Infosys-Oracle Blog

In my last blog, I wrote about the challenges the utilities industry in facing and the smart grid investments that are available for them.  In this blog, I intend to address a few solutions for the questions posed in the blog.

In the long run, while smart grid is gaining predominance, utilities are faced with a challenge to address the following questions as a part of their consideration.

How to reduce carbon emissions through a balanced generation portfolio?
How to maximize your assets utilization?
How to Reduce Transmission Congestion?
How to improve quality and reliability of power delivered to your customers?
How to win your customers with innovative and economic tariffs?
How to Provide Evolved Service to Your Next generation Customers?

How to reduce carbon emissions through a balanced generation portfolio?

Whilst the system efficiencies can be managed by optimizing business process through a robust work and asset management system, they could look at a solution that can cater to the evolving need for an enterprise information system that could provide a dashboard of information of the grid, right from the source of generation to the point of consumption.  The dashboard will play a pivotal role in providing the required analytics on various generation sources, their capacity and their efficiencies.  This, in combination with the demand response analytics can provide an opportunity for the utility companies to optimally integrate multiple micro generation and renewable energy sources

How to maximize your assets utilization?
Utilities operate in an environment characterized by constant regulatory changes, shifting economic landscape and escalating costs. In addition, they have pressures to optimize taxpayer value, meet stringent safety, reliability and compliance requirements while maintaining the rates to the customers constant. The key to survive and grow is to modernize grids with smart grid capabilities and to maximize asset utilization through effective Asset Lifecycle Management and near real time monitoring and analysis.

How to Reduce Transmission Congestion?
One of the biggest concerns of all electrical utilities is to protect the grid from congestion and ensure supply of reliable power to the consumers. In order to avoid congestion, the utility companies have to analyze the demand correctly and plan for the supply of power accordingly. The amount of mismatch between demand & supply has to be arrived at, and suitable measures either at supply side or demand side has to be taken to ensure grid stability.

How to improve quality and reliability of power delivered to your customers?
Power Outage is one of the top concerns for any electric utility.  Thus it is critical for any electric utility to continually be more and more efficient in outage restoration processes.  Improving outage restoration efficiency delivers higher quality and more reliable power to their customers. . In order to be efficient, utilities must be able to answer the following questions:

• When is outage repair needed?
• Where should dispatchers send service crews?
• When is it not necessary to send a service crew?
• Have all affected customers been restored after an outage restoration?

How to win your customers with innovative and economic tariffs?
In today's competitive market scenario, many customers have a clear view of what they want and how much they are willing to pay and most importantly, what they expect as quality of product/service from the utility. In the current energy market, to maintain a competitive edge, utilities have no other option, but to address this consumer attitude.  Utilitites can invest in solutions that can provide this intelligence by leveraging smart metering and AMI with Meter data management to provide the necessary information that would assist the utility to analyze and understand new customer behaviours, provide information to them proactively on consumption and device a response strategy to tackle the change

How to Provide Evolved Service to Your Next generation Customers?
Electricity from being merely a public service has now evolved as a product and is being offered with the specifications such as for predefined types of usage, times of usage, levels of usage. Interestingly the new generation customers expect offerings with options to choose the renewable mix, total carbon liability, specific sources of generation.  As the electricity prices depend heavily on the time of use, due to peak limitations seen both in terms of availability and delivery capacity; customers are willing to lower usage during peak hours. This has given way to the smart devices, smart meters and thus to smart utility systems to monitor, interact and intelligently control the customer side devices for a mutual win-win scenario.  Utilities can look at the solution aims to streamline the processes in electricity product offerings, leveraging interactive communication with customer-end smart device and inputs from electricity procurement.

It will interesting to see how utilities respond to these challenges over the next 10 years in the pursuit to realise the opportunities that a smarter grid has to offer.

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Meet us at Booth No. 1701, Moscone Center South, OOW 2010.
Explore more at http://www.infosys.com/Oracle/news-events/Pages/oracle-openworld-california10.aspx
Follow us on Twitter - http://twitter.com/infyatoow
__________________

Posted by Ismail Syed Mohammad at 4:07 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Over the past decade, companies have invested in supply chain management (SCM) software to automate procurement processes, improve delivery times and reduce the cost of doing business. Majority of the Fortune 1,000 (and beyond) have realized dramatic savings by applying strategic sourcing principles to both their indirect and direct expenditures.

But despite these gains, companies today face intensifying competitive and global pressures, and are responding by pushing the boundaries of outsourcing and low cost country sourcing in a quest for further cost reduction. Leading companies are finding themselves dependent on an increasingly complex supply base, with the need to drive further cost and performance improvements, manage supply risk, and streamline costs of supplier interaction.
In the current market trend of increased global competition, shorter product lifecycles and a move to outsource business processes, organizations require to improve collaboration with their supplier base and to examine methods of further reducing the costs associated with Supplier collaboration and relationship management.

Oracle Supplier Hub & Supplier Life Management is the new addition in the Oracle Supplier MDM product range. This session explain capabilities of (OSH & SLM) and Five step process to implement world class Supplier collaboration system.
______________________________________________________________________________________________

If you are at the OOW we are pleased to invite you for this session:
Five Steps to Resolve Supplier Collaboration Problems with Oracle Supplier MDM
Schedule   :    Tuesday, September 21, 14:00-15:00 PST
Venue        :    Westin Market Street Hotel, Metropolitan II

Also meet us at Booth No. 1701, Moscone Center South, OOW 2010.
Explore more at http://www.infosys.com/Oracle/news-events/Pages/oracle-openworld-california10.aspx
Follow us on Twitter - http://twitter.com/infyatoow
______________________________________________________________________________________________

 

- Rajeev Jain
Rajeev is a Principal Consultant in the Enterprise Solutions group of Infosys Technologies Limited, working in Infosys for more than 5 years now. He has over 12 years of experience in end-to-end business transformation engagements leveraging Oracle Applications. He has consulted for multiple clients in discrete manufacturing space in the Middle east, Japan, US and Europe.

