Infosys-Oracle Blog

But the key issues with their legacy TMS or logistics applications are:

 * Absence of scalability and robustness

 * Inability to provide real time supply chain solution to key stakeholders
      
 * Planning and Optimization processes are manually intensive. As a result; customers are not getting the benefit of incremental freight savings across multiple modes and geographies
      
 * The entire freight settlement and audit processes are manually intensive and as a result pretty error prone

But at the same time, every market has its own processes and own macro-economic and micro economic challenges. Like Indian transportation market has the following

 * Issues of Non-standardized vehicle types

 * Cumbersome taxes like service tax/toll tax/Octroi

 * Requirements of multiple operational documents
      
* Procedure of payments to carriers for executing the shipments and the subsequent implications for tax settlement

* Painful Change management requirements

* Crippling Infrastructure issues in terms of both hard (Road /Rail/Port conditions/network connectivity etc) and soft infrastructures( skilled manpower/business practices/cumbersome Govt policies etc )
     
So,where there is a huge potential for growth for advanced Transportation Management systems, at the same time the need of the hour is strong localization approach from the advanced TMS systems from established ERP vendors.

 TMS best practices prevalent in advanced economies are not applicable and not required too now, in these markets in absolute terms. Products need localization approaches with features relevant for the respective market to address these requirements

LSPs/3PLs/Manufactueers/Retailers know and understand the strategic and operational benefits of these systems but not sure how these systems will fit into the requirements of Indian market conditions. They are clamoring for ‘Glocalization’ approach- Global Products but local execution approach –which will only cater to their requirements. Ultimately the total cost of ownership of these systems are quite high too, they are really looking for reasons to justify this to their Top Management.

Posted by Nilabja Dey at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

“Earth Hour” observed on Saturday 28^th Mar, 2009 from 8:30 to 9:30 PM across the world. While this is equivalent to switching off China's emissions for less then six short seconds, it shows our concern for climate change. It also means, Companies have to comply with stricter regulations in coming future.

We are hearing Lean from long time, now the focus is shifting to “Lean with Green”. While “going lean” was more of a business requirement, “going green” is becoming necessity with more and more regulations flowing in. While, one is being driven by being able to stand in the market against ever-growing competition, the other is for standing on the earth itself!

As a philosophy, lean means, “Eliminate waste”. Anything, which is not adding value to product from the customer’s point of view, is waste. Waste need not necessarily related with material, these can even be applied to Financials. There are companies which are moving towards lean accounting.

 

Let’s see, how best-in-class Enterprise Solutions can help your company become “Lean with Green”:

 

• Supply chain efficiency improvement through Advanced Planning combined with Transportation management system, will result in reduced transportation, one of the major sources of greenhouse gas emission. It also optimizes the receiving & shipping process, hence minimize waste. What’s more, with accurate forecasting, scrap can be reduced, resulting in reduced recycling requirements.
• Asset management is another area where small investment gives good returns. EAM can provide all energy consumption data, which will help in preparing & implementing an energy saving strategy. Preventive rather then reactive asset maintenance, will result in efficient asset usage with minimize downtime.
• It has been proven, that any best-in-class ERP system, improves production efficiency, optimize resource usage & reduce wastage. All these conform to lean objective & help company become green. Implementation of E-Record & E-Signature, which enables paperless shop floor, should also be part of company’s green initiative.
• Company may want to change their product features, to make them more environment-friendly. PLM solutions come to rescue here, which can reduce ‘time to market’ significantly, and thus help you stay competitive.
• To know the success of Green & Lean initiative, it is necessary to have well defined KPI with appropriate monitoring. BI applications do just that.

With all these advantages, we have just scratched the surface. Enterprise Solutions touch all business functions of your company, and with most of the ‘Best Practices’ already built in, it is just matter of implementing the correct module, and Voila ! You are on way toward "Lean with Green" !!!

Posted by Ashish Namdeo at 05:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

With the growing focus on carbon emission restrictions, Generators are forced to have a healthy mix in their portfolio to ensure that their carbon emission is within acceptable limits.  I happened to read a community research conducted by European Commission on ‘World energy, technology and climate policy outlook for 2030’, mentioned that generators will have to invest in other technologies and renewable sources to support solving global CO2 emission problem. With this thrust to have a healthy mix of sources in their portfolio, generators are likely to relook at their portfolio and hence EAM business model that could support them. 

