is that Oracle has partnered this solution with Oracle Business Accelerators where smaller and mid-sized business enterprises can take advantage of easy to use templates and process flows so that customers can be made to realize immediate benefits from using the application. Other key features of Oracle Accelerate are automatic upgrading to save time from complex and risky migrating processes. It also offers integration with back office and front office processes.

For the high mark that Oracle has garnered from the Forrester Research, I say congratulations. I am sure that more innovative products will come our way especially now that Oracles has long been longing to get the top spot from SAP as the leader in ERP solutions. And with SAP not just standing by as Oracle is getting accolade, for sure more business innovations are coming from SAP too. The result is that it is the small and mid-sized enterprises getting the best of both worlds.

Oracle E-business Suite – Logistics

The breaking of geographical boundaries has brought new challenges to many business organizations nowadays. Some countries have opened their economy to trade globalization making most companies more profitable because of the many choices they can have in relation to raw goods importation, finished products exportation and even human resource outsourcing. The act of managing and controlling the flow of energy, information and goods is called logistics. Today's logistics include management of resources such products, services and people from the production source to the marketplace.

With today's international business trading scenario, it would definitely be difficult, even near impossible, to manage these logistical resources without the help of software logistical applications.

The Oracle E-Business Suite Logistics family of applications answers the needs in logistical areas such international trading, global import and export process, and international repositioning of products and materials for manufacturing. This software solution is designed for complex distribution operations and helps manage inbound and outbound transportation which are major activities of production and marketing.

Like all applications within the Oracle E-Business Suite, the Oracle Logistics application is all about unification – in this case, unification of data models in order to give the company a single and accurate picture of the whole logistics process. With a unified view, it would be extremely easy to plan, manage and control all processes pertaining to the storage and flow of services and goods from factory to the market.

Oracle logistics closely integrates with Oracle Radio Frequency Identification (RFID. RFID makes possible accurate tracking of assets as well as monitoring of key indicators. RFID tags work together with different types of radio sensors and tracking technologies such as global positioning system for fast or real time monitoring of business processes.

DHL, a world leader in express and logistics company, has invested in RFID technology with Oracle applications in order to create optimized value for its shipping and logistical processes and to extend its supply chain visibility to both customers and partners.

To help optimize asset usage Oracle logistics leverages all assets to reduce operating costs. The Oracle Transportation Management works with the Logistics in delivering robust transportation planning. It efficiently handles cooperation among the business organization, its shippers and third party logistics provider. Among the features of the Oracle Transportation Management are Freight Payment, Billing, and Claims, Transportation Sourcing, Forwarding and Brokerage Operations, Transportation Operational Planning and Logistics Inventory Visibility.

The Oracle Logistics applications make use of the best technologies available int a multiple collaboration method for connectivity. It utilized the web through an online portal with secure remote access from all locations for all trading partners. It supports XML and OAGI XML standards for guaranteed secure one-time delivery. It's email system guarantees constant updates and follow up as well as notification of activity on business documents.

Going global with a business venture will never be headache anymore with Oracle Logistics to deploy and manage the organization. With its multi-lingual, multi-currency, multi-org, multi-national capabilities, a company operating in several countries will get the feel of being in one central location.

The Oracle E-Business Suite Product Lifecycle Management

As promised, I will blog today about the Oracle E-Business Suite Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) which is actually a set of applications which work in collaboration to help business organizations effectively manage all activities related to products innovation and development. These product related activities include from product conceptualization to retirement.

Because product development and management is a fairly complex area, there needs to be a unified data model which will guide the company in having a single and accurate view of the product. This will ensure that that company can accelerate introduction of new products while maximizing its value throughout the entire life cycle as well as future investments.

Business organizations have different product requirements depending on the industry they are operating. Oracle's E-Business Suite has tailored its PLM to suit the needs.

For instance, Oracle has these keen observations as the basis for tailoring their PLM to specific industries:

• In life sciences, the rate of growth in the investment required to bring a drug to market is outpacing growth in the return on marketed drugs.
• In consumer electronics, it is not uncommon for lifecycles to be as short as a few months, with extremely narrow product introduction windows–a delay in product introduction could have significant impact on company performance.
• In complex manufacturing industries, as the outsourcing trend accelerates, ensuring consistency and secure collaboration across company and geographic boundaries becomes a pre-requisite to on-time, on-cost product delivery.

Oracle PLM has a feature to integrate and support both manufacturing and service industries. This will make a company have the correct information and analysis tool needed to find the right bets and maximize captured value from services and products.

Oracle PLM's Analytics can help companies strategically allocate resources and make smart decisions. The Analytics tool is so advance that it can work in collaboration with other modules across the enterprise to reduce cost throughout the value chain.

One can configure the company products to meet the demands of the customers using Oracle PLM. The information about product attributes can be taken from the costing analytics. PLM's configuration feature can provide customer and designers with a catalog of profitable options.

Although investing in Oracle E-Business Suite Product Lifecycle Management means spending money on buying the software, it could also actually mean a reduction in the company's IT cost because of the Oracle architecture advantage.

Oracle, world leader in database software and enterprise resource management (ERP), can make possible a superior integration of both Oracle and non-Oracle systems. This way a company can have a single definition of suppliers, customers, partners, services and products. With one source of information, decision making can be made faster.
E-Business Suite Product Lifecycle Management also protects a company's intellectual property by using role based views so only certain employees can view certain information.

In tomorrow's blog, I will try to write other innovation software applications within the E-Business Suite. For now, I hope you well in all your business and personal endeavors.

PLM and the Oracle E-Business Suite

Yesterday I blogged about Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and how giant enterprise resource planning (ERP) software vendors are trying to development their own implementations of PLM.

To begin with, many IT professionals and business decision makers who have implemented ERP applications have exclaimed that the PLM is one of the best things which has come along in the Oracle E-Business suite since the descriptive flex field (DFF).
Oracle Product Lifecycle Management was known before by different names like Engineering Online and Advance Product Catalog. Compared to the Oracle Inventory or Engineering Modules, this products can changed documents in an HTML interface there is become a lot easier to manage items master and BOM's because with HTML, managing can be done using a web browser. The Oracle PLM has many functionalities which did not exist before in the Oracle E-Business Suite such as being able to ad more information to a part number using dynamic item attributes or ability to mass load items through Microsoft Excel and WebADI.

Before we go into details about PLM and the Oracle E-Business Suite, I would like define some common terms.

PLM Item Catalog – this could be considered the main component which is organized by the Catalog groups of the Inventory Module in order to extend definition into a hierarchy. Such hierarchy can have nodes called “Item Catalog Category” (ICC).
Item Catalog Categories (ICC) – This is the node or catalog group wherein all items in the item master are assigned. Only one item can be assigned to an ICC. In order to have a PLM functionality, an item must be assigned to the item master. ICC in PLM is the same as the Catalog Group in Oracle Inventory.

Catalog – In PLM, Catalogs are the Category sets in the Inventory Modules but there is a difference. In the PLM, there is added security feature which is not found in Oracle Inventory even if they have the same category.
Operational Attributes – This refer to attributes existing only the mtl_system_items table. These operational attributes could neither be created nor deleted from the system as they come with Oracle when it is shipped and there are used in defining items for other modules. Typically, they exists as mapped groups to a module in Oracle like Inventory, Purchasing, Order Management, WIP, Planning, and other modules.

PLM User Defined attribute groups – These groups form one of PLM's major functionality advantages. Users of Oracle EBS who want additional ability for adding information to an items and then use the same added information for defining, searching and integrating data can use these groups in customization. The attributes should be defined withing a group or tied up to an ICC.

One of the good things about PLM is its security feature, which, needless to say, is very important when dealing with business data. In PLM, Roles are objects based on their functionality. The role can be defined against an item, group, change inventory, ICC and just about any object within the Oracle EBS/PLM. Privileges, like in other applications, refer to the allowed function a user can have. Groups are a related cluster of user assigned to certain sets of privileges. For example, a group could be customers groups, accounting group, supplier group and many other divisions in the company.

Now that some vital terms are defined, tomorrow we will go into details of the functionalities of Oracle PLM.