Posted by Guest Blogger at 6:28 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

 Have you ever wondered how you would manage your engineering changes in a single instance multi divisional environment? You are using Inventory, Bill of Material and Engineering and it has become a nightmare to maintain your master data. You have issues with data security due to the multi divisional environment.

 

You have issues with productivity and efficiency with your Engineering department. You really want your engineers to design your complex products and new products rather than spend time maintaining and documenting these changes in the ERP system. You have issues with creation of part numbers in the system and you want every department that controls the item attributes to get involved in setting up the part numbers. You are looking for an in-built workflow based approval process for item creation.The item definition screens available in your ERP system are not enough capture all the attributes required to have a comprehensive definition for the same for your design engineers.

How do you manage this on a global basis where your engineering team is involved in concurrent product development accross the globe? You have a single global environment in Oracle and want to manage this in the most efficient manner. You also want to use as little customizations as possible to achive all the above

If you are at the OOW we are pleased to invite you for the session:

Oracle Advanced Product Catalog: One-Stop Shop for Design Engineering Needs

Schedule        :          Thursday, September 23, 10:30-11:30 PST

Venue             :          Moscone Center West L2, Room 2010

 

Also meet us at Booth No. 1701, Moscone Center South, OOW 2010.

Explore more at http://www.infosys.com/Oracle/news-events/Pages/oracle-openworld-california10.aspx

Follow us on Twitter - http://twitter.com/infyatoow

Posted by Somnath Majumdar at 1:51 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

I know there's lot of noise around Larry's public outburst on the definition of "Cloud" but slowly there's quite a bit of change in adoption of cloud in Oracle's offerings.

 The link http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/cloud/index.html does list the various solutions that Oracle is offering.

At the outset they are suggesting to jump onto Amazon's public cloud offering but its interesting to see that they bundle their On-Demand offering as as part of SaaS offering. That kind of gives a harbinger on what we can expect from Oracle in future for their enterprise applications as they've not yet certified their Applications on Amazon's cloud infrastructure.

Yes we do have a option of building a SaaS application using their Oracle Database and Fusion Middleware, Oracle Enterprise Manager and VM. My take on this combination is that they make a wonderful combination on a on-premise and has been a hugely successful. But deploying them on a cloud based solutions will have some kinks to be ironed out. couple of top priority items would be Design Patterns, Security, deployment patterns, Services consumption/usage patterns.

 

I would like to hear from you on what you think on the SaaS application on Oracle platform

Posted by Rizwan M. K. at 5:47 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

For the past few months, I have tried to explore Social CRM from various aspects that I feel are important for organization to consider if they are keen on exploring the Social media platform. As I see, the question that is bound to be a part of discussion for any organization wanting to devise a Social CRM strategy would pertain to the opportunities to expand the traditional CRM pillars i.e. Sales, Marketing and Service for Social CRM. The answer to this really depends on the assessment an organization should undertake in order to identify the scope and relevance of the Social CRM related possibilities. This will also help them to prioritize on whether they should use it first for marketing, then sales and service or vice versa.

Organization could assess their Social presence in many different ways.  To let users think over the ways described below and the subsequent way of dealing with them, I have intentionally split the complete post into two parts. In the first part of the post, I have tried to provide a compendium of some important parameters that could be used to assess the impact of social media for your organization. Here are the illustrations for them:

The degree of external conversations about the organization: One of the parameters an organization should take into account is the quantity and quality of conversations happening in various social media channels about their products, services and brand in general. This is important because unless no one talks about your brands, there will not be much conversations that would be of organization's interest. For instance, search on twitter for world famous brands like Dell, Sony and one will be able to see these being part of many conversations.

Social behavior of the target customer segment: An organization needs to identify whether their target customer segments could be reached using multiple social media channels. If yes, then what are the features factors that their customers look in such channels that could influence their loyalty and purchase decisions. To explain the said, if an organization wants to target a new product on post-graduation students, they should look out for online public communities that could pertain to GMAT, GRE on various channels like Facebook, Orkut etc.

Official presence using internal and external social media channels: Another parameter that should be considered is in what form the organization has adopted the social media. Whether they have an official presence on various external channels like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and others? Whether they have dedicated online forums to bring different stakeholders on one platform? This will help them to understand on what possible integrations one should look in Social CRM.

Benchmarking with Competitor's social presence: An organization might be slow in adopting social media but that cannot be said about its competitors. Hence, another parameter is to identify how competitors are using this as a medium.  For example, if we take example of airlines industry, there are some players having official social presence on various social media channels but most of them only sticks to websites. An assessment like this could help other airlines realize on the benefits going for their competitors.
 
The above mentioned parameters are only a limited but reasonably important set for organizations to devise their initial Social CRM strategy. More parameters could be included based on the type of business and the overall road map that management is seeking to accomplish. Further, parameters an organization will use for assessment would vary only slightly in the final outcomes as there is bound to be a high correlation among them. 

How the outcomes can have correlation is something I would keep it for the next part. For the time being, I would let your minds be tickled to think and identify different scenarios on how outcomes of above parameters could be used as an input to building the overall strategy.  Also I would appreciate if someone can identify more parameters either industry specific or general.

___________________________________________________________________________________________

Meet us at Booth No. 1701, Moscone Center South, OOW 2010.

Explore more at http://www.infosys.com/Oracle/news-events/Pages/oracle-openworld-california10.aspx

Follow us on Twitter - http://twitter.com/infyatoow
____________________________________________________________________________________________

 

- Nishith Gupta
Nishith is a process and domain consulting expert, focusing on new go-to-market CRM solutions. He has over two years of experience in the IT industry. He has also developed custom-built CRM applications for a leading telecommunications provider, centered on customer retention and campaign management.

