Infosys-Oracle Blog

With much awaited R12.1.1, which was released in early May 2009, Oracle has finally introduced full fledged “Make-to-Order” solution for process manufacturer as part of their OPM suite enhancement.

Posted by Ashish Namdeo at 04:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Having seen both the SOA approaches top down and as well as bottom-up, this question still bewilders me if there is any right option out of these two? There is no easy answer. Or I would like to believe it depends...

Posted by Gaurav Sharma at 03:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Governance, described by Oxford as 'an act of governing', is one important and essential element of any engagement. An engagement will be between two (or more) parties contractually obligated for its success and governance is a means to ensure it happens. Typically there will be, and preferably so, a three level governance structure governing the operational, tactical and strategic aspects of the engagement. Based on the level in the structure, multiple levels of people will be involved from the parties contracted.

In the traditional engagement models, where the customer has a dedicated IT team from the service provider, servicing his needs on projects or for support & maintenance, there will be a well defined Governance structure and mechanism overseeing the operations with periodic reviews on the progress. Now the question is will this setup be available for the shared services delivery model too??

I think the Governance structure is something of very hygiene in nature and is expected to be available on all engagements irrespective of the nature of the delivery model nor any other factors. Having said that, it may be possible that there could be some minor changes in the framework of the governance structure but the skeleton would remain the same.. for example, there may not be a need to have transactional monitoring or operational level monitoring in the shared model as the delivery is expected to be on well established and standardized processes. there may not be a need to have tactical structure unless multiple projects are under the same engagement umbrella.

There would still be an engagement manager, from the service provider, acting as a liaison to the customer manager who would take bottomline on the delivery of services and the relationship overall.

Under no circumstances, the Governance mechanism of the engagement can afford to be overlooked by either of the contracted parties. For a very healthy relationship, it is pertinent to have a well-defined governance model and the senior management involvement in ensuring that the governing body performs efficiently.

Posted by Ramgopal Natarajan at 08:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

To overcome this, it is needed to maintain an optimum level of inventory so as to avoid overstock/short-supply and bring innovative and profitable schemes in marketing. Business Intelligence(BI) can help in achieving this.

BI helps in keeping managers updated / equipped with state-of-the art and exact information that helps in taking critical business decisions than relying on assumptions.

Manufacturers use Business Intelligence software to improve visibility and communication across their increasingly complex supply chains, while satisfying customer demands for new products and product enhancements. The prime areas of concern are

• Having a bird’s eye-view of the customer information which helps the sales team to coordinate and collaborate customer interactions.
• Trace the metrics and indicators that improve customer satisfaction.
• Lead time to fulfill customer orders across sales and distribution channels.
• Improve “order promising” (Delivery or issue resolution for a customer) through analysis of historical statistics, expected lead time, and inventory levels.
• Analysis of current usage of products to determine the new range of products.
• Tracking service, to better predict and prepare inventory and production levels.
• Benchmark distributors, regions, and individual locations against each other in an attempt to foster increased attention to goals and metrics, as well as reward high performers and aid underachievers.

Some of the areas where BI Solutions can be applied in Manufacturing are:

Supply Chain and Order Management:  Oracle Supply Chain and Order Management Analytics delivers deep customer insight into order and inventory data to make better decisions in each stage of the order lifecycle. It enables one to assess inventory levels, determine likely product fulfillment needs before the order has been booked, quickly identify potential order backlog issues, and stay on top of critical accounts receivable (A/R) and daily sales outstanding (DSO) issues. By leveraging actionable and fact-based insights, one can transform their current Supply Chain and Order Management processes to improve financial performance and customer satisfaction.

Financial Management: Oracle Financial Analytics helps front-line managers improve financial performance with complete, up-to-the-minute information on their department's expenses and revenue contributions. KPI’s and reports enable financial managers to improve cash flow, lower costs, and increase profitability while maintaining more accurate, timely, and transparent financial reporting that helps ensure Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.