Whilst the current EAM business models are more focussed on offering maintenance support for their physical assets, the focus is shifting to include safety and some specialised functionality, depending on the kind of generation station. For example nuclear plant’s asset management needs some specialised business functions like waste disposal tracking or portfolio optimisation to be incorporated, which may not be the case for a gas fired plant. Similarly if you take wind farms, there is a need to have remote sensing and performance monitoring to be integrated with the EAM business model to ensure that the offshore wind farms are maintained appropriately.

In a nutshell, the view of Generators who are taking up EAM implementation for their generation plants are changing – especially the ones who have different types of generation plants in their portfolio.  In essence, they are looking at the following dimensions as a part of their EAM business model; over and above the fundamental need take care of support maintenance of their physical assets

1. An EAM business model that is homogenous across their portfolio, with capability to add unique functionality to only the plants that need them.
   
2. Focus on Environment, Health & Safety aspects
3. Unique busines functions for supporting specialised assets like Nuclear Plants, Renewable energy plants etc.,
4. Focus on integration with back office & planning systems to ensure that maintenance functions run hand-in-hand with the other business functions in the enterprise.
5. Need to support a new set of Performance and financial measures.
   

Posted by Ismail Syed Mohammad at 05:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Somnath Mukherjee at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Master Data Management (MDM) helps in managing your product or customer master more effectively and efficiently. MDM ensures data consistency across various disparate systems used in any enterprise. This is not a one-time process but a continuous journey. MDM acts as hub of your product or customer master and all other front-end applications subscribe to this hub. This hub acts as a middleware application for all front- end applications.

Let us start our journey of implementing Master Data Management:

The First Step:  The companies implementing MDM for the first time will focus on migrating data from different sources to the MDM hub and have a single source of truth that is consistent across the organization. Even building this may take years for large organizations and organizations with huge master data spread across many systems. After migrating the data, the data needs to be cleansed and enriched with information from different systems– this itself will take a long time.
 
And the journey continues…
•    Once you build the Master after years of effort, it will give more tangible benefits to your organization by giving the right data to the right subscriber across the information supply chain. But this is not the end. In today’s scenario, companies deal with stakeholders continuously and hence data flows in out of the system continuously.

• Another pain area is tracking the updates that are not done through the MDM system. For example, a team may discuss and finalize changes to the master data through e-mails or with some documents which may not be updated in the MDM system – this creates a gap in single source of truth. Conscious effort should be made to capture such data and update the system.
• For some of the subscribing applications, there may be real-time two-way integration with PIM. In this case, there is a need for continuously cleansing incoming data. To aid companies in real-time integration, real-time data governing tools are available that ensures master data completeness and validity before loading the new data onto the MDM system.
• Whenever a new partner or customer is added, naturally your Master Data needs to be updated. At times, you may end up with one more subscribing interface.

 
Thus, Master Data Management is not a one-time exercise but a lifelong journey! But this journey aids your business by improving the scope for up-selling and cross-selling.

Posted by Krithivasan S at 05:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The retail industry is unlike any other in many ways – from accounting methods followed to the range and type of interactions with suppliers and customers. In this video blog, I have discussed the dynamics of the industry and how these impact technology solutions created and implemented for retailers.

Posted by Venu Kotamraju at 05:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The traditional thinking is that Lean and ERP are contrary to one another. Lean signifies a pull system and simplicity whereas ERP signifies a push-based complex environment that relies on innumerable transactions at every step to run smoothly. Lean is reality-oriented while ERP is data-in-the-system-oriented. One can argue forever on these lines…

If one scratches the surface, however, it does not seem so contrarian after all.

Consider some real-life examples below from my consulting experience where an ERP system assisted the lean philosophy of an enterprise.

 

Kanbans: The simplest form of Kanban relies on containers with a card number. An empty container can imply either movement of material, in a lot size equal to the Kanban size, from another location in the plant such as the warehouse (Intra-plant Kanban), production of an assembly (Production Kanban), purchase of material from a supplier (Purchase Kanban) or purchase of material from another plant of your company (Inter-plant Kanban).  While the movement of an empty container as a physical indicator may be feasible over small distances, it is not necessarily possible over long distances particularly when the container is not part of a reverse logistics system.  In such cases, an ERP system’s Kanban functionality can help achieve some of the same simplicity of operations using an electronic signal rather than a physical one. A board of bar-coded Kanban cards and a handheld device to scan an empty card can be used to trigger either a move order, a work order, a PO or an internal PO. This helps alleviate distances and cards lost in transit.
Another situation where an ERP can assist in a Kanban environment is to identify uneven demands. To function successfully, a Kanban system assumes an even level of demand. Placing a Kanban item on MRP to monitor future demand can be a good idea to identify bumps in demand. The replenishment still happens on visual cues and not from MRP; a planner simply sees the MRP horizontal plan to make sure there are no surprises ahead.