Posted by Guest Blogger at 12:46 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Outage restoration has always been a challenge for utilities.  Enterprise Outage Management Systems are a great tool for restoring power after outages.  As time goes on, new features and tools make a good system even better.  One such feature is Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) interfacing with the OMS.  Taking advantage of AMI allows utilities to save money and restore faster by

• Reducing OK on arrivals

• Know faster when there is an outage

• Identify nested outages easier

• Reduce unrequested callbacks

Reduce OK on arrivals:  Customers call to report their power is out.  In the 20th century technology, utilities had to send a crew to the customer's site to confirm an outage.  If power reached all the way to the meter and the crew finds the power delivery is OK upon their arrival, the crew was dispatched needlessly.  Assigning crews to these jobs is a loss of efficiency.  Today, a simple ping after a customer call confirms whether the meter is live and receiving power at the home.  When the ping is successful, calling customers can be informed the problem is in the premises and not the delivery of the power.  The customer can be advised to check inside or that dispatching a crew risks a charge if no problem is found.

Know faster when there is an outage:  The sooner an outage is known, the faster it can be restored.  When a smart meter goes off line, it sends a "Last Gasp" message that informs of a potential outage.   When this happens, it isn't necessary to wait for a customer's call.  The Last Gasp is an early warning that there may be a problem. Once the Last Gasp is received, further pinging verifies the outage.   With Last Gasps and pings, action to restore power can happen immediately.

Identify nested outages easier:  When repairs happen, it is not known if everyone affected by on outage has power back.  A 2nd nested outage may still be underneath the original restoration.  Power Up messages from the meters combined with pings are used to confirm that a customer has power restored.  When meters fail to respond to the pings, the nested outage is found.  The crew can continue on to assess and restore the remaining outage before being released to go somewhere else.

Reduce unrequested callbacks:  Making callbacks is a time consuming and expensive way to confirm restorations.  In some cases, callbacks are performed by customer request.  These callbacks must still be made.  However, if there was no request from the customer to get a callback, it is quicker and less expensive to use pings to confirm a restoration.  Pinging does not require a customer to be home to respond.  Pinging is quick to send the message out and receive the message back.  Pinging does not fill the IVR lines with traffic, like callbacks could.

Have you encountered other benefits to AMI use?  What are your best practices? 

Posted by Ross Shaich at 6:58 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

The constant demand for analytical information, coupled with frequent BI product consolidation has often left organizations wondering if they should retain their existing products and applications or migrate to a new BI/EPM platform. Thus, organizations have a constant pressure to modernize their BI/ EPM tools and technologies at a faster pace while meeting the objective of lowering costs. Does this scenario resonate with you?

Infosys can address these issues by defining a next-generation BI strategy. The Infosys approach also boasts of several features like migration roadmaps/ accelerated methodologies, tools and accelerators and case studies that can provide organizations with a competitive edge. We will showcase all the above mentioned features as well as address key questions you may have related to modernizing your existing information delivery needs at Oracle Open World in San Francisco from September 19-23, 2010. 

• 'Stay, Extend or Migrate' - What is the best strategy to adopt for your existing BI platforms and applications?
• Are you able to make two-fold returns - operational intelligence and strategic decision making - from a single EPM (Enterprise Performance Management) investment?
• How can you cut both, spend and migration time in half during your organization's BI and EPM modernization efforts?
• Do you have a plan to manage user expectations while transitioning from existing BI platforms and applications to Oracle BI Fusion Edition?
• How can your organization set itself apart by leveraging Infosys' Oracle BI 11g levers?

Meet us at Booth No. 1701, Moscone Center South, OOW 2010.

Explore more at  http://www.infosys.com/Oracle/news-events/Pages/oracle-openworld-california10.aspx

Follow us on Twitter - http://twitter.com/infyatoow

Posted by Indivar Nayyar at 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Over the years, transportation remains one of the top five expenditures for Hi-Tech manufacturers, Retailers and Distributors. As Hi-Tech manufacturers strive to be competitively responsive to the marketplace demands in order to leverage the economic growth, and be a step ahead of their competitors, gaining control over pace and the cost of the transportation activity becomes imperative. As per leading industry analyst firm "A 5% reduction in transportation cost has the same P&L impact as a 5-30% increase in sales".

Primary Objective of Transportation

Make "On-Time Delivery" to Customers Cost Effectively

100% on-time delivery has become a benchmark for transportation. Customers expect 99.9% on-time delivery performance from a Logistics Service Provider (LSP), with minimum damage-in-transit, flexibility to accommodate any order changes and end-to-end visibility through track & trace of the orders and shipments.
On-Time Delivery to customers improves net margins by:
- Faster revenue realization and reduced turn-around-time
- Enhanced credibility of service
- Reduced waiting time for consignee
- Optimized storage space and equipment utilization
- Enhanced predictability through end-to-end visibility

 Delivery based Promising to Customers

The time-lines for each pickup and delivery are planned in advance and are communicated across the transportation network so as to ensure adherence at each level. This largely reduces the delay at any of the levels in the transportation network, as the timelines are being tracked and monitored across the network. Communicating plans in advance increases the likelihood that transportation service will be on-time and more cost-effective.

 Proactive Monitoring of Shipment

Proactive monitoring of shipment events helps to control the unplanned costs and minimize customer service issues. Prior notice always produces more informed decisions on corrective action.

Demand-to-Deliver (D2D), a pre-configured solution leverages the Oracle Transportation Management (OTM) for Hi-Tech manufacturing industry logistics process area to improve "On-Time Delivery" for better transportation operational planning, optimization & freight spend visibility. Based on the availability of resources & customer promise dates, OTM plans the transportation orders to calculate the transit time and optimize the shipment cost. OTM also monitors all the shipment events from booking to delivery for better visibility. Based on the transit times derived from OTM, D2D solution can fulfill the demand of "On-Time Delivery" and influence the net margins by better controlling the unplanned costs.