Procurement and Spend: Oracle Procurement & Spend Analytics is useful to optimize supply side performance by integrating data from across the enterprise value chain enabling executives, managers, and frontline employees to make more informed decisions. It increases visibility into the complete procure-to-pay process, including comprehensive spend and procurement analysis, supplier performance analysis, supplier payables analysis, and employee expense analysis. Through complete end-to-end insight into the factors that impact company performance, one can significantly reduce costs, enhance profitability, increase customer satisfaction, and gain competitive advantage.

Using these analytics helps assess cash-management and monitor operational effectiveness of the payables department to ensure lowest transaction costs; Identify most profitable customers, products, and channels, and understand profitability drivers across regions, divisions, and profit centers; Improve inventory management for those products that consistently fall into backlog due to a lack of appropriate stock levels, Gain visibility into inventory activities to minimize unnecessary expenditures and optimize inventory to conserve working capital; Gain detailed visibility into direct and indirect spending, and identify opportunities for consolidation and reduction of costs; Monitor price, delivery, and product quality to determine the best and worst performing suppliers.

This blog has inputs from Neeraj Jha who is a Consultant with the Oracle Business Intelligence Practice at Infosys. His areas of interest include Packaged BI Applications and Process Consulting.

Posted by Sivaraman A at 09:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Mergers and Acquisitions activity is getting increasingly common and challenging in current business environment.  These dynamics in the trading community (Customers, Suppliers...etc) of an enterprise needs to be effectively managed. Any inflexibility in administering the dynamics would increase the risk exposure, loss of opportunity, lack of insight into customers, and revenue leakage. In cases where an enterprise is part of Merger or acquisition activity, lack of proper CDI strategy for any of the participant enterprises would make realization of intended ROI difficult. Read through this blog for more information.

M&A has become the invaluable business strategies for industries implementing Master Data Management (MDM for Customers, products, suppliers etc).

When a company sees an opportunity to acquire another company, it basically looks at improving the customer base and to increase its own products and services.  The result of these acquisitions is the impact on customer model. Once acquired, there should be synergy in the customer bases between the acquired company and acquiring company.

 For any company, acquisitions are challenging but are necessary for companies to improve their planning process, to provide a customer-focused experience to their customer leading to everlasting customer loyalty, trust, reaping the benefits of M&As. What is important for companies after they acquire new business is to retain their customers, their staff and also ensure they are motivated and positive.

The same is the case when a company is merged with another company, the two customer models get merged and a decision is taken which customer model survives during the merge process and which ones will be retired after the merge process.  Again, there will be lot more pressing problems during merging as well. These acquisitions and merging should be timed well enough, consolidation of disparate systems should be done but it shouldn’t disrupt the existing business processes that are critical to revenue generation.

Most Communication service provider industries fall a victim to M&A activities. These industries are moving from LOB-centric product view to Customer View. What it means is –It is quite common these days, when businesses (like the communication industries) merge together, they keep adding more products to their shelf, by doing so they need to provide support for sales and service of the product. This further leads to maintaining their customer information in one central repository and their inability to provide a single global view to the external world.

In order to provide a single blended view to the external world, enterprises need to adopt the best practices leveraging on Oracle CDH which is an effective CDI tool to manage trading community dynamics that would help them in realizing success.

Posted by Aruna Srikanth at 06:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In today’s competitive environment the unit prices for electricity and gas is driven heavily by the competition between energy companies.However, to ensure that the customer receives a fair price and to avoid monopoly, it is quite common to have this price overseen by regulation.  Though there are many pricing models available in different countries, by and large the pricing models in regulated scenarios are either revenue based pricing or rate based pricing.  This blog briefly touches upon the pricing models and the components of prices. Pl. note that the examples in this blog focuses on UK energy market.     

Posted by Ismail Syed Mohammad at 08:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I read about Oracle’s acquisition of Sun; a move which had been preempted and discussed after IBM’s failed attempt to acquire Sun few months earlier. And then the obvious question “ Why Sun” ?

As per my understanding, Oracle acquired Sun for open standard Java language , a backbone of various applications and mobile phone related software . The second reason is Solaris on which a high number of Oracle database runs. Also a significant chunk of Sun’s revenue comes from maintenance services( around 40%) , a revenue stream which Oracle cannot ignore and which means Sun’s hardware business is still going to remain(though Hardware is considered to be a low margin business). And should we account of Sun’s customer base too..

