Infosys-Oracle Blog

As consumers we have increasingly become used to the idea of having a same product available to us across different stores or channels from the same selling company. And we expect consistent product information available to us across these sales channels.

It is easy to put off a customer when the two arms of the selling organization give inconsistent or incomplete information on the same product.

These inconsistencies, bewildering as it might be to the customers are easy for an IT practitioner like me to understand.  It’s a case of product data lying in silos or lack of master data management (MDM) at the organization level.

Even as companies are waking up to the need for MDM at organizational level there is still a long way before we reach the desired state. In a recent experience of dealing with the Fortune 100 company, I discovered that the most simple reason for inconsistency of data. The selling channels e.g. distributors have the flexibility of picking the product master information as per their needs, basically only information which they need to make the sale. The logic at one hand might be preventing a data overload to the distributor systems and reducing manual effort since the data transfer was a manual process there. On the other hand the process simply ensures inconsistent or incomplete product data across the selling front since it depends on the distributors judgment of essential product data.

The need for a master data management strategy is pretty apparent in such a case. But what would be some of the measures as part of this strategy? Let’s list out some of them.

• Standardize the master data set needed for the selling arms across the organization. So that all the selling channels have a consistent set of product data. Baring of course any channel or geography specific content.
  
• Automate the process of sharing of product data across the selling arms. The manual effort of data sharing can leave the product data sharing dependant on the evening schedules of the person/s responsible for the data transfer!
  
• Implement a Master data management product solution in the organization. An MDM product can assist in standardizing data and sharing the same across the organization and systems.
  
• Have an IT systems strategy which can ensure that hardware and software purchase or developments are planned with the intent of having as much uniformity as possible across the organization. A set of disparate best of breed applications, which have limited capabilities to talk to each other can lead to creation of data silos.
  

Bringing consistency across the sale channel can be comforting to a customer and could be one of the reasons for a customer choosing a company’s product!

Posted by Rahul Guleria at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The first and foremost thing is to understand what is the problem we are trying to solve. If it is just a change in policy or framework, there are other options as well.

Secondly, GRC is one of the pillars of any organization and it is important that we ensure that it percolates to every nook and corner in the organization. We cannot have a successful project unless we get a buy in from all the stakeholders.

Thirdly, the project should be flexible enough to cater to the ever changing legislations . The investment is costly and hence too many throwaways become an overhead.

Fourthly, technology is the least important thing. If we get the people and processes right, 90% of the project is done.

Finally do not copy blindly from any organization. Each organization has its own unique GRC needs and it is imperative that we take care of this aspect.

Oracle provides a comprehensive solution around its GRC Suite of products and companies need to evaluate the options very carefully before deciding on the solution.

Posted by Sandeep Chatterjee at 10:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Oracle has recently announced plan to develop an evolved offering for sustainable manufacturing using its Energy Specific Manufacturing Operation Center (MOC). It will use sensor technology from partner OMRON. While the Outcome of this initiative is yet to be seen, My focus in this blog would be to discuss about sustainable manufacturing which has become BUZZWORD from some time.

Sustainable manufacturing is all about developing technologies to create products without emission of green house gases, or use of non-renewable or toxic materials or waste. Well that is as per the definition, but in practical sense, we can only try to reduce these to the maximum extent possible.

As they Say, If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it. Measurement of current Carbon Emission is first challenge we encounter. This will require a tight integration of various business functions such as Supply Chain Management, Planning, Financials, Logistics, Human resource management and Customer relationship management to support real-time representations of data from many environmental sources that are affected by manufacturing activities. Without a proper integration it would not be possible to get the correct figure on the carbon emissions. For Example, in software industries, carbon emission is usually counted by the use of computers. But, what about the carbon emissions, that happens when an employee travel overseas for official purpose. We have to ensure that we are not missing hidden Sources. A good Enterprise wide system can play a key role in developing the Sustainable Manufacturing strategy, as it provide enterprise wide visibility to all organizational activities.

Another major challenge is Carbon Accounting. At present there is lots of ambiguity over carbon accounting. A clear guideline has yet to come out. The accounting standard should be acceptable worldwide. One of the major thrust in near future would be to develop accounting features and analytics on Carbon accounting which could be the growth engine for the ERP.

In the coming future, carbon credit will determine the future growth of the organization. There could be time when the organization's product/services could be sold in the market only when it has got the specific rating from rating agencies. Sustainable manufacturing is the way to go as it is in the interest of business and society at large. It is high time we start looking at how these challenges can be converted in to opportunities.

Posted by Ashish Namdeo at 07:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Managing assets is crucial for any business, especially for Oil Field service companies which are asset intensive where operational cost in asset management contributes to a substantial part of expenses. Even a 6-8 % saving on operational cost can make lot of difference.

Some of the pain areas we have come across in OFS companies are -

 Ability to capture operational Cost at each work Order Level
 Charging Labor cost
 Accounting outside Job Processing against work orders
 Performing Preventive Maintenance  
 Scheduling Maintenance based on Location
 Performing Profit & Loss analysis at Asset Level

Oracle’s Enterprise Asset Management helps asset intensive companies to overcome these challenges. With the ability to structure and roll up cost at various levels provide the ability to perform the analysis at Country/Area/Asset level.

With the ability to define resource rates by Employee/Role, appropriate labor cost can be charged to each work order created for an Asset.

Outside Job processing usually gets accounted as expenses in Purchase Order and paid through Payables, tying Outside Job processing cost to a work order will ensure that all the cost related to an Asset/Work Order is captured and accounted against an Asset.

Preventive Maintenance is a key for operational efficiency, and the frequency at which we do the preventive maintenance has a greater role to play in overall life of an Asset. Maintaining records of last service dates and performing the next maintenance at appropriate time will help in performing timely maintenance and avoiding unnecessary maintenance. E.g. if an Asset is in service for two consecutive months and then out of service for one month, maintenance schedule should be adjusted  to take one month of downtime in account and trigger the next work order accordingly. Considering downtime will help in reducing untimely & unnecessary maintenance.  Another example of unnecessary maintenance would be if one has performed Engine Overhaul recently, there is no need to perform Engine routine maintenance within next 10 days even if the routine maintenance was due. Features provided in Oracle Enterprise Asset Management will help businesses to plan Preventive maintenance more efficiently.       
 
To save travel time & cost it is important if we can plan all the maintenance in an area together. With the help of scheduling workbench an area supervisor can plan to perform all the work for a give location. Scheduler workbench gives Area manager the ability to see which all Assets have planned maintenance due in a given period so that they all can be combined and worked upon in a single visit.   

The ultimate aim would be to evaluate how our Assets are performing on Year on Year basis. To do this we can look at our cost & revenues for each Asset, this will help us verifying our gross margins at an Asset level. Appropriate action (Overhaul/Scrap) can be taken once we Identify Assets which are costly to maintain. With Oracle Enterprise Asset Management integration with Oracle Projects one can have both cost & revenue information in Oracle projects, Gross Margins can easily be calculated at various levels (Country/ Area/Asset) and more appropriate Management decisions can be made.   

Posted by Manish Malhotra at 08:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Oracle Project offers a very tight and out of box integration with other systems, which are typically, operational in nature. Oracle project connects with procurement, payables, inventory, WIP etc to collect the cost that is incurred for a particular project (and task). So basically if users are able to stamp a proper projects signature on all the transactions which are recorded in “operations” system like payables, procurement, inventory etc, the cost collection for a project really becomes very easy.

Given these features of a product, I think it’s not necessary to give solutions only to manage “Projects” using Oracle Projects. By definition we can call a certain activity in an organization as a “Project” when it has certain life time, certain out come of that activity.

However there are certain operations activities which can use many of the features provided by Oracle projects. There will be requirements to

• Define certain cost budgets,
• Need to track various costs against agreed budgets
• Manage the resource allocation and track their work time
• Manage day to day issues collaboratively.
• Measure SLA for various operations functions based on the time required for each issue resolution.
• Ability to allocate over head costs, to each operations department based on certain criteria’s etc. 
• Ability to have a proper change management for budget , scope change etc.
• Ability to have standardized reporting for all operations activities across organization.

We can debate that most of the requirements mentioned above which are to manage costs and budgets etc, can be easily managed in Financials system. This is true however when it comes to track resources, issues, SLA measurements, collaborative issues resolution, change management, status reporting features provided by Projects systems can be effectively used.

We can look at providing this project based solution to various operations like

• Govt health schemes monitoring ,
• Banking organizations have need to capture cost including proper overhead costs for certain activities or departments (Cost centers) etc
• Equipment rental business
• Typical services organization, which have to mobile resources for various contracts
• Use the infrastructure given by Oracle Projects to manage organizations Annual Business planning process.

etc.

So basically there are many instances where the demarcation line in operations and projects is very thin, project bases system can be very effectively used to give solutions to manage certain operation activities as well.

Posted by Prasanna Kelkar at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)