Author: Lakshmana Murthy K / Abhishek Sabharwal 

 

Meet us at Booth No. 1701, Moscone Center South, OOW 2010.
Explore more at  http://www.infosys.com/Oracle/news-events/Pages/oracle-openworld-california10.aspx
Follow us on Twitter - http://twitter.com/infyatoow

 

Posted by Abhishek Sabharwal at 8:35 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

For long Risk management and Performance management are considered as two independent functions. While performance has always been at the center stage of organization's efforts, risk has been limited to being a regulatory compliance function. But crisis has again highlighted the need of adjusting performance for the different kind of risks taken. While almost ever organization agrees on the need to do integrate risk with performance management, not many are enabled to convert concepts into real systems.

While skewed incentive systems encourage excessive risk taking, creating effective performance criterions is always a challenge. Collating risk bottom up and monitoring it top down is tough cause of intransient correlations between various types of risk and factors. Even if right models are designed, complexity and vastness of calculations mandate organizations to have a powerful integrated system which shares calculation, reduces data redundancy and offers real time intelligence. Real time intelligence in turn provides a competitive edge by helping front line managers and traders in effective decision making.

This can be achieved through a solution which creates a common metadata for all analytical tools, uses pre built dimensions to reduce the developmental delays, provides industry best practices through canned processes and reports, generates for what if analysis for range of financial factors like interest rates, exchange rates, prepayment, credit defaults etc.

To address these needs, Infosys has developed an IRPM (Integrated Risk & Performance Management) framework with using Oracle's OFSAA as underlying technology suite. 

To know more about how IRPM can help you address these challenges, please stay tuned to this space

__________________________________________________________________________________

Meet us at Booth No. 1701, Moscone Center South, OOW 2010.

Explore more at http://www.infosys.com/Oracle/news-events/Pages/oracle-openworld-california10.aspx

Follow us on Twitter - http://twitter.com/infyatoow

___________________________________________________________________________________

Posted by Sandeep Singh at 5:06 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Apart from forecasting a tremendous growth of Social Media for Business and customer facing communities, Gartner's CRM  predictions for 2010 have some key points to note

Enterprise adoption of social media will occur primarily in the context of customer relationship management (CRM), according to Gartner. The analyst has predicted that 80% of all market growth in 2010 will come in this field, as organizations struggle to find a clear business case for leveraging social media as a tool for internal communication and collaboration.

 For most organizations, the single most logical way to differentiate the business is through great customer experiences, rather than having the lowest cost or most innovative products and services," said Ed Thompson, vice president and Gartner analyst.

This is already there to see in action even as most of the leading Fortune 500 such as Dell, Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, Procter and Gamble and others have not only started using Social Media effectively for business but are also reporting generating sizeable and tangible Social ROI.

It becomes therefore very attractive for an enterprise to jump into the social Media bandwagon. But replicating such success stories require a conscious planning and forethought. Having a mere presence in social media or facebook / twitter will by no means assure an effective social CRM .

Similar to any other new initiative, social CRM initiative needs much deliberation on the following key components     

1.  Understand and Assess the Business Need for Social Media : Although the case studies are in plenty , it is mandatory for each organisation to establish its own Social CRM objectives on areas hwere an impact is expected from Social Media. This could also be elicited from identifying issues that current channels are not able to deliver in addition to the well-known potential benefits of social media interms of reach to customer, brand building, customer insight and the like.

2. Establish Strategies to cross-leverage Social media and traditional CRM Channels : Social media has its own advantages but is effectively harnessed in combination with offline / other online sales and service channels. For example , a marketing ad or an event brief publicized on social media could generate the attention , awareness and interest that an enterprise desires to create but is converted to a business opportunity and a sales deal with a combination of multiple communication mechanisms ranging from social media, email, phone call or face-to-face conversation. It is hence crucial to understand the key activities and stages in CRM processes that would be best done using social Media

3. Evaluate Social Tools:  On deciding to take the plunge, it is key to identify the tools an enterprise would want to leverage in the Social CRM journey . Options range from having a  facebook or twitter presence to setting up an organisation specific Communities, Forums, Blogs, wiki or Support center. The scale and tool that is tobe used hence depends on business objectives and the timelines to accomplish goals. Most of the tools in the market deliver the expected functionality to have presence in social media. But other key components to the social CRM puzzle are social Listening Tools, Social Analytics, Integration with traditional CRM and Predictive Modeling using Business Intelligence. It is imperative for an organisation to do a due-diligence in assessing leading tools or packages providing the functionality. 

4. Social CRM Execution : I am consciously avoiding the term "implementation" as Social CRM is a combination of Strategy and Systems . Using sophisticated Social CRM tools will in no means deliver the much needed RoI unless the strategy is in place. Some key aspects by no means exhaustive would be , establishing a sound Social CRM plan , creating the mind-shift from enterprise focus to customer centricity , laying more emphasis on customer advocacy than just repeat sales , Training the employees on the behavioral aspects of the emerging social customer and  skill enhancement in handling social media as  a new business channel

5. Engage Customers using Social Media : Addressing all customers' complaints, needs , remarks and critiques is not feasible albeit it appears necessary to engage customers. The answer lies in identifying the key influencers within communities who would not only represent the customers sentiments but also sport the hat of brand advocate and customer service agent when necessary. Even as the pace with which information or rumor spread in social media is incredible, it is imperative for the employees who are managing social media conversations for your enterprise to be well-trained to handle conversations with dignity , patience and customer-empathy. A knee-jerk reaction would only tarnish the brand image further, if any damage is done already. 

This post is aimed just to highlight key business imperatives and  common pitfalls an organisation must watch out for , before initiating the Social CRM journey.

_________________

Meet us at Booth No. 1701, Moscone Center South, OOW 2010.

Explore more at http://www.infosys.com/Oracle/news-events/Pages/oracle-openworld-california10.aspx

Follow us on Twitter - http://twitter.com/infyatoow

_________________

 

 

Posted by Khanchana at 4:51 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Over the last decade, the climate, economic conditions and consumer behaviour has changed drastically forcing the utility companies to rethink their approach in managing their operations and delivering integrated services.