Most ERP systems do Kanban calculations for Kard size or the number of cards based on historical or forecasted usage.

Backflushing: Most ERP systems support backflushing of components during manufacture. By having components on the shopfloor rather than stacked high in warehouses, you can ensure a lean operation as it reduces the overheads associated with kitting from the warehouse for an individual job and carrying each kit to the shopfloor. ERP systems assist in this Lean initiative by directly backflushing material on completion. A Kanban system can then be used for the movement of inventory between the warehouse and shopfloor either based on physical movement of cards/containers or electronic signals

Cellular/flow manufacturing:  ERP packages assist cellular manufacturing (self contained units with material in close proximity of the operator) and flow manufacturing by providing work order-less completions wherein a single unit of an assembly can be completed and the corresponding quantities of raw material backflushed at the press of a button. This is extensively used in organizations to reduce batch sizes to the point that a single unit is completed each time. This obviously requires flatter bills of materials or use of phantom levels.

Electronic communication with supply chain partners: Using supplier and customer portals can eliminate wastes such as paper-based communication and most ERPs support such portals. Suppliers can receive POs, send acknowledgements and invoices electronically. Similarly, customers can place their orders electronically and check the status online.

Workflow: Workflow-based processing, a standard feature of most ERP systems, is another step in the direction of Lean as it promotes a sequential flow of process in manufacturing and order management.
The above cited examples do signal reconciliation between the ERP and Lean way of thinking. Finally, the two don’t seem mutually exclusive.

Posted by Gaurav Yadav at 05:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

‘Climate change’ is one of the key topics that is getting more and more visibility at the board room level for industrial and commercial business.  There is a pressure from all stake holders to ensure that the business houses consume and spend energy more efficiently.  Staying ‘green’ is no more optional – it is becoming mandatory.  This necessitates C&I businesses to re-look at the way in which they manage their assets that are very vital for their businesses.  This blog briefly talks about what are the functions that are needed in a classical EAM business functions and the new business functions that are required to be managed, in view of the need to have a green strategy to mitigate climate change.

According to a study published by US Energy information administration (EIA), Commercial and Industrial businesses spend more than 80% of their non-labour operating and maintenance budget on energy.  If one views this data in conjunction with the statistics that 40% of the fossil fuels are consumed in producing electricity and this is roughly responsible for 40% of the CO₂ emissions, one can understand the need to have the assets running in their most efficient zone.

Classically, operations and maintenance engineers focus on keeping the assets running successfully.  They plan their maintenance strategies in such a way that their businesses are not impacted because of failure of assets.  If you take a generating station for example, any accidental outage will impact production very seriously and it takes more time to get the asset back into normal operation.   For eg., when the North east of US plunged into darkness on 14^th of August 2003  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_North_America_blackout) , it took 2 full days to regain normalcy.  This grid failure which impacted North Eastern, Mid Western US and Parts of Canada was because of an accidental shut down of East lake plant in Ohio (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastlake,_Ohio).  In a nutshell, one can understand how an unexpected failure of an asset can run havoc.

To ensure safe, sustained operation and maintenance of assets, the primary functionality that is required in eAM packages is the capabaility that enables users to optimally plan and schedule maintenance activities. These packages also have functionalities that facilitate monitoring resource efficiency, enhancing maintenance quality, tracking work history, and recording all maintenance costs. Any EAM package is expected to support these functions.

However, the growing climate change concerns had forced the package vendors to add enriched functionalities around monitoring the actual performance of assets – in terms of operating conditions and efficiency at which the assets are operating there by facilitating formulation of maintenance & replacement planning strategies.  The following functionalities are getting added to the EAM packages :

• Energy consumption patterns – Capability to integrate applications with meters or group of meters to capture and monitor the commodity consumption patterns at an individual asset level or at the level required by the asset hierarchy
• Trending based on operational efficiency – Integrating OEM data and algorithms that help monitoring the current asset performance to identify underperforming assets, very early in their lifecycle.
• Enhanced Preventive maintenance strategies – Based on consumption patterns and trending, arrive at periodic or set date based maintenance approaches for assets
• Capability to take qualitative data to asset history – Capability to take engineers’ quantitative (for set parameters) and qualitative inputs at the time of inspection that can be used to decide on maintenance approaches.
• Integration capability with rest of the enterprise - This enables you to strategically monitor resource and cost planning throughout the enterprise. Improvement programmes can be enforced and reviewed to ensure compliance with industry standards by tracking problems through to resolution.

An enterprise needs the above capabilities to collect data, monitor and take action on performance of their assets which is integral to support the organisation’s ‘Staying Green’.