But most importantly, with acquisition of Sun, Oracle now has control over the complete stack from business application to hardware, which is important in the emerging space of “Cloud computing”. Cloud computing requires all the components behind the cloud to be really tightly coupled so as to become a utility service (time based or usage based. But does it leads to lesser choices for customer? Well that’s a choice you have to make for lower cost of utility services

But it needs to be seen what are its plan around MySQL and Java both on open source and with one of them competing with Oracle’s own offering.  Can we see more similar players getting into vertical integration- IBM, SAP, HP etc to build an end to end stack? Talk about going back in time.

Posted by Amandeep Singh Syali at 08:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Remember those Linear Programming Problems in College? We used to find an optimized solution based on certain constraints. Some of the popular methods of solving these were Graphical, Simplex and Big-M Method. Also, there were software programs available to minimize the computation efforts.

Oracle Strategic Network Optimization (SNO) is an object oriented simulation tool that enables you to model and optimize your supply chain network, from obtaining raw materials through delivering end products. It enables you to solve a wide range of production, distribution and planning problems. It can determine when and where to close or open facilities and production lines, and whether to manufacture in-house or outsource. It can help in developing various ‘what if ‘ scenarios to can optimize plans by performing a variety of detailed analyses including expected profit, new market, marketing promotions, materials and finished goods sourcing, and inventory builds.

The Solver is based on the algorithms used for solving LPP problems. It balances the conflicting objectives and limitations of supply, production, and distribution in the model and determines how to meet demand with the least cost or with the most profit.

If you are looking for a tool to optimize your supply chain, this is the product to look out for!

Posted by Sandeep Chatterjee at 03:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Vertically integrated utilities have large assets in form of their generation stations and their components.  This part of the business is regulated in some countries.  Through the regulatory environment, the government gets involved in various aspects of utilities viz., pricing, Secured energy supply, Pressure to reduce carbon footprint etc.,.  Equally there are some accounting challenges that are posed through regulations and reporting norms.  This blog talks about one such challenge faced by generators on the way in which they manage and report their generation Assets and their significant components.

One of the common challenges that utilities come across as a part of their financial reporting is the way in which they report their large Assets in generation stations.  The generation stations are a combination of large and complex assets and components.  These assets and components are subjected to extreme climatic and operating conditions and they require periodic maintenance and sometimes replacement.    The classification of ‘Significant components’ that are parts of the asset is stipulated by IFRS.  It stipulates that these significant components and their depreciation should be identified separately.  This may be alright for new plants, but for old plants it is always a challenge because record keeping for old plants and reporting didn’t have this need.

In such cases, it is a generally accepted practise for the utility to look at their Work and Asset management system, look for the work that was done on the assets and work out the components, their history and the work that were done on them.  This practise also forces the utility to have a focus on keeping a record for all the maintenance, overhaul schedules and the amount expended on these maintenance jobs.

The other challenge is the way in which depreciation is calculated for components which have a shorter life than the actual asset itself.  In such cases, it is generally a good practise to set that component to its shorter useful life and let it depreciate to its recoverable amount over that period of time.  It is also acceptable to let the remaining carrying amount of the component to be derecognised on replacement and the cost of the replacement to be capitalised.

IFRS also clearly stipulates what parts of the expenses for such assets and components can be capitalised and what part of it can be expensed.  The normal thumb rule is to let the cost of performing outage maintenance to be capitalised, if the expense can be justified that it helped the future economic benefit or revenue generation by the asset.

Since more and more vertically integrated utilities are forced to adopt IFRS and move away from GAAP or any applicable reporting standards, the need to have a structured back office implementation is increasing.  Generally such vertically integrated utilities tend to have a robust state of the art Enterprise Asset Management install base duly supported by a financial and reporting solution.  Oracle EAM, Oracle Financials and Hyperion reporting solutions are better suited to help these utilities have systems and processes that are industry wide best practices and quickly let them comply with the compliance norms.

Posted by Ismail Syed Mohammad at 07:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Traditional BI deployments result in a time lag between the time data is entered in a transactional system and the time at which this data is available to the analytical systems for reporting & analysis. This time lag is dependent on the data extraction process (ETL) to extract, transform & load the data warehouse, aggregate and present the data in the form of reports, dashboards and alerts to the end user. The architecture of the BI platform deployed and the business requirements of an organization mandate the schedule of data extraction processes. For a typical manufacturing organization having an ERP system, to capture transactional data the ETL processes are generally scheduled to run on a fortnightly, weekly or daily basis. The complexity of the KPI’s measured through the reports governs the time spent on data aggregation and presentation.

However, with constantly changing market dynamics, today the decision makers and analysts want to monitor and analyze the performance of their business on the latest available data i.e. on a near-real-time basis. This means that a Real-Time BI solution should be able to deliver information just-in-time when required by the user; much faster than normal BI platforms.

Industry Requirements

Real-time Business Intelligence is required by event-driven enterprises where the action to be taken by the business user is dependent on the latest data. Some of the industries where Real-Time BI solutions are required include:

• Financial Services - to monitor Credit Card frauds and Risk Management (market, credit, ops)        
• Retail - for Price Optimization, stock replenishment & inventory management
• Consumer Products - to gain insight into sales promotion effectiveness
• Telecommunications - to report customer balances

Apart from the above mentioned niche areas there is a growing need for few metrics to be reported on a real-time basis in the traditional manufacturing and distribution organizations. These metrics include the latest updated customers, suppliers, orders, quotes etc.

Oracle's Solutions for Real-Time BI Reporting

Oracle provides Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) to integrate data from various heterogeneous data sources and perform integration in real time. ODI is an E-LT (Extract, Load & Transform) tool and part of Oracle's Fusion Middle ware product suite. Real-time data integration is possible through ODI's Changed Data Capture (CDC) feature. ODI utilizes a set of out-of-the-box Journalizing Knowledge Modules to monitor the data sources and capture any new/modified data and makes the new data available for analysis through the already defined data integration mappings. This helps in minimizing the data load time as only new/ changed records are loaded. The data integration process is started automatically once the changed records reach a predefined limit or after a predefined time limit is elapsed, and thus, provides data from different sources to be analyzed on a real-time basis.

Similarly for Oracle BI Applications, Siebel OLTP change capture techniques are embedded into DAC (Data warehouse Administration Console) which helps in providing near Real-time reporting on some of the Seibel CRM metrics.

Including Real-time Metrics in existing BI deployments

For existing BI deployments, real-time data analysis can be achieved by minimizing the time consumption in ETL processes or customizing BI platforms to efficiently query required data directly from the transactional system.

Apart from using faster processors, one of the approaches to optimize ETL process for better performance is to simplify the data transformations. However, most of the transformations cannot be simplified because of data cleansing, aggregation and reporting requirements. The analysts need to identify the specific metrics where real-time data would actually impact the business users in making decisions and carrying out their responsibilities. The transformation of data from the source system to the warehouse could be simplified by splitting the mappings affecting the identified metrics from existing complex mappings and minimizing cleansing & aggregation processes for these mappings. Incremental load through these bifurcated mappings could then be scheduled on intra-day basis to achieve near real-time BI. This approach would be most successful when there are strict guidelines which restrict the data entry at the source system to be clean.

Another approach to Real-Time BI is to query data directly from the transactional system databases. However, most of the transactional systems use fully normalized relational schema (e.g. Entity Relationship schema) in their database which are efficient in reducing data redundancy and optimizing data updates but not suitable for analytic purposes to query data for historical analysis. This presents the need for data extraction to dimensional schemas in the warehouse for analysis of data from transactional system database. To report some of the metrics on real-time basis like new customers, suppliers or orders, the BI metadata layer could source the required selective data directly from the OLTP database by-passing the ETL process . This entails very specific queries to return selective data without any historical analysis. These metrics could then be embedded as a separate set of measures along with the regular BI application leading to a near real-time BI reporting.

This blog has inputs from Sumit Sharma who is an Associate Consultant with the Oracle Business Intelligence Practice at Infosys. His areas of interest include Packaged BI Apps and Financial Analytics.

Posted by Sivaraman A at 07:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)