The importance to reduce their carbon footprint promotes the need to have diverse generation assets in the organisation's portfolio.  These non-conventional energy sources in the portfolio assist in reducing the carbon footprint.  However, these energy sources give rise to sustenance challenges as their generation is intermittent.  At the end of the day, the utility is equally compelled to provide economically affordable and competitive energy services to the customer.  This forces the utility to find the optimal mix of generation assets, manage their network's capability to manage potentially diverse new generation sources and most importantly operate and transition efficiently to a low carbon system.

In a nutshell, utilities are compelled to address the following challenges :

• Facilitate connection and operation of diverse generation sources including micro generation from customers
• Deploy and run assets optimally.
• Optimise and balance their power system's operation by forecasting energy demand for their wholesale and retail customers
• Provide transparency on goods and services and promote billing accuracy for services delivered to their customers
• Assist their customers in understanding their consumption pattern and saving their bills
• Focus largely in reducing the environment impact by exploring and investing in  green generation options
• Securing customer confidence by delivering a reliable, secure and flexible service

Thus there is a need in the future to invest on a 'Smart Grid' that can intelligently integrate the events that impact all the stakeholders connected to it.  This includes the generators,  DNOs and DSOs in order to efficiently deliver sustainable, economic and secure energy to the customers.  In the long run, this smart grid is likely to gain predominance. Utilities are faced with a challenge to address the following questions as a part of their investment.

How to reduce carbon emissions through a balanced generation portfolio?
How to maximize your assets utilization?
How to Reduce Transmission Congestion?
How to improve quality and reliability of power delivered to your customers?
How to win your customers with innovative and economic tariffs?
How to Provide Evolved Service to Your Next generation Customers?

Over the next series of blogs, I will try to cover some of the solutions available to the above questions. 

Posted by Ismail Syed Mohammad at 4:26 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Design of the Organization structure is the common issue faced by most business houses. The structure should not only be compliant from legal perspective but should also be effective from operational management and accounting perspective. Legal entity is the crux of the organization structure as this determines the statutory and country specific (local) reporting needs.

Legal Entity is a juristic person that can enter into contracts, own assets and bank accounts, pay debts, file returns, perform statutory reporting, comply with legal requirements etc. In other words, legal entity is a business entity that is known to exist to the outside world. Internal organizations or divisions are not legal entities themselves, but are just part of it.

Once the Organization structure is determined, the same needs to be configured in the Application used for financial accounting as well, such that all relationships between various components of the Organization structure are captured appropriately. The new Oracle E-Business Suite R12 architecture brings about the significant role of legal entities within the organization structure and provides enhanced features for security, flexibility, reporting, compliance, accounting and control.

The R12 architecture breaks the one-on-one relationship that existed between operating unit and legal entity in the earlier releases, thereby bringing about the true picture of operating unit as a division or mechanism to restrict access and deploy other sub-ledger level controls as opposed to an entity that needs to perform statutory & tax reporting. In the new architecture, various legal entities could share the same ledger and consequently the same operating unit. Both legal entities and operating units are associated with the ledger and the relationship between the legal entity and operating unit is derived based on the ledger.

Ability to store the registered address for the legal entity as also the names of directors and officers associated with the entity exists in R12. The architecture is also flexible to accommodate assignment of single legal entity or multiple legal entities to a ledger. If no sub-ledgers are required for a ledger (Eg: Consolidation ledger), there isn't a need to assign any legal entity to the ledger. So the focus of the Legal entity is more external facing while the other internal reporting entities could be configured as separate balancing segment values within the same legal entity. The structure also provides platform for enhanced intercompany accounting.

Some of the major benefits that could be realized from the R12 Legal entity structure are summarized below:

• Improved tracking of sub-ledger transactions at legal entity level
• Simplified statutory compliance by leveraging advanced features in Oracle R12
• Enhanced tax reporting
• Enhanced audit trail, compliance and control
• Scalable platform for future initiatives

 

Join us at Oracle OpenWorld 2010 for answers to these questions and more:

• How does the new R12 Legal Entity concept fit within the multi-org structure?
• What are the various business considerations that drive the Legal entity structure?
• What are the enhanced multi-dimensional reporting capabilities with the Legal Entity structure?
• What is the impact of the Legal Entity structure on sub-ledgers, General Ledger, Tax and accounting?

 ___________________________

If you are at the OOW we are pleased to invite you for the session:

Demystifying the Legal Entity in Oracle E-Business Suite 12

Schedule :   Monday, September 20, 12:30-13:30 PST

Venue      :   Moscone Center West L2, Room 2006

 

Also meet us at Booth No. 1701, Moscone Center South, OOW 2010.

Explore more at http://www.infosys.com/Oracle/news-events/Pages/oracle-openworld-california10.aspx

Follow us on Twitter - http://twitter.com/infyatoow

____________________________

 

 - Sowmya Trikkur and Hitesh Madan

Sowmya Trikkur is a Principal Consultant at Infosys and has over 12 years experience in the industry. She provides process, domain and package consulting and has extensive experience in the implementation, upgrade and support of Oracle Financials.

Hitesh Madan is a Lead Consultant at Infosys and has over 8 years experience in the industry. He provides functional expertise on Oracle Financials and has worked on different industry verticals.

 

Posted by Guest Blogger at 9:40 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Few weeks back, I witnessed a great debate on significance of measuring ROI on BI projects. There were opposing views being expressed where some argued that measuring ROI may not be possible for every BI project, while others said that establishing ROI is both possible and essential to measure the success of the project. According to me, in majority of cases, it is possible to measure and realize the ROI on the BI projects over a period of time. The ROI could come in different ways viz. through greater agility to respond to market demands resulting in greater revenue or by increasing operational efficiencies or by prevention of future loss through compliance related BI projects and so on.