Posted by Ismail Syed Mohammad at 06:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Websters defines 'Exclusivity' as something in the state of being exclusive.. simply put 'Truly yours only'. During the initial days of the Outsourcing wave, customers insisted on consultants working only for them and paid on the number of people working for them exclusively. Down the line, customers have matured on the outsourcing concept and offshoring work to the so-called low cost countries became norm. Customers were focussing on the work getting done for them by the carefully chosen skilled resources thereby reducing the weightage given to the individual's performance.. Monitoring their work was becoming an overhead. Then came the new wave of 'Managed Services' - where the service provider owned the end-to-end delivery of services upon agreed service levels with the customer. Even in this model, the exclusivity continued to exist.. Customers, who could afford, went for an exclusive location or development center for the teams working only for them with high security requirements.

Question is: Is this still relevant or necessary to have exclusivity during these tough times? As long as the agreed upon service levels are met, with no breach of security norms or regulations prescribed by the customer, if a service provider is able to deliver the services.. why not??

IT Shared Services delivery model does exactly that... A consultant's time is efficiently shared across multiple customers.. Such a model works very well for customers too where
 (1) A consultant with niche skillset is always difficult to find. In such a case, his services can effectively be shared across multiple (not more than 2 or 3 max) customers so that they benefit from it equally.
 (2) Such a consultant may not have work all the time too.. conversely a customer may not have that much work to keep him/her busy either.
 
In both the cases, the customer pays only for the effort consumed for his work (not for FTE).. and the service provider is able to satisfy the needs of other customers too.. works win-win for both sides.

Interesting!!! Think about it.

Posted by Ramgopal Natarajan at 05:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

ERP drives enterprise-wide planning and scheduling of resources to satisfy your organization’s needs of manufacturing, procuring and shipping of goods. The planning and scheduling outputs that an ERP provides, is based on the various input parameters fed to it such as lead times, safety stocks, order modifiers, product structures, supply and demand, stocking levels, etc. Based on these input parameters, an ERP plans for the short-term and long-term resource requirements for your organization. However, in order to derive the maximum benefits out of your ERP deployment, you need to validate that your organization is efficiently managing these input levers to your ERP. It is here that Lean manufacturing and Lean supply strategies can help you in reducing the fat that often accumulate in these input parameters. This is where Lean operating principles that focus on eliminating waste from the processes can help an organization streamline its operational levers to derive the best benefits out of an ERP implementation.

There are several ways in which ERP can complement a Lean initiative. For example, a Lean organization would focus on reducing demand variability not by raising inventory stocking levels or padding up lead times rather by increasing the flexibility in manufacturing to reduce cycle times. A Lean organization rather than promoting fixed lot multipliers to reduce ordering inefficiencies would focus on collaborating with suppliers to do intelligent and just-in-time procurement. ERP enables sharing of data with suppliers, whereby an organization can look at the available capacity of its suppliers and in turn the suppliers can look at stocking levels of their customers to decide on when to replenish. An ERP can go a long way in developing such collaboration.

When it comes to Lean material replenishments, most ERP packages have built-in support for Kanban planning and execution. Kanban is a self-regulating replenishment cycle which can operate extremely well through visual signals. However, visual signals may not be the most efficient across large shop areas due to difficulty in viewing these signals. When supported by an ERP, the Kanban system can become even more powerful and overcome the space limitations that visual Kanban signals might face. Similarly, ERP packages have built-in support for other Lean methods such as in-process quality checking, pull-based replenishment, backflushing, vendor managed inventory, etc. Oracle Apps provides a Flow Manufacturing module that provides customers with support for flow schedules, mixed model maps, takt time calculation, line balancing and flow schedule managing and execution. In fact, the unified data model that ERP packages uses, can be used to develop some custom tools that can utilize the data stored in ERP and yet meet some Lean initiative needs that the ERP package of choice might not offer. We did such a customization to help an industrial manufacturer classify incoming order lines into value streams – a Lean concept.

While ERP can support some Lean initiatives, as is well known, Lean planning and execution is a cultural and operational change that an organization needs to commit itself to. But once done, ERP can be a powerful ally to it and vice versa. So if you already have or are planning for an ERP implementation, see how best you can derive benefits by examining your processes to eliminate waste and get leaner in the process!

Posted by Rupam Das at 04:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Enterprises today are seeking technologies that would enable them to do more with less - more results and lesser ownership costs. Adopting the new wave “Service-Oriented Architecture” is on the agenda of most major enterprises today. While many organizations have reaped the benefits of SOA, there are others whose SOA initiatives have either failed or delayed, leaving them disillusioned. Oracle AIA, a flexible yet robust framework helps in implementing SOA the right way.

