Tag: supply chain

What is Oracle Insight methodology?

What is Oracle Insight Methodology? Before getting into it, you should know that Oracle Insight was created to be a global business strategy development practice to leverage skilled industry experts within Oracle in standards such as Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) for supply chains and Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) for datacenters, and a proven methodology for identifying and answering IT strategy questions.

An Oracle Insight engagement can take from 3 to 6 months and follows a 4-step methodology that is customized for each individual client.

1. Industry perspective. Oracle Insight facilitates discussions with customer executives about the trends, best practices, challenges, and opportunities particular to the customer’s business.
2. Discovery. The Oracle Insightteam visits the customer site to study capabilities—in personnel, processes, and technology—that can be leveraged in an improved strategy. The team uses proprietary Oracle intellectual property and industry-specific frameworks in its assessments. Continue reading What is Oracle Insight methodology?

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Supply Chain Best Practices

A customer changes a large order at the last minute; a key component supplier experiences a shortfall. Surviving in a fiercely competitive, volatile market means companies must be able to achieve supply/demand balance rapidly. Most companies with mature supply chain processes have demand and supply planning processes that run at a regular cadence and produce good tactical-level plans for execution. However, when immediate problems occur, the batch planning processes have too much information latency, making it difficult for companies to react rapidly and make optimal decisions.

Companies can build agile and responsive supply chains by complementing their existing planning processes with real-time rapid planning capabilities that allow them to react within minutes to unexpected supply chain events.

The ideal solution for rapid planning capabilities should allow for supply chain best practices such as mapping out “what-if” scenarios, allocating customer demand dynamically {auto allocation), prioritizing customer orders for production (clear- to-build analysis), and performing root cause analysis for demand that is late (late demand analysis), while integrating seamlessly with other planning processes:


  • What-if capabilities, which allow the assessment of alternative supply chain scenarios, simulate the impact of incremental demand forecast or capacity changes to achieve optimal supply/demand balance in a matter of minutes. While the demand-side changes are generally triggered by demand forecast quantity or product mix changes, the supply-side changes could include simulating the impact of updating product bills of material to correct lifecycle status, viewing the impact of alternate parts, or substituting components on supply/demand matching scenarios.
  • Auto allocation, the process of automatically apportioning product supply to customer orders according to a transparent set of business rules and criteria, is especially important to original equipment manufacturers when product demand exceeds product capacity or supply. Orders can be allocated based on flexible business rules to optimize profitability and maximize market share. A similar set of capabilities can be leveraged to simulate the impact of customer order request changes rapidly in order to improve customer responsiveness.
  • Clear-to-build analysis, which allows planners to quickly view and simulate whether sufficient material is available in order to take customer orders, is extremely valuable to manufacturers who produce some or all of their products in-house. In case of material conflicts or shortages, planners can simulate reallocation of on-hand material quantity across different make orders to arrive at an optimal prioritization of make orders in order to achieve company objectives.
  • Late demand analysis allows planners to identify the root cause of a late customer order and proactively develop a contingency plan to contend with a potential material or resource shortage. This capability allows planners to drill down from a sales order that is late all the way through the entire supply plan, including the extended supply chain, to quickly identify root cause for the delay and take proactive action to minimize occurrence.
  • Rapid planning capabilities provide an integrated planning approach that deals with supply/demand disruptions in near-real time. A company that complements existing planning processes and systems with these new capabilities can match demand and supply with a quick assessment of various scenarios in order to arrive at optimal decisions. The resulting supply chain plans are of high quality, promoting enterprisewide visibility, predictive and real-time analytics, transparency, and collaboration among planners and stakeholders.
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Real-Time Supply Chain

Over the past two decades, supply chain organizations have become much more responsive to customer demand. This evolution was largely achieved by eliminating inefficiencies, integrating processes, and manufacturing products only after receipt of an order. But globalization, outsourcing, complex sourcing relationships, and a volatile economic climate have limited the competitive advantage of simply automating the supply chain. It’s not enough.

Today’s supply chain needs to sense and respond to changes in real time and use information to drive intelligent decision-making. This requires tight alignment between planning and execution, decision-making, and collaboration.
But progress is limited by poor integration, a lack of supplier orchestration, limited visibility into demand, and poor data quality.

Fortunately, solutions exist to deal with each of these issues. Operational planning processes involve evaluating demand and manufacturing capacity and developing plans and schedules to meet that demand. But existing process is largely hierarchical, serial, and static. Most companies separate planning from supply chain execution—but tighter alignment is necessary as timescales compress. Sales and operations planning (S&OP) is the primary integration point between planning and execution. As such, S&OP is in a perfect position to align the objectives of finance, sales, marketing, and operations departments. Most companies lack the tools to support S&OP, but deploying optimization tools and increasing the frequency of S&OP activity can improve performance.

Planning can also be improved by electronically populating tools with more-granular business data—including market, cus- tomer, and product information—to more accurately reflect the complexity of the marketplace.

Supply chain visibility has become increasingly complex as companies outsource manufacturing and form complex and strategic supplier relationships. Collaborative planning and process orchestration capabilities have not evolved to keep pace. Supply chain organizations must eliminate this latency to orchestrate activities across organizational boundaries. Collaboration tools and intelligent alerts can electronically share plans and schedules, track supplier commitments, and deal with exceptions. Using a service-oriented architecture (SOA), companies can develop reusable, device- independent collaboration services to address these needs. Standards-based communication protocols can then be used to bridge system gaps with suppliers.
Continue reading Real-Time Supply Chain

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