As organizations today undergo business transformation, I believe there is a tremendous potential to increase the ROI of these transformations by implementing BI to maximize the operational efficiencies.  For very large organizations with multiple lines of business, this may not happen in a big-bang way and usually is a multi-phased approach. One of our client organizations is a very large retailer in US, and is currently on a similar journey. Traditionally, it has been focused on developing in-house custom IT solutions for their business needs. As a result of this, over the years some of the lines of businesses were still using legacy applications, which posed limitations to increasing operational efficiencies.

 
One of their business units was facing a similar problem. They were losing millions of dollars worth of claim settlement payments from their partners, because of their inability to access accurate and timely business intelligence.  At this juncture, we engaged with them to define a BI roadmap to overcome these challenges.  Working closely with their senior management, we defined a deck of Financial and Operational Effectiveness dashboards to be delivered on the Oracle Business Intelligence EE 10g platform.

These dashboards gave them ability to monitor KPIs related to claims, aging of claims, write-offs and payments anytime. Now they had the ability to get the bird's eye view of the health of their business operations. They could now easily identify the partners with whom they were facing payment issues. They could now easily drill down to the detailed order transaction data to understand the root causes of claim denials on specific orders.  This new found insight helped them to identify the current business process gaps. This triggered a change to their core business processes to address those gaps.

This is what I call 'Closed Loop BI' in action. I still remember the delight on the face of the Operations Head when she started using the BI dashboards. Oracle BI is now helping them save millions of dollars of write-offs every year. This success has triggered other business units in the client organization to leverage the power of Oracle BI.  And who said that it is difficult to have a ROI on BI.......

I am sure many of you have similar experiences to share.

Posted by Uday Patil at 8:30 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Every organization has unique consolidation needs due to the way it has grown, complexity of the business and also its legal entity structure. What are your consolidation challenges?

Are you coping with multiple systems / multiple vendors sending data for consolidation in discrete manner?

Do you have multiple instances of your GL, which need to be consolidated?

Do you need sophisticated consolidation needs like Extended reporting capability in a single GL environment?

Do you need insights into consolidation for Analytics, Performance management like KPI's, Ratio Analysis etc to make informed decisions?

Oracle provides you choice of multiple financial consolidation solutions depending on how you answered the above questions. Oracle GL provides a Balances / Transaction based consolidation solution while Oracle Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) is a specifically built solution to handle consolidation with sophisticated features like Modeling, What If Analysis and Extended Reporting.

Following are some of the key questions to be answered while choosing the right solution:

 a) What is the Data to be consolidated and where is it coming from?

 Organizations having discrete data sources or multiple instances of GL (PeopleSoft, Oracle etc) would consider using HFM. HFM has been prebuilt to import data from multiple sources using a standard adaptor called FDQM and provides a flexible consolidation solution with interface back to your GL?

b) What are your consolidation needs?

If the requirement is to close GL and handle extended closing adjustments separately, perform extended reporting with What if analysis, modeling etc then HFM is the right tool. But in case the consolidation needs are not very complex and you have a single GL instance then Oracle GL is the right tool.

c) Do you have complex consolidation needs?

 In case the organization has complex ownership structures with multiple consolidation hierarchies, cross ownership for adjustments, needs predefined business rules, complex currency / intercompany eliminations and needs a dashboard to monitor the consolidation process then HFM is the right tool to be used. Oracle GL is simple Balances based consolidation solution and cannot handle complex business rules.

To summarize if one is looking for traditional transaction based consolidation without any need for highly sophisticated features like Performance management, Extended financial close, Management reporting hierarchies or Scenario modeling then Oracle GL based consolidation solution would be the right choice

Posted by Sachin Chitlange at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

With demand moving at rapid stride, and capacity utilization reaching its peak, there is always a need for the warehouse and the distribution centers to expand. There is many a factor that goes into the optimal sizing of a distribution center. It may be considered both an art as well as a science. Many warehouses these days use material handling equipment and WCS to enhance their operational performance. The MHEs and WCS occupy significant amount of floor space. Hence the real estate of the warehouse needs to be managed carefully. The typical warehouse building has receiving doors on one side of the building, and shipping doors on the other side. This is a traditional configuration.  While this flow-thru design is often the best configuration, but it may not be the only one.  A warehouse could be configured by, placing receiving and shipping doors on the same side of the building. This may allow both functions to share sortation equipment, using one set of diverts to sort received cartons for palletizing and put-away, and another to build outbound customer orders.  It also comes with another advantage. One can provide a common and secure space for both delivery and pickup drivers to congregate.   While there is usually flexibility to add doors even to a specification building, the final arrangement of doors needs to be closely tied to the material handling system layout.
Other factors that may be worth considering are the size of the building, building height etc. Most of the warehouses and distribution centers today make use of the hand held mobile devices to perform effective inventory tracking. With increasing sizes of the warehouses, effective heat map of the floor is a very important consideration. Too much or Too little may lead to a number of problems when it comes to the performance of these mobile computers. A lot of deliberations need to go into the installation of the wireless access points. The number of WAPs and their relative placements is vital to the success in the usage of these devices. It has been commonly observed that cluttering of WAPs causes signal interference. This causes the devices to vary off. Extending this argument further, those areas of the warehouse that is heavily stacked with inventory, need special attention. Good signal strength is needed in these areas for the mobile devices to work on expected lines.
In times to come the best warehouse would no longer compete with each other, but with value chains. A successful warehouse ecosystem carries with it the attributes of optimal physical sizing.

Posted by Amit Sinha at 1:30 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

High Tech manufacturing enterprises operate in a very competitive environment with a complex and long value chain. Value Chain Planning is the key differentiator and thrust area for these enterprises, as this lends them to better demand capture and fulfillment, better operational and financial efficiency. IT systems play a crucial role in enabling them to remain competitive. These IT systems acquired/built over a period of time, inevitably result in a complex integration landscape involving plethora of heterogeneous B2B (Business to Business), B2C (Business to Customer) and A2A (Application to Application) transactions. Even the reporting for running operations and management decision making is premised on multiple sources of truth.