 

One of the biggest challenges that an enterprise faces today is the fragmented information across stovepipes of applications. Integration solutions like point-to-point and traditional integration tools are proprietary and making the landscape fragmented. Companies are spending a large portion of their IT budgets in managing the applications and their integrations across the applications as the business needs change as well as the applications get upgraded.

Powered by Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Oracle AIA is an application-independent standardized framework and is based on common object model. AIA can be used not only to integrate Oracle applications like R12, Siebel, PeopleSoft but the legacy, third-party and non-Oracle applications as well. What’s more, you also get a standard-based reference architecture that can be adopted.

Many customers have started leveraging AIA to overcome SOA adoption challenges; to reconcile semantic differences across applications. With pre-integrated service packs (PIPs), AIA offers faster time-to-market and lower total cost of ownership. A PIP is an out-of-the-box collection of service to manage your key business processes like order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, etc.

These days, applications are being built to integrate and not be thickly created as silos. The business process changes faster than you plan. There is a strong need of cross functional process improvement. With choices being so wide on products available, it is essential to develop a future-proof integration so that new products can replace old systems seamlessly in a phased manner as per budgets and business plans. AIA implements Service-Oriented Architecture on common object model making the solution repeatable and robust enhancing the value of technology investments.

Don’t reinvent the wheel. Use AIA to implement SOA.

Posted by Gaurav Sharma at 02:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The market leader in database strongly focuses on Customer Data Hubs. Why? Oracle is going to use Customer Data hubs to increase its sales of Oracle CRM and ERP in SMB sectors. Read the blog to know more on the competitors in Customer Data Hubs in the market.

Today, enterprises need a single system of reference to consolidate the duplicate records lying in disparate systems to provide a global view of customer data. To facilitate this, Oracle provides out-of-the-box functionality to integrate with E-Business suite of Applications through its homegrown product - Oracle Customer Data Hub.

Oracle actually sells two products on customer Data hubs -Oracle CDH and Siebel UCM (Which is now Oracle UCM). But these products are positioned differently in the markets. Oracle CDH is mainly focused on manufacturing, hi-tech, Retail and Distribution industries whereas Siebel UCM is targeted for telecommunications, media, financial services and government. Enterprises implementing customer Data Hubs should evaluate these two products and choose from these based on their requirement.

If you look at the strengths of these products, both the products have the same vendor name behind it leading to impressive commitments from range of industries across various segments. Technically, Oracle CDH can be implemented as stand-alone along with PIM data hub in a single instance. Also, it has a very good party model as it leverages the underlying structure from Trading Community Architecture, can easily integrate with third party systems like Dun & Bradstreet for Content enrichment. The release 12 of Oracle CDH can easily integrate with Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle BPEL Process Manager as the Fusion MDM will be the key focus for customer data in the future.

Siebel UCM which is now called as Oracle UCM is the leader in Customer Data solution among these two products, though IBM's Info sphere is ranked the highest by Gartner.

UCM (Universal Customer Master) release8.0 has more capabilities than CDH in terms of Data extensibility model, Data quality features and its strong interfaces to various third party tools like Trillium etc.

On the weaker side, Oracle CDH and UCM are lacking in terms of dash boarding, reporting facilities, data steward facilities through web, registry-style implementations. Oracle plans to address these minor issues in future releases.

Happy Reading!

Posted by Aruna Srikanth at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Previous post: Top Down vs Bottom-up Techniques in Manufacturing… The debate continues

While identifying areas for standardization during implementation is relatively easier to achieve, it is difficult to define and implement acceptable standards for identified business processes. The degree of differentiation in the business process - identified for standardization, across the entities implementing the process could vary. This calls for an assessment to determine the approach to standardization. A high degree of differentiation will require a phased approach to standardization. This phased approach involves defining the standard process, acceptable limits for differentiation from the standard and a plan to converge from the variants of the standard to the standard process over a period of time.

In some cases, as detailed above, it may not be possible to converge to a common process due to statutory and legal requirements and the company may choose to continue with the differentiated process. A low degree of differentiation will lead to a quicker (in timeline) convergence to a standard process during implementation. 

A Package Enabled Business Transformation exercise is suggested to derive the first iteration of the To Be Process enabling maximum utilization of the underlying package processes. Multiple iterations for the To Be process are carried out over a period of time within the limits of acceptable change to ensure the balance between common and global processes. This can be very well managed by highly sophisticated ERP packages - most of them now support integration of best-of-breed software for each area through robust middleware integration like BPEL in Oracle and NetWeaver in SAP.

A commitment to process standardization need not always be achieved at the cost of customization. It is important to accept the inevitability of customization in a global implementation to account for regional and legal requirements. As stated earlier, a compromise on customization for the purpose of standardization will surely affect the acceptance and usage of the implemented system. It is extremely important to analyze the impact of the customizations since it has a one-time impact during the implementation but has a continuous impact in terms of maintainability.

For some organizations, the instilling discipline into the process has posed to be a greater challenge than standardizing the process itself. It has been observed that individuals who knew how to beat the system have been most effective in the legacy environment. This is a near impossible task with ERP implementation after an analysis of several post-implementation scenarios and looking into the complaints raised by users about the additional time taken to process transactions and the ERP implementations not living up to the commitment of improving cycle time, closing time and fulfillment time. In order to effectively reap the benefits of standardization, the top down approach helps where all employees need to be in line with future objectives for which the standardization was done.

Posted by Nilanjan Chatterjee at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Recession appears to be all around us. In these difficult economic times companies generally tend to put off investments in Business Intelligence(BI). However it is in a downturn that resources such as technology and manpower are available at very competitive prices. When the economy rebounds, companies that were not able to take advantage of this will in all probability see that  resources are no longer available at the prices they were during the downturn or in some cases not available at all !

BI solutions which are kicked off now would most likely be up and running by the economy starts reviving, thereby generating returns on the investment right from day one. Companies will be well positioned to determine and meet the growing demand for their goods and services in a reviving economy through the predictive abilities offered by Business Intelligence.

BI products like Oracle BI Applications offer hundreds of pre-built industry/vertical specific dashboards & reports based on the standard analytics used in these industries and verticals. This enables organizations to start analyzing their performance based on industry standards as quickly as possible to optimize their business processes to reduce costs and maximize revenues. Oracle BI Applications is 'hot pluggable' on Oracle Applications which is used for Enterprise Resource Planning by many organizations. Another factor favoring BI investment is the shorter implementation cycles for BI products.

Two factors which make for any confident investment are: the timing of the investment as well as the degree to which the decision is a studied one. Both these factors are satisfied by investing in BI now !

Posted by Sivaraman A at 06:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In one of my earlier blogs, I had discussed why Brazil is different from other countries. One of the legal requirements in Brazil is if you are selling in Brazil you have to own inventory (at least in your system if not a physical warehouse). For a company with no manufacturing in Brazil, there is an import process whereby goods need to be received against a Purchase Order. The core Oracle product does not have the provision to comply with legal and statutory requirements for Brazil when it comes to receiving.

Integrated Receiving (mandatory for receiving goods in Brazil) is a new module developed by the Localizations Brazil team (Oracle Brazil) and is used only for Brazilian legislation purposes. Its objective is to provide the entrance of goods and services in accordance with the Brazilian Fiscal Transactions, segregating all types of taxes and conditions required by the Brazilian Government.

Basically it enters all the Fiscal information and calculates the amount to be paid and sends this information to the Accounts Payables Invoices Interface to create the payments. Parallely, it creates the physical receipt in the inventory module according to the setup .It also creates the inputs for Periodic Average Cost transaction evaluation and for the Fiscal Books provided by third party Oracle partners.

Technically, all the RI features are supported by new tables, objects and programs that are documented in the Technical Reference Manual (TRM) for Integrated Receiving. All the links between RI and other Oracle modules are based on the Open Interface Tables provided by Oracle E-Business Suite

So if you are thinking of Brazil, this is one of the modules you need to master!!!

Posted by Sandeep Chatterjee at 02:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

In the tough recession phase, an upgrade to R12 EBS can reduce cycle times and streamline the core business flows. The core OM features like MOAC help in providing a shared services model. For most of your OM needs, R12 brings ways to bridge those gaps. The complex business processes can be well managed using R12.

Oracle R12 is a major release with large number of enhanced functional capabilities. With significant changes to architecture and technology, this release is recognized as the "global business release".
Thinking of R12 upgrade should no more be a question. Join the R12 journey and feel the difference.

Posted by vikas khurana at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Continuing from my previous post:

Standardization: Top Down vs. Bottom-up

There are a few more considerations to the standardization approach. Implementation of enterprise software has led to the motto “Common…and Global”. As a result, companies are adopting standards in definitions and processes for global implementation. A standard implementation refers to a set of guidelines which is better known as a template or a blueprint allowing minimal deviations during rollouts. At times, these monolithic implementations indirectly lead to a situation, where established and efficient local practices are abandoned or compromised to make way for standardization. This in turn has the potential to create large scale organizational change issues and productivity loss in the short-term. 

Hence, the dilemma in establishing standardization in a global implementation is that a high degree of standardization – at the cost of limiting variations, could compromise effectiveness, acceptability and usability of the implemented system. On the other hand, a high degree of customization to accommodate a predominant local touch in a global implementation, could limit maintainability of the system. It is therefore critical to achieve the balance between global and local requirements while establishing the areas for process standardization, defining standard processes and monitoring the application of standards. It is extremely important to critically examine the current business processes and then evolve the right ‘standard’ process. There is one more factor that one needs to consider - the uniqueness of business processes that the company wants to retain to maintain its leading position. It may not make sense to standardize those processes which are unique and helps to give the business an edge in the market.

Will be continuing this in my next post. Feedback is welcome!

Posted by Nilanjan Chatterjee at 06:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In very simple terms, IT Shared services are consolidated IT functions that are delivered over a shared infrastructure.  Some of the key benefits that are achieved through shared services are:

• Lower TCO for customer and provider
• Higher levels of productivity and increased efficiency
• Wider service coverage in terms of domain, technology and service availability hours
• Higher probability of meeting SLA targets
• Capability to structure the Ticket Based Pricing or Pay Per Use pricing options
• Lower setup time required to integrate a new customer
• Higher agility to ramp up and rampdown the team size based on customer needs
• Better alignment for catering to small size outsourcing opportunities

Needless to say that none of these benefits accrue without facing the challenges head on. I recall the ones that I had faced while consolidating the IT services of a large program in my previous organization.  Broadly I would divide them in 5 categories

1. Service Provider people
2. Service Provider Infrastructure
3. Customer People
4. Customer Infrastructure
5. Service Governance and Reporting

Currently we at ES-MCOE are in the middle of the transformation that’s being generated  through the implementation of ‘Global Support Center’, a shared services offering from ES.  I invite the experts to share  their experiences with the Shared Services. What were/are the challenges, how did one overcome them...let’s hear the stories of finally achieving the “ gains after braving the pains of setting up IT shared Services”.

Posted by Shobhna Agarwal at 03:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Recession.. difficult times.. reduced cash flow.. credit hard to come by.. on and on and on..

Let us face it. These are unfortunate events but are reality.. but should we just sit and keep worrying about it or do something to beat it. We anyway need to have the business running.. Key executives are looking for ways to weather the storm by cutting down costs. Invariably, eyes roll towards the Enterprise IT of the company.. trying to optimize, consolidate or even retire some of the IT assets. Most easist and the fastest thing to achieve quick wins is to cut down on 'labor' as an asset class.

Hope you are familiar with 'Outsourcing' unless you have been living in Amazon or in the north of north pole. Assuming you are already outsourcing your IT operations, either discretionary or non-discretionary work or both, one of the ways to ensure business-as-usual and to 'Keep-the-lights-on' and still cut down costs, is to look at IT Shared Services delivery model as an alternative.

Global IT Shared Support Services Delivery Model involves bringing together of IT services that are common to multiple organizations or business units to be delivered through a single entity comprising of a pool of consultants. This is a framework where standard support models are utilized to leverage expertise & share costs, thus delivering value to customers.

Interesting!!!! Watch out for more on this..

Posted by Ramgopal Natarajan at 09:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Retailers are increasingly paying closer attention to the customer data to analyze consumer behavior. Consumer behavior is not the only reason to start maintaining enterprise data in a better way. Master Data Management is an approach of holistically identifying enterprise-wide key entities and maintaining them in a centralized manner. This post identifies some key areas for this approach for retailers.

Retailers are relative newcomers to the ERP bandwagon. For years, they made do with mainframe-based systems. After all, to get a Retail system going, one main focus was on the Point-Of-Sale applications and they were cash registers at best. So as long as you could ring the sales in, the front office was taken care of. As far as the back office was concerned, a host of mainframe/AS400-based warehouse management systems were implemented. Retek was the de facto system for maintaining the store level information, be it items, store transactions or item categories. It is only lately that retailers have embarked on migrating financials, GL, AR and AP, expense procurement onto ERP and with Oracle buying Retek, there has been a consolidated move towards establishing an integrated ERP for retailers. Some of the key entities that are gaining favor in being maintained through the Master Data Management aspect are:

1. Items - For retailers, this entity poses the most complex problem, with multiplicity of channels and supplying relationships, the same item can be called with many different names depending on which channel it is being sold or which supplier it is being sourced from. From a channel perspective, online and in-store items often pose unique challenges, since the classification of items online can be different from how the retail store departments are organized. Some of the common brands are manufactured outside the U.S. and exported through agents and brokers. This creates a complex network of item sourcing resulting in multiple items for the same essential item.

And there is item classification/category, more than the individual items, it is this classification that is key in management reporting. Categories such as frozen, perishable or meats for grocers, women’s outerwear,  men’s shoes or cosmetics for apparel merchandisers are a few examples. Often, this classification is also part of the financial reporting/structure.
 
This data is needed by both financial, procurement, store management as well as warehousing systems, which further prioritizes the need to manage the creation, approval, maintenance, retiring process through Master Data Management.

2. Customers - Retailers often have a very high amount of customer data, with millions shopping through its stores. Most retailers are only now beginning to mine this precious data and understand the customer buying behavior better.

This data is needed in financial systems as customers are typically part of the receivables system - there are customer refunds that are often processed through such systems. It is of course, also part of the store management system.

3. Suppliers - Large retailers can have as many as 40,000 active suppliers, and that too is not a static figure. The supplier base keeps shifting depending on the popularity of the items they supply. Since this is needed by the payables system, the procurement system as well as the store management system, there is a great need to manage the supplier base through a defined MDM approach.

I think these three key entities need immediate attention through a well-defined MDM approach. What do you think are the entities that are being managed through this approach at retail companies? Let me know.

Posted by Venu Kotamraju at 11:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Basavraj Loni (Raj) at 07:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

With the economy in such turmoil, more and more companies are looking at emerging countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) for growth. With unique statutory, legal and language requirements, it is imperative that companies follow the rules of the land to do business.

Take the case of Brazil. Brazil has a very long customs clearance process (about 30 days) and during this time you cannot receive the inventory in your system. You need to show it as an accrual and receive it only after customs clearance.

 

Also, goods movement within Brazil needs to be accompanied by Invoices (Nota Fiscals being the actual term). And this needs to be in the local language (Portuguese). And to add to the complexities there is a complicated set of taxes for federal, state and local authorities, some of which are recoverable. IPI, PIS, COFINS are federal taxes while ICMS is State Tax. Also from September 2009, it will be mandatory that all invoices be transmitted electronically to the Brazil Govt and goods can be moved only after they are approved.

 

Oracle E-Business Suite provides Globalization and Localization patches to enable Brazil systematically. There are Brazil specific modules like Integrated Receiving (RI), Periodic Average Costing (BRPAC) which adhere to Brazil’s statutory and legal requirements.

 

Oracle’s solution has evolved over the years and is not fully complete. Third party tools like eComex, Mastersaf, which have easy integration with Oracle EBiz, are used extensively in Brazil.

 

So if you are thinking of enabling Brazil, Brazil Localization is the way forward.!!!

Posted by Sandeep Chatterjee at 03:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Master Data Management or MDM as it is commonly known is vital to the extraction of value and formation of insights from corporate data in IT systems among other benefits to an enterprise. Master data exists in every system in some form or the other. Every business has customers, products (or services) and suppliers. Data on these entities is created, consumed and retired during the lifecycle of a system.
A typical enterprise stores transactional data which is processed with reference to master data. A purchase order is made to a supplier, a sales order is created for a customer and products are manufactured and sold. Master data is undoubtedly the key business entity which defines an enterprise. In fact, master data sets the context for transactional data in an IT system.

Master data is used in multiple systems that are interlinked in an enterprise, which has a legacy of homegrown systems and packaged applications. A typical problem in this scenario is that master data is not common to these systems. On the contrary, the same set of customers, suppliers, products and employees is identified differently in these disparate systems which thwarts the fusion of data from all these systems. In a nutshell, MDM is a journey from unmanaged master data to managed master data. The offshoot of not having managed master data is a lack of integration among systems in the true sense. When data from multiple systems can be brought together and analyzed to get a holistic picture of performance, master data plays a critical role in enabling that integration. Not having managed master data dilutes the benefits of an integrated enterprise system and can lead to diminished performance. On the other hand, an MDM program can improve customer service, reduce inefficiencies and help spot opportunities for raising employee productivity.

There are different strategies to manage master data. It must be borne in mind that it is a process and not a destination. Having an infrastructure in line with the chosen strategy contributes to that process but importantly, a master data governance model is fundamental to set the rules for creation, consumption, modification and deletion of such data. Technology can support but not solve the problem in its entirety. While on this topic, it is worth noting that improving data quality not only supports a MDM program but is also sustained by it - a symbiotic relationship at best!

In my next post in this series, I will write about MDM in general with a greater emphasis on typical scenarios which expose the realities and consequences of unmanaged master data.

Posted by Anand Srinivasan at 12:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)