Infosys-Oracle Blog

Business transformation is one of the key needs for the large enterprises. The next generation packages are in making but not all enterprises may be able to move to these new packages. AIA can bridge this gap as it provides a standards based architecture.
Integrations are the key need of today to keep your architecture robust and scalable for tomorrow’s needs. Enterprises having multiple applications need to follow a common architecture strategy. AIA is a step to provide a best practice standard architecture. Typically in an enterprise context, Business and IT are two sides of same coin but AIA can make them work together smartly.
Foundation pack and Process Integration pack (PIP) are the key two offerings of AIA. Wanna know more about AIA???? Come and join me at Oracle Open World to know more on AIA.
Session ID – S310090
Session Title – Oracle Application Integration Architecture – The Future Is Here
Track – APPLICATIONS: Oracle Application Integration Architecture
http://www.oracle.com/openworld/index.html
Lets begin the journey to know more about AIA and understand how enterprise architectures can speak a common architectural language.

Posted by vikas khurana at 06:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Labor day is just around the corner, and a strong retail sales figure could be just the boost to reinforce consumer confidence in the US and global economy. What do retailers typically do for such events and what role does an ERP application play?

Retailers are used to seasonalities in their business, sales are usually skewed towards weekends and major holidays. Labor day marks the end of the summer season in US, traditionally similar to May Day celebrations, US version is more marked for resting, picnics and enjoying the last days of summer. This event is also popular as it is the last opportunity to buy before the schools start. It  also marks the start of the hugely popular NFL and College football seasons.

All of the above create a fervor and activity in retailers around putting their best foot forward to meet the customers and converting every single opportunity of sale. Some of the areas where the enterprise application (Oracle, PeopleSoft, Retail etc) plays a big part are

Pre-Event

1. Procurement

As you can imagine planning for such events requires lead time to procure the necessary goods across the entire supply chain. Typical peaks for procurement occur around August timeframe, at least a month before the actual event, some retailers vary this depending on their lead times to procure.

This is typically carried out based on the sales forecast with additional considerations given to the economic environment. Planning modules of Oracle are typically utilized to generate the sales forecast and from that POs are created and sent.

2. Receiving and Store Allocation

The merchandise procured has to be received in the warehousing system and distributed across the various stores. This function is typically carried out using Oracle Transportation Management or Manhattan products. 

3. Labor Scheduling

Store operations require special care and planning to address the volume of traffic that goes through Retail Stores. This is usually done using specialized labor scheduling packages such as Kronos, Red Prairie.

This involve setting the staffing levels based on skill and need to carry out the operations in a store. The planning is done based on needs as well as cost by taking into account various factors such as the different compensation types - cashier, sales, shelf stocking etc.

4. Multi Channel Order Management

On the days of the sale and preceding the event, the various channels of order management will witness a heavier volume of orders flowing through, often any errors in these have to be resolved with high priority due to the increased focus on the event. This includes credit card processing as well as order allocation activities which are carried out in order management systems such as Oracle, PeopleSoft or Sterling commerce OM system. 

5. Financial Transaction processing

Given the volume of transactions flowing through, the revenue side transactions have to be processed with a higher focus. The cost accruals typically occur during the procurement phase and actual liability postings are delayed until the invoices are matched and paid. This is the core function of the GL/AP/AR teams.

6. Reporting

Finally, the most important piece of this entire event is to be able to turn around reports showing various parameters such as item category, store, department, vendor based reports.

 Most retailers release the labor day sale statistics within days of the event and this requires gathering, reviewing and verifying the sales data through the various Sales, Order and Financial systems. This is often best sourced from the ERP systems. No report is worth sharing until the financial verification of the data has been carried out.

What other areas are you seeing activity in, in preparation to the Labor Day Sale?

Posted by Venu Kotamraju at 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Over the years we have stuck to the approach of building first and integrating later in designing solutions for business problems. This has led to heterogeneity and applications silos. SOA is indeed a powerful solution to address this and many architects are zealous to make SOA a success in their organizations. Ever wondered why SOA initiatives fail. This year at Oracle Open World Infosys AIA team is presenting a point of view to address top challenges and frequently asked questions on SOA initiatives…

Let us look at some of the top most queries our customers have who are on SOA adoption path: 

1.    Have you embarked on SOA journey and finding too many ways to enable your applications for SOA?
Too many ways of implementing SOA has always bewildered solution designers. Oracle SOA powered by Oracle AIA framework is a one stop solution for all kind of service based solutions.
2.    Are you spending lot of energies and time in deciding the frameworks and standards?
Oracle AIA is rapidly becoming an industry standard with its robust yet flexible framework. Many of our customers have successfully adopted this.
3.    Have your previous initiatives on SOA been unsuccessful due to lack of a disciplined approach?
Without having any governance model, any SOA initiative is almost unsustainable after some period. Oracle AIA brings with it an out of the box governance model with best practices and guidelines.
 
4.    Are you worried that enabling SOA would mean lot of custom development which would hinder speed of your implementation?
5.    For integrating your Oracle Application with legacy systems are you struggling to attain a seamless application to application integration?
6.    Do your customers and suppliers need to integrate with your Oracle Application using open standards based on flexible framework?
 
For answer to all these questions, please wait for our full fledged point of view document that will be available during Oracle Open World sessions at Infosys booths…

 

Posted by Gaurav Sharma at 04:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It is seen that for High Technology companies’ compliance to green related regulations required for market entry is the top pressure driving green product development. Most of the High Technology manufacturers have a green product development initiative in place, even more than other industries. They also seem to brand energy efficient technology as one of their top marketing strategies
It is clear, that while today High Technology manufacturers are focused on compliance to regulations like RoHS, REACH, WEE, TSCA, etc. they must look ahead and add cost reduction strategies around green design in their efforts in order to capture and sustain competitive advantage.

But doesn’t too much focus on compliance lead to increasing product development costs and affect their sustainability in the marketplace?? Let us see how successful High Technology manufacturers address this.

Green design refers to an approach to design of a product with special consideration for the environmental impacts of the product during its whole lifecycle. As the whole product life cycle should be regarded in an integrated perspective, representatives from advance development, design, production, marketing, purchasing and project management should work together on the design of a further developed or new product as they have together the best chance to predict the holistic effects of changes of the product and their environmental impact.

Let see some of the best practices adopted by High Technology manufacturers who have successfully embraced green design and are reaping the benefits.
• Have single source of product and process knowledge, enabling manufacturers to capture and trace compliance requirements and track compliance achievements across the entire product lifecycle.
• Use of concurrent engineering – change from a serial process of product development to a more parallel process
• Use of the latest green material selection available, from leading material suppliers
• Use of Six Sigma and quality techniques for process measurement, analysis and improvement to select optimum RoHS-compliant processes that will increase quality and reduce cost
• Use of standard performance criteria and test methods for compliance.
• Ensure supplier environmental qualification as a key part of the supplier sourcing, qualification, and quality control process.
• Validate product compliance throughout the development process in accordance with multiple environmental guidelines established by U.S., European Union and Asian governments.
• Provide an easy-to-use supplier portal which provides an automatic way to aggregate compliance data from your supply chain, eliminating time-consuming tracking and communication breakdowns that result in costly mistakes.

This broad scope of insight into the world of environmental compliance allows companies to improve product time-to-market, enhance customer satisfaction and meet regulatory directives. It is critical that the environmental compliance be managed early in the product development process because the costs associated with late-stage design changes can be enormous.

True green design leverages product development and provides following benefits:
• Improve product quality by removing information silos that prevent collaboration and reuse of intellectual property (IP)
• Provide accurate audit information and traceability by verifying and integrating product compliance specifics at every step of the product development process
• Speed time to market by avoiding late-stage design changes that often cause product delivery delays
• Lower costs by building compliance mandates into the product at the concept level
• Enhance brand identity by enabling the successful implementation of an green design strategy for product design

High Technology manufacturers that demonstrate green awareness and sustainability have the chance to increase their market share, enhance their brand image and drive revenue. Getting the greatest return-on-investment from eco-design will require manufacturers to think well beyond just meeting compliance regulations. 

Posted by K N Harilal at 07:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Does your manufacturing intelligence system support proactive monitoring for quick decision support? Lots of data gets collected on your shop-floor – but how should it be organized to assess the performance of a machine, a line, a plant, or a fleet of plants? What will it take you to make the process more a science than an art? Oracle has launched a new product - Manufacturing Operations Center - to answer some of these questions.

A real-time manufacturing intelligence system can equip shop-floor supervisors, plant managers, and VPs with the tools to see the operations at the right level and obtain valuable insights. Some examples of such insights are:

1. Can production losses from existing equipment be reduced to increase the effective capacity, and therefore postpone new equipment purchases?
2. Which machines are showing abnormal temperature and vibration trends and need to be immediately put under preventive maintenance to avoid costly scrap?
3. When should you move production from Equipment-A (or Plant-A) to Equipment-B (or Plant-B)?
4. What is the backlog on the shop-floor – and which customer orders should be prioritized for manufacturing?

The primary challenge in any manufacturing intelligence solution is the sheer variety of data standards that need to be handled. Each plant can have equipment based on a different technology with different control parameters expressed in different communication protocols. Integrating information from all equipment to get a holistic view of the shop-floor becomes a complex task. However, as more and more companies try Lean and Six-sigma initiatives - accurate, current, and holistic measurements of equipment and plant parameters become critical to identify and eliminate waste in all its forms.

Oracle’s Manufacturing Operations Center (MOC) is a manufacturing intelligence solution aimed at measuring what needs to be managed. It can be implemented as a stand-alone product, or in conjunction with Oracle E-Business Suite for which it has prepackaged adaptors. It collects real-time, high-resolution data from shop-floor systems (for example: SCADA, PLCs, DCS, quality systems, MES, counters, sensors, and data historians) and contextualizes it for analysis. Its architectural elements are: 

1. A persistent data model that supports extensible attributes for capturing customer-specific process parameters.
2. A contextualization rule engine that adds business context (work order #, shift, product, etc.) to the data collected from the shop-floor.
3. Configurable role-based dashboards based on Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE)

MOC supports advanced graphics and drill-downs for more than 50 KPIs and more than 90 measures. These KPIs and measures are organized under the MOC Catalog that has the following categories: 

1. Manufacturing Asset Performance: To analyze Overall Equipment Efficiency (OEE) and production loss
2. Batch Analyzer: To analyze batch production variances (quantity, material usage, resource usage) and cycle time
3. Schedule Adherence: To analyze production performance and production slippage
4. Agility Responsiveness: To analyze flexibility ratio at equipment level
5. Plant Maintenance: To analyze equipment downtime measures
6. Quality: To analyze first pass yield, scrap, and rework
7. Service Levels: To analyze manufacturing performance related to schedule, requested, and promise dates for pegged sales orders
8. Equipment Downtime Analysis: To analyze equipment downtime by downtime reasons
9. Equipment Scrap Analysis: To analyze scrap quantity by scrap reasons
10. Equipment Attributes Data – Actual: To compare actual attributes data with specifications 

Role-based dashboards can be configured from these measures to foster focused monitoring. The seeded Plant Manager Dashboard has tools to track the following metrics: 

1. Asset performance (OEE) by plant, department, and equipment: OEE is a product of machine availability, machine performance, and first-pass yield. It summarizes the current state of the plant and helps in benchmarking operations against other companies and divisions.
2. Batch performance: Measures work order quantity variance, PPM trend, batch cycle time trend, and service level performance
3. Production performance: Measures production schedule performance by department and equipment

The first measure – OEE – helps plant managers dig deeper into the reasons for poor equipment availability, equipment performance, and product quality. Figure 1 shows how these losses (shown as B, C, and D) can reduce the total capacity (A) of equipment to effective capacity (E).

Figure 1: Understanding Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE)

 

Plant managers can view the departments with low OEE, and drill down to individual equipment to find out which loss is dragging the effective capacity down. Similar drill down is possible with other metrics in the Plant Manager Dashboard.

MOC uses ISA-95 standard for defining equipment hierarchies. Shop-floor data is collected as tags using 3^rd party OPC servers (from companies like Kepware, ILS, and Matrikon) and other 3^rd party solutions. With Kepware’s KepServer, for example, a Channel is a group of shop-floor equipment, and each data collection point (pressure, temperature, vibrations, etc.) for an equipment is defined as a tag. Each tag is mapped to a database table-field in MOC. Data on each tag can be collected at a user-defined frequency. 

MOC requires Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB) 10.2.0.4 and OBIEE 10.1.3.4. It uses OWB as an ETL tool to extract data from source systems. OBIEE is used to generate configurable role-based dashboards, ad-hoc reports, and alerts. The reports can be easily downloaded to Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint. A profile option in MOC points to the machine and port where OBIEE is installed. 

The latest release (12.1.1.01) of MOC comes with EBS process manufacturing integration, enhanced EBS discrete manufacturing integration, production performance reporting, and production quality monitoring.

MOC is built for quick deployment and adoption. It is advisable to start MOC deployment with a controlled scope (a cell or a line in a plant) and expand gradually to cover the production landscape.

Posted by Deepak Wankhade at 06:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In the past couple of years, the world has been facing challenges of increasing business complexities, volatile transportation costs and severe resource constraints. For  midsize Logistics Service Providers and Industrial Manufacturing Enterprises this has created a need for an integrated logistics solution that leads to reduced freight spend, improved customer service and hence increased profits.

Keeping this in mind, Infosys has developed an affordable, Ready-to-Deploy OTM fixed price solution within the Oracle® Accelerate framework, targeting midsize organizations across the continents for various industries. The Oracle® Business Accelerators are pre-packaged bundles that pair Oracle® Applications with Partner knowledge to help deliver rapid fixed cost implementations. Oracle® Business Accelerators bring proven, best-in-class business solutions that reduce implementation process and thereby reduce time and cost of implementation.

Visualizing great demand for OTM, a TMS solution by Oracle®, Infosys has launched four Accelerate Solutions across India and Australia, focusing on Industrial Manufacturing and Transportation Industries.

Oracle® Accelerator Provider of Industrial Manufacturing Solutions – India
Oracle® Accelerator Provider of LSP (Logistics Service Providers) Solutions – India
Oracle® Accelerator Provider of Industrial Manufacturing Solutions – Australia
Oracle® Accelerator Provider of LSP (Logistics Service Providers) Solutions – Australia

The above solutions harness industry best practices and support business flows for Industrial Manufacturing and LSP Industries and come in three fixed price/scope offerings:

• OTM In-a-Box
• OTM In-a-Box Plus
• OTM In-a-Box Advanced

The OTM In-a-Box solution combines transportation planning and execution with inbound and outbound freight logistics, freight rating and routing and financial payment. The solution covers point-to-point, multi-stop and multileg shipments across different modes of transport namely Truckload (TL), Less than TL, Ocean and Air. The solution also includes design and development of specific number of reports of medium complexity and implementation of out-of-box workflow features.

The OTM In-a-Box Plus in addition provides superior shipment optimization - features comprising of Cross-Docking, Consolidation and Deconsolidation Pools and Continuous Move. It also offers design and development of specific number of high complexity reports and implementation of basic workflow features.

The OTM In-a-Box Advanced in addition provides Fusion Transportation Intelligence for decision making and better visibility. It also enables the Carrier to generate freight invoice through a portal. It also offers design and development of a specific number of high complexity reports and implementation of advanced workflow features.

All these solutions will help organizations to manage their entire transportation network on one single platform to increase asset utilization, to lower transportation costs and to reduce environmental impact. The industry focused prepackaged units enable Infosys to deliver scalable business solutions to companies in an accelerated time frame.

As the first Oracle® Accelerate solution for OTM, the solution attempts to equip organizations with enterprise technology for optimizing the logistics function and is scalable to meet their future growth demands.

For customers interested in a rapid, low-risk approach, Oracle® Accelerate provides the opportunity to leverage world-class functionality at an unprecedented entry-level value.

Press release of the solution launch is available at http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/021903

Acknowledgements: Lakshmana Murthy Kodukula

Posted by Nilabja Dey at 08:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Experience shows it is impossible to define all business requirements in the initial phase of a packaged software implementation. Some requirements are missed due to schedule pressure or oversight, while others originate later due to changed business realities. How can program sponsors manage changing requirements without impact to budgets and schedules? This article attempts to answer the question based on practices observed in multiple large enterprise system implementations.

Implementations of packaged software aim to deliver solution components for all validated business requirements (See Figure 1) gathered mostly in the initial phases.

Figure 1: Evident and hidden Business Requirements and Solution Components in a packaged software implementation

 

Posted by Deepak Wankhade at 01:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

How do you verify that Oracle Applications set-up standards are being consistently applied across organizations? How do you monitor that approval controls and financial limits are changed only when properly authorized? How do you determine why functionality works in one instance but not in another? How do you ensure your set-ups are defined consistently across instances when changes are propagated? How do you automate SOX and other audit or regulatory compliance requirements? How do you manage the changes required for new rollouts, business organizations, or version upgrades? How do you provide time stamped documentation of application setups? How do you identify what changed when errors occur?

If your answer to one or more of the above questions is yes, then there is a ready solution available in the market. Oracle Configuration Controls Governor from the Governance, Risk and Compliance suite of Oracle products caters to the above problems. The four primary functions of the product are:

(1)    Snapshots which automate time-stamped documentation of key controls across all Oracle   Applications modules

(2)    Comparisons which determine what is different when problems occur, verify what has changed after project activity. Monitor consistency of controls across Instances, Versions, Points in Time,       Operating Units and Sets of Books

(3)     Change Tracking which automates real-time monitoring of key controls in Oracle and ensures visibility and integrity of controls over a period of time

(4)    Migration which increases  system integrity and operational efficiency by automating setup propagation

The initial product was named as Integra Apps which was developed by Applimation, a NYC based company. Integra Apps Product Family had 4 Modules: Apps, Access, Transaction and Codebase. Integra Apps was bought by Logical Apps in Feb, 2007 while Logical Apps was bought by Oracle in Oct, 2007. The product family has been rechristened under Oracle’s Governance, Risk and Compliance Suite.

With so much attention being paid to SOX compliance, this is a product to look out for.

Posted by Sandeep Chatterjee at 07:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)