Some of these IT systems would probably be living a leased life with their EOL being reached. These systems are not able to react fast enough to Business imperatives like transaction growth, expansion in new geographies & new lines of business, changing business models, new requirements from trading partners and rapid new product innovations etc. Also decision making suffers due to latency and inaccuracy in reporting data. Thus, it's important that the IT backbone of the organization becomes more robust, scalable and flexible so as to be able to play an important part in organization's growth, rather than being an impediment. Here the role of simplification and standardization in IT system becomes vital for enterprises.

The Demand To Deliver (D2D) solution offering from Infosys and Oracle precisely address this core problem, by providing an end to end, seamless, integrated, open standards based solution which is based on best of breed processes and functionalities from Oracle stack of modern, cutting edge applications. This solution addresses the core ERP needs for the entire Demand to Deliver Process flow, topped with robust Oracle SOA based integrations, user friendly Oracle BI based analytics, flexible MDM and best of breed edge products from Oracle stable like OTM, Demantara, Agile, Oracle Transportation Management, Retek Oracle Retail (for consumer oriented channels).

Enterprises may choose a total transformation, or simply use it as a future vision, or choose to implement piece by piece leveraging a homogeneous Oracle solution, or combining Oracle products with existing infrastructure for a heterogeneous solution. Either way, ROI is created as each piece is preserved on the path to the complete end to end process integration. This inetgrated Demand To Deliver solution helps enterprises to make their IT systems to gear up to support the dynamics and complexities of the High Tech Value Chain.

To learn more about D2D solution, stay connected to this blog space, and provide your valuable feedback.

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Posted by Nikhil Kumar at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

As per the Gartner report (See: http://software.tekrati.com/research/news.asp?id=9065), "By 2010, less that 25 percent of large companies will have the sufficient technical and organizational skills necessary to deliver enterprise wide SOA." One big reason why SOA initiatives fail or do not get enough momentum is lack of reference architecture and a robust framework. IT industry finds the path to SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) a bit challenging. Oracle AIA (Application Integration Architecture) provides a robust and yet flexible architecture.

We can look at AIA as an application independent standardized framework based on common object model. Enterprises today are seeking technologies that would enable them to deploy cross-functional business processes. Majority of enterprise applications are monolithic within individual lines of business - and this makes coordinating activity between them very difficult. The need of cross functional process improvement effort is very strong.

A composite application based on common object model is the new direction where technologists are heading for. A composite application automates business processes across the boundaries of multiple applications and is future-proof. However it is a laborious, complex and time consuming task to build composite applications. Oracle AIA simplifies this process and makes it more seamless - and far less costly.

AIA brings to the table following key features

• Best Practice Processes - We can leverage best practices available out of the box in AIA
• AIA Foundation Pack - We can create custom business processes across any of our applications utilizing predefined, application independent objects and service definitions
• Process Integration Packs - Pre-built, out of the box, integrated services for quick implementation of business processes, without the risks
• Powered by SOA- AIA is built on top of SOA, an open standards based platform

AIA enables us to

• Expedite our Enterprise SOA Initiative
• Build adaptable composite processes
• Stop redeveloping integrations with every new release and upgrade
• Focus on core business, and not on integration nightmares

Application Integration Architecture not only offers value for investments for the customers today, it is also planned for future returns on the current investments. Application Integration Architecture is a framework Oracle customers need to adopt for Fusion Applications. Fusion Application modules can be plugged into Application Integration Architecture seamlessly. Customers can upgrade to Fusion Applications and preserve their investments in AIA.

With this we come to an end of a short glimpse on features of Application Integration Architecture (AIA). Stay tuned for my next blog on more details about AIA!  Do feel free to send in your comments. 

Posted by Anu Samantha at 8:26 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Organizations pan globe have engaged in programs like VoC (Voice of Customers) since time immemorial. They all want to know what their customers perceive of them. Recent times have seen the flattening of the business world. In order to keep an organization's supply chain lean and optimize on cost and operations, it is equally important to engage in programs like VoS (Voice of suppliers).

This is a growing concept and is rife in the business world these days. Understanding the perspectives of suppliers about how products, processes, and costs can be reduced can deliver significant value to an organization. These kinds of discussions can be consummated if the organizations are receptive and are ready to determine how their performance stacks up against their best practice industry competitors, and identify areas and processes on which to focus resources and investments. If organizations believe that suppliers are an important stakeholder in the business, then the channels of communication open up really well and the ramifications of these discussions bear fruits. Suppliers are:
1. Likely to Best in Class in the products and services they offer
2. Due to close linkage with the industry, the suppliers are aware of the industry best practice and market trends.
3. Suppliers also practice KYC (Know Your Customer) and hence know the details of internal processes of our business.

Companies often make changes to designs, product requirements, packaging, supply chain, logistics without asking suppliers, the impact on their costs and hence ultimately prices. Take for instance a retailer in food and beverage industry that performs lot traceability of inventory, designs all its system process based on supplier's capability to provide SSCC compliant information that embeds pallet/case information, product and lot information etc. Unless carefully implemented, these programs can lead to increased system and business costs. The example above clearly inkles at the fact that supplier compliance with an organization/industry standard is a new project in itself.

Suppliers need to be nurtured and taken care of. Business economies today are not monopolistic; they are tending to be oligopolistic. Supplier would often allocate their best resources to their best customers. If they care for you, you need to care for them. There is a paradigm shift from KYC (Know Your Customer) to KYS (Know Your Customer). An AT Kearney report suggests that "Companies that engage their suppliers may find that a simple policy change or equipment adjustment could save millions of dollars- changes that would not have been considered had the company not reached out to, listened to, and shared ideas with key partners." Business world is really flattening.

Posted by Amit Sinha at 5:08 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

In the crisis just gone by, newer and complex financial products, ameba like organizations cause of heightened pace of M&A and ever changing relationships between different types of risks resulted in broken models, violated assumptions and ineffective risk management just when it was needed most. Couple it with continuously evolving regulatory requirements, an Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) is needed which can align risk function with strategic business imperatives, create a common language of risk and facilitate optimal levels of risk.

An ERM as we know helps in solving the eternal dilemma of decentralization versus centralization of Risk. While decentralization helps in letting risk managed by people who understand it best aka line managers across difference line of businesses, it also creates a risk of letting them stretch beyond permissible limits to achieve their short term targets. Now, one would argue that a perfectly defined incentive management, the one that encourages long term sustained profitability over short term volatile profits, is the key to address these issues. True but not completely and that I will leave for another day.

Coming to the other side, centralized risk management is a much better choice as it is a top down approach, it helps in aligning business objectives with risk management, but the apparent beauty of the solution ends here. While conceptually it looks good, practically it's impossible to calculate risk from bottom to top and distribute it top to down. Not because one doesn't have models to do that but because no model are not correct in all situations and one only comes to know the failure of these models in hindsight. Sure, one can back test each and every model for its validity but in financial world we have seen historical data are of not much use as crisis situation always comes with a new face.

So like in almost walks of life, solution lies in the middle not extremes. ERM precisely does that. While it encompasses all types of risk in all corners of any organizations, it also creates a framework of its optimal distribution.

Posted by Giriraj Somani at 1:15 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

In their attempts to preserve and grow the ecosystem in which businesses operate, over the last several years, the green supply chain is one initiative that has gained popularity in business parlance. Organizations having realized that their social responsibility extends not only to the society that they operate in, but also to the environment, have launched several initiatives to go green. However, the extent and intent of such initiatives has not been uniform across organizations.

For example, some organizations have limited their 'going green' initiative to reducing paper usage and encouraging online transactions. Yet some others have tried to limit travel thereby reducing carbon footprint wherever possible. All of these, while helpful to the Going Green mission, might not provide business benefits apart from marginal cost reduction. Such initiatives are usually driven by the personnel department and not really tied to business objectives of the organization.

However, there are organizations that have actually rethought their business processes and supply chains through the green lens and identified scopes for improvement, and what they will gain in business terms such as process efficiency, better delivered value to customer, sustainable reduction in costs etc.. In other words, these businesses have used green to improve their business processes to derive business benefits. An example of such benefits by going green is that of an FMCG company that used recyclable packaging, which in turn reduced the cost of packaging material while maintaining the quality.

Businesses need to examine their value streams- right from product design through to manufacturing and sales and check the possibilities for reducing waste. A few examples of these wastes can be in terms of material, rework, energy (electricity, oil, utilities etc.) costs, old machines that consume more power to run. They should find out if there are any means of reducing such wastes- that in turn can help them reduce the necessity to dispose material wastes, reduce the necessity to use less energy etc.. Machines with new technologies usually consume less power to run and switching to those machines can reduce the energy costs and at the same time provide better precision. In addition, vehicles can run on different forms of fuel that are less harmful to the environment. Using such vehicles for transportation can lead to reduced overall costs at the same time preserving the environment. Reexamining your production strategies to find out if your utilization levels can be reduced (it is not necessarily a bad thing if you are able to meet demand with less utilization!!) will also reduce the waste generated. Innovative supply strategies such as enabling channels for customers to dispose off used goods, sending email catalogues rather than paper based catalogues etc. make for happy customers at the same time promoting green.

So, going green can be a way to reexamine your business processes and identify wastes and thereby derive benefits for your business also, not just for the environment. Doing that will create the necessary incentives for sustaining your enterprise's green initiatives.

Posted by Rupam Das at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Insurance is one of the most paper-intensive industries, generating volumes of documents that require constant modifications for business and regulatory needs. As the customer base of an insurance/reinsurance company increase, the document generation and archiving can become one of the bottleneck processes for the company.

In Insurance sector, the document automation can play a critical role in most of the stages like:

• Policy Definition (Product Development)
• Product Information forms (Distributed through different selling channels) 
• Creation of rejection/acceptance letters 
• Issuing actual policy contract to clients 
• Generation of Claims communication document

The critical points for insurance documents are: 

• As insurance involves contractual legalities; the documentation should be Correct, consistent and non-debatable 
• The insurance document should extensively cover the coverage and exclusions in the policy documents 
• The policy should be regulatory compliant for the region 
• The issued policies should be easily accessible

One solution that is present to alleviate the documentation related paint points of insurance sector is Document automation & Assembly packages. Document automation refers to automated generation of documents that can be used to communicate with either internal/external clients or stakeholders. Modern day document automation tool provide myriad of features that help in:

• Increasing the productivity 
• Generating consistent and correct documents using predefined templates resulting to higher quality products 
• Support both forward looking and legacy integration frameworks 
• Increasing the customer satisfaction by faster assistance during policy issuance, claims and support. 
• Achieving faster times to market my optimizing and reusing the policy sections

As per a survey conducted by Celent in Late 2007, one of the products that lead in document automation in terms of client base, breadth & depth of functionality was Oracle Documaker Suite (formerly Skywire Documaker). Being in the document automation arena since 2000, the tool not only successfully expanded the customer base to over 1000 clients but also matured to support both modern and legacy systems.
Oracle Documaker supports (some of the features): 

• Template based document design and generation 
• Batch creation of policy documents 
• Enhanced workflow of documents for collaborative approach 
• Document archiving 
• After being acquired by Oracle in 2008, Documaker also readily plugs in to Oracle based solutions/systems like Oracle Policy administrator, Oracle SoftRater and Oracle ERP COTS package.

On a closing note, the research and the need of the hour is to induct a competent document automation system into insurance companies' core network. This would give the required boost to insurance sector to meet the ever demanding needs of the customer. Oracle Documaker is one such product that can help the companies achieve it with ease.

Posted by Rohit Kaushal at 3:00 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 2 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )