Infosys-Oracle Blog

Guest post by
Jaideep Ranjan Vijayakar, Lead Consultant - Banking and Capital Markets, Oracle Practice, Enterprise Solutions, Infosys Technologies Ltd.

In the previous installment we discussed about the imperatives of mobilizing the enterprise and the basic configurations that are broadly adopted by organizations. In this installment we will discuss the stages and types of enterprise mobility.

Mobility could be loosely classified into two variants-

1. Wired Mobility- This was the first step towards providing some mobility to employees and gave rise to the Work from Home concept. This enabled employees to perform their Work from home or hotel by providing VPN access to the office network.
2. Wireless mobility which is provided through the various wireless technologies that are available- WLAN, WiFI, WiMax, EVDO, EDGE, GPRS.
   a.   WLAN, WiFI, WiMax unchain the employee from the physical (wired?) world within the office which enables previously deskbound employees to be mobile using their laptops or netbooks to while moving from one meeting place to another.
   b.   EVDO, EDGE, GPRS primarily utilize mobile carrier networks and Smart Phone like devices to enable employees to access the office network from anywhere in the world.

These two types however are not mutually exclusive and can infact co-exist. (the one can provide the other) but in general provide two distinct ways of looking at mobility. 

It starts off with providing employees Laptops which they can carry along with them wherever they go, thus unchaining them from their desks. Coupled with VPN access it enables employees to connect to the Office network over the Internet (WiFi hotspots, Home Networks, Hotels). Secured VPN access also takes care of the security issue of allowing outside access to internal systems. This enables employees to work from home or on the road providing two key benefits. It improves employee productivity and can cut costs (travel, facilities, save environment) by encouraging telecommuting.

The next barrier is removed when the enterprise sets up WLANs within the office premises enabling the employee to be mobile within the Organizations Physical Structure. It eliminates the need to setup multiple network ports in each meeting room and the need to carry network cables. Typically availability of network ports is the biggest hindrance to enabling truly mobile access within an office structure. Even non carpeted areas (warehouses etc) can be covered further boosting productivity. WLANs enable true mobile access within the office campus.

It may look counterintuitive that mobility is moving inwards from a larger geographical area to a limited physical area. However due to technology investment and prevalence of the internet this is the normal route towards enterprise mobility. Most organizations have already taken the two steps above towards enterprise mobility.

The Dell'Oro Group, a trusted provider of information on networking and telecommunications industries, has recently published a report revealing that the enterprise wireless LAN (WLAN) market increased by more than 15 percent over the previous year.^{1(Second Quarter 2009 Wireless LAN Report-Dell'Oro).}

Technology spend in this area is now about $1 billion globally with CISCO being the clear market leader followed by Aruba networks and HP which primarily caters to the wireless warehouse market.

The next thrust towards enterprise mobility is in utilizing Smart Phones and other non laptop wireless devices which piggy back on wireless carrier networks to provide access and carry data back and forth between consumer devices and the enterprise network. This again typically starts with providing email, calendaring and contact information over Smart Phones or PDAs. The Blackberry introduced by RIM, in 2002, has become the standard for wireless enterprise mobility. It was among the first smart phones optimized for wireless email use which enterprises could depend upon for providing these services.

The final step is to deploy applications over these Smart mobile devices. This enables employees to access enterprise systems and other business tools increasing efficiency both outside the office and within. Role specific applications like CRM, SFA, Workflow Approvals and Decision Making Systems can all be deployed to improve productivity and expand coverage. This means employees can now go from just accessing information remotely to actually performing business transactions from any locations. This provides the real boost to employee productivity. 

For more details on the Enterprise Mobility and implementation steps - Please see the article "Mobilizing the Enterprise- Strategies and Technologies to Drive Organizational Readiness".

Posted by Guest Blogger at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Nitin Lehri, Lead Consultant, Oracle Practice, Enterprise Solutions, Infosys Technologies Ltd.

So many times we casually make use of the term "Closed-loop-Marketing" without fully realizing its actual meaning. Most of us may have not, but I am sure people who are associated with Marketing related services, would have used this jargon. Several clients limit themselves to the response which they receive against the myriad offers they roll out to customers. Further they content themselves with response rate figures derived as part of post roll-out reviews of campaigns. Clients, banking on IT applications, will actually realize the benefits of closed-loop only when they can see the conversions coming in.

To address this, there are already Lead Management and other integrated solutions in the market. They help establish the missing link between a response to an offer or a campaign and the lead which gets created against it. But does that really solves the issue? Does any company witness a 100% conversion rate from lead to  product purchase? I fear not. Thus in terms of totality it is almost impossible to accurately calculate the breakeven point for your campaign expenditure.

Even if we tread on a happy-path, are all the responses and leads getting captured in the application? What about referrals or one-off cases where an acquaintance is interested in a particular offer? Can all these 0.01% scenarios be encapsulated in any application?

In order to reach somewhere close to the quintessential state, multiple client applications should be tightly integrated end-to-end from IT perspective. Say campaign details flowing into lead system and then lead connected with the application/order processing system. From the business side, users can be incentivized such that rewards and recognitions are tied with their efforts captured by the application. On-field staff and partner channels may still remain a challenge but using few other applications like handheld devices or partner portals, objectives can be achieved to a great extent.

Posted by Guest Blogger at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Jaideep Ranjan Vijayakar, Lead Consultant - Banking and Capital Markets, Oracle Practice, Enterprise Solutions, Infosys Technologies Ltd.

Increasing productivity of employees who spend a majority of their time away from the office /desk is THE BUSINESS IMPERATIVE in today's world. Enterprise mobility is one of the enablers for this objective. Enterprise Mobility, put simplistically, transforms "Work" from 'some place you go", to "something you do". It is about providing employees with a technology platform which will enable them to work, "when" they want to work and "where" they want to work, in a secure, compliant and risk managed way.

Most enterprises have already taken the first steps towards employee mobility and have seen quantitative improvement in employee productivity and business coverage. Deploying role specific enterprise applications over the mobile network will, however, turn out to be the game changing differentiator in many industry verticals.

The basic productivity improvement tools are access to e-mail, calendar and contact information over mobile devices. New generation mobile handsets (devices) have erased the demarcation between traditional thick client systems (desktops/laptops) and mobile thin client computing devices for accessing enterprise applications.

What is needed is a well designed package of software to optimally exploit the potential of these technologies. Organizations will gain an "unfair competitive advantage" when they begin to fully harness the capability of the mobile smart devices by deploying enterprise applications and tools that enable mobile workers to work from wherever they are, whenever they want to. In order to get there, organizations need to strategically define how to integrate mobility into their business processes and enterprise applications for successful business transformation.

The wireless and mobile strategies need to be supported by a strong set of operation policies. These together should lay down the rules regarding the users that need to be mobile, technologies (networks) to be deployed, devices to be supported and applications to deploy over the mobile network. I will discuss about these in details in another edition.

In my opinion a mobility enabled organization adopts these configurations:

1. Secured VPN for accessing the network from outside the office.
2. Wireless Network (WiFi) within the office. Wi-Fi enabled laptops provided to key employees, so they are able to access the Internet/Intranet from anywhere within the Office Building.
3. Smart Phones/PDAs provided to
   a.   Sales Force/ Geographically dispersed employees who need not come into the office to access the Office Network.
   b.   Senior managers so that emails can be checked and responded to during meetings without having to lug around heavy laptops and or burdening Wi-Fi networks.
4. Role specific mobile applications rolled out to Smart Mobile Devices which provide a significant productivity boost and competitive advantage to the organization.

Ultimately mobilizing existing enterprise applications or developing mobility enabled applications will enable organizations to

• Increase the productivity of the workforce
• Provide information on the move to business participants
• Allow faster and more efficient decision making
• Reduce unproductive travel time
• Improve logistics management

For more details on the Stages of Enterprise Mobility and implementation steps - please see the article "Mobilizing the Enterprise- Strategies and Technologies to Drive Organizational Readiness".

Posted by Guest Blogger at 6:18 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 2 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Aniruddha Suresh Parwekar, Principal Consultant - Business Intelligence, Oracle practice, Enterprise Solutions, Infosys Technologies Ltd.

Transportation is one of the key elements of your Supply Chain Strategy. The primary objective of the Supply chain is to deliver a right product in right packaging and right condition to right customer at right time and right Cost. Transportation part of the supply chain can help you with goods delivered in right condition to right customer at right time and right cost. In short, Transportation can make more impact on the cost rather than revenue and bottom-line rather than top line. Hence, while transporting goods; typical objective of any Transportation manager would be to minimize the cost for freight.

Note: Cube refers to "volume of a cargo inside a container". Optimum Cube as defined by Webster dictionary is "The highest level of cube utilization that can be achieved when loading cargo into a container".

For our discussion, let us consider the scenario of inland freight via containerization. Capacity of containers can be measured by number of Cases, cubes or weights it can handle. There are many algorithms for optimizing the weight, volume or the combination also called as density. For now, let us assume that playing with the "Cube" is our strategy. So maximizing the volume of the container to reduce the freight cost per cubic unit is a no brainer. But one needs to consider; is maximizing the cube permissible? Would the weight added by making the container fill to its last cube be more than the permissible weight for that container or trailer that would be hauling or handling it? Would maximizing the cube make the unloading and loading difficult and costly? Are there any cube restrictions on the type of Cargo that is being hauled etc? But still Cube is one of the key factors that any Transportation Manager would look at while planning for his container optimization. So let us quickly focus on what metrics Transportation Managers would typically look from Cube Optimization point of view:

1. They should determine whether there are any cube exceptions based on the type of good hauled, type of container used. This will be required more from Safety and Industry compliances.
2. They should analyze the cases, cubes and weights per trailer per type of cargo that is being hauled. They should monitor this over time for each of their shipment and see if they are utilizing the volume efficiently? Can they tweak one of the triple constraints: case, cube or weight to get the minimum or rather optimum freight cost? They could also do a simple trend chart between time periods like week, month or years to analyze their performance across each type of Cargo.
3. If you have multiple facilities of Origin and Destination, then you could do several other types of analysis like:
   a.  Cubes from a particular origin to destination by Cargo Type  (identify opportunities at origin)
   b.  Cubes across multiple origin points for same type of Cargo (identify opportunities by type of cargo)
   c.  Cubes being received to same destinations from multiple origins (identify opportunities by destination)
4. Another analysis could be a variance analysis, where they have defined goals per Cargo Type and type of trailer used and see if these goals are being met. They could keep doing this analysis over time and over other dimensions mentioned earlier and come up with averages which could be used to benchmark with others or best in the industry.
5. One could also analyze on loading and unloading time by volume (cube) in the trailer
6. Last but not the least are the typical Top 'n' or Bottom 'n' analysis which gives a quick snapshot of who is doing the best and who is doing the worst and provides opportunity to share ideas for overall improvement.

So, the key question here would be - How does Business Intelligence (specifically Oracle Business Intelligence) play a role in enabling this?

1. One can deliver exceptions directly to the mail inbox of the Manager / Supervisor via Oracle BI Delivers technology. It also enables delivery of mails to PDA, Smart Phones and personal dashboards on the Oracle BI. We can also trigger actions based on the exceptions by harnessing the power of Oracle's Fusion Middleware.
2. Oracle BI provides rich capabilities of charting with line, bar, pie and other advanced charting options like Dials and Gauges. Line and bar charts together make the optimal option for any trending analysis.
3. Top "n" and Bottom "n" is an out of box feature in Oracle and can be easily employed by the business user creating the report.

In all, any Business Intelligence Solution is as successful as how we could get our business customers engaged with it. We need to ensure that they get all the data that they are looking for meeting their business objectives and in this case cutting the costs. Oracle BI has proven to be a great enabler in harnessing the power of the data and in my experience proven to be a reliable and easy to use BI technology.

I will try to cover other aspects of Transportation Business Intelligence Solution in my subsequent blogs.

Posted by Guest Blogger at 8:30 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Aniruddha Suresh Parwekar, Principal Consultant- Business Intelligence, Oracle practice, Enterprise Solutions, Infosys Technologies Ltd.

Most people make haste in getting on to "Social Media" bandwagon. They want to ensure that their organization has presence on all the key social networking portals and also put in a sincere attempt to lead a discussion or two before the initiative gets fizzled out. Why does this happen? If I am a business executive, I would invest only in that activity where I get the biggest or at least some bang for my buck. And I would question, with participation in the social media, am I generating additional sales? Am I able to provide better service to my customers and prospects? Is my company image getting better? Am I generating more Word-of-mouth? Am I engaging prospects and customers on a new idea or co-creation? This is very similar to what many organizations did in late nineties when "e-commerce" was the buzzword and every company thought, mere presence on the net would boost their sales. What went wrong? STRATEGY!!!

To be a successful e-commerce business, an organization would need along with a good product, price, package etc, a "backbone" that supports e-commerce, namely: payment gateways for electronic payment, efficient supply chain system that ensures the right product reaches at right time to the customer and in right condition, a reverse logistics chain to handle returns, call center setup for online and telephonic support etc.

So the moot question is what do you need for your success with Social media?

First of all, figure out why you want to get onto Social Media bandwagon? What is it that you would like to start seeing as you advance into your social media initiatives? Do you want to better your customer service? Do you want to share your ideas with customers and prospects and engage them to co-create something that would be your next big product? Increase product awareness? Lead discussions and sway them to your area of specialty or expertise?  In short, determine your near and long term OBJECTIVES. As commonly said, "you cannot manage, improve or control what you cannot measure". So if you do not have any specific objectives, then how will you know that you are doing good, bad or ugly?

Output

1. Defined objectives (near and long term)
   a. Define specific measure if you would be analyzing the data captured via a business intelligence tool
2. Timelines / prioritization to meet the objectives

Hint: Ensure that objectives are in line with your business strategy be it sales and marketing or service or any other strategy. New media of interaction like Social media will always get step-brotherly treatment from the organization's older departments if this new social media is not aligned to their objectives. So in short, get a champion from top management to help you with this and engage your employees before you try to engage prospects and customers. Understand human behavioral dynamics or organizational politics to incubate Social media initiative in its early days.

Once you are done with your objectives, you need to build an organization or a support structure for the initiative. Take a case of a Business Transformation Programs at large corporations, they have dedicated team derived from key senior people from all the impacting departments and is spearheaded or championed by an executive in the top management with direct reporting structure to CxO level executive. With Social media initiatives you are trying to transform your organization but more subtly. We may not be "re-engineering the corporation" borrowed this term from renowned management authors, Michael Hammer and James Champy, but we are definitely trying to better our business. So assuming that, as part of the objective definition activity, you decided to improve on marketing, sales and customer service, you may want to derive some senior folks from these departments to create your SOCIAL MEDIA IMPLEMENTATION / CORE TEAM. Additionally, you may want to engage with corporate communications, in-house Information Technology group and some external consultants who could bring their expertise on this topic. Create the core group and build a reporting structure. Manage the team as a project with priorities and deadlines. The bottom-line of the project or initiative success lives with the core team and employees of the organization. The consultant play role in implementation and providing additional recommendations on setting new areas for monitoring and control. So own it up or you will fail in this initiative.

Output

1. Core Team
2. Defined Reporting Structure
3. Executive Sponsorship
4. Possible engagement of external partners / RFI / RFP
5. Project Management Approach

Now that you have got your CORE TEAM set on driving the social media initiative, question arises, how you sustain the momentum. To SUSTAIN MOMENTUM, you need:

1. Marketing Planning (campaign / response strategy)
   a.   Engage with customers and prospects
   b.   Building relationship with them
   c.   Grow the relationship through support and guidance around discussions and blogs and enabling co-creation of any kind
   d.   Measure how you have been able to do that
   e.   Loop back the feedback for continual improvement
2. Content Development
   a.   Professional content development (web blogs, videos, white papers etc)
   b.   Ideation / co-creation
   c.   Engaging employees outside the core group in organizational social media activities. This may involve training and making participation in social media activities as a part of day to day business activity. At a retail client I worked, every employee is required to spend one hour in self training every day. Why not institute such practice but the training, research and involvement should be in social media activities. If your organization does not have skills and utilizing Social Media for business benefits, now is the time to get trained before committing to many mistakes.
3. Technology Backbone
   a.   Security around accessing Social media sites
   b.   Building connectors with organization's social media platform which helps in initiating discussion groups, blogs, communities, analytics, polls, widgets etc
   c.   MDM, Notification services, Localization
   d.   Integration services
   e.   Interfacing applications like CRM

Output

1. Technology feasibility analysis
2. Employee trainings
3. Social Media content planning

In short, treat Social Media as a strategy and not just an initiative and Success will be yours. The key word is "ENGAGE" and strategy should be all around that key word. Engage Employees. Engage Partner. Engage Customers.

Posted by Guest Blogger at 6:16 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Cross docking has gained popularity amongst the retailers and has been widely acknowledged to provide operational efficiencies and scales of economies. A key business imperative for the retail industry is quick turnaround and cross docking proves to be a definite enabler.

Effective cross docking requires ASN/ASBN from suppliers. It is very important to collaborate with your vendors to streamline the cross docking operations in a given retail organization. In order to efficiently handle the customer order flow, we need an efficient supplier order flow. Due to the short longevity of the products involved it happens more often than not, that product is received in the warehouse of a retailer only a few hours in advance of the actual shipment. These industry dynamics makes cross docking a treasure to harness.

As per the levels of cross dock models described in the Saddle creek report following classifications have been proposed.

One-touch Model: Where in products are touched only once, as they are received and loaded outbound without being placed on the warehouse dock. This model provides for the highest product velocity and the focus is on cross-dock productivity.

Two-touch Model: Where in products are received and staged on the dock, then loaded outbound without being put into storage. This model provides for the outbound load optimization and improving transportation efficiencies.

Multiple-touch Model: Where in products are received and staged on the dock, then reconfigured for shipment and loaded outbound directly from the warehouse dock. This model provides for the greatest opportunity for customization.

There are a few systemic barriers when in comes to implementing an efficient cross docking model. Most of the host systems (could be an ERP or an OM system) are decapacitated in sending pick release information to the warehouse systems unless the inventory is physically in the building and recorded in the host system. In this case the host system needs soft allocation of inventory before a pick release instruction could be sent to the WMS. Due to these reasons WMS is really unaware of the customer demand. In these kinds of scenarios appropriate item classification can come in very handy. Pick Release instruction can be made to be sent to the WMS in the absence of allocation. Another challenge is that wave planning in a WMS needs systemic inventory and allocation. Due to the dynamics involved, there may no inventory present in the WMS at the time when wave planning needs to be performed.

All these can be easily overcome by modeling the systems to meet the business requirements. Let us also look at the physical warehouse sizing and configuration aspect. A typical warehouse building has receiving doors on one side of the building, and shipping doors on the other side. This is a traditional configuration.  This flow-thru design is may not be optimum for cross docking.  A warehouse could be configured by, placing receiving and shipping doors on the same side of the building. This design will certainly assist in cross dock operations.

IT follows business. It can be made use of to meet the business imperatives and help an organization become world class.Cross docking is a SMART way to achieve efficiencies. It is a Simple Method to Achieve Rapid Throughput.

Posted by Amit Sinha at 6:35 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Olivier Penel, Principal Consultant - MDM, Oracle practice, Enterprise Solutions, Infosys Technologies Ltd.

MDM (Master Data Management) initiatives should be seen as a way to provide master data 'as a service' across the organization, lines of businesses, channels, countries, etc. The idea is to decouple the management of core data entities (products, customers, locations, etc.) from the business applications (ERPs, CRM, range planning, merchandising, supply chain, e-commerce systems) and to provide those systems with the data they need, at the right time, and in the right context.

The SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) layer aggregates master data from MDM systems, but also transactional data, historical data, or reference data, from internal and external data sources.

For example, organizations often subscribe to data pools (e.g. GDSN) as a trusted source of information to enrich their master data repositories. Large manufacturing companies have long been in that space, making their product information available in an automated and standardized manner. However, small and medium suppliers cannot really afford investing into PIM (Product Information Management) solutions and GDSN (Global Data Synchronization) infrastructures. To deal with this issue, GS1 UK recently launched a new initiative intended to provide those suppliers with a "PIM as a Service" offering that will eventually provide retailers with trusted product data from a much bigger number of their suppliers. This move clearly shows that the market is fast maturing to the idea of sourcing master data from external sources in an automated and standardized way.

We can see very clearly that the boundaries between the enterprise information systems and the outside world (partners, suppliers, customers, data pools, etc...) is not as clear as it used to be and the current move towards Cloud Computing is likely to increase this pattern, especially in the MDM area. In this context, one can wonder what the trend towards Cloud Computing mean for organizations that are looking to launch an MDM initiative or to extend their existing MDM solution.

I believe that Cloud Computing is very likely to increase the need for MDM and strong Data Governance. The main reason for that is the obvious risk associated to Cloud Computing, which is a loss of control over data and data quality. MDM is a critical step towards strengthening this area and mitigate the associated risks.

The trend towards applications and data in the cloud will require more sophisticated systems and strong data governance processes and technology. It is delusive to think that good enterprise wide services can be set-up without underlying data governance. Who owns data? Who can access or change those data? What data quality means for the organization and how to monitor it? Those are just a few questions that an organization should answer before starting an SOA or Cloud Computing initiative.

The fracturing of data caused by the adoption of Cloud Computing raises the importance of MDM in keeping disparate data synchronized. Cloud Computing will become extremely confusing and totally inefficient without a consolidated version of the truth in a proper master data management hub. In addition, as applications go off premises, there is a real danger MDM could get out of reach very quickly. Therefore, MDM should be seen as a pre-requisite to cloud computing, in order to get control over data before trying to leverage external data sources, or external applications consuming master data.

On the other hand, Cloud Computing will introduce new opportunities with using external reference data pools (GS1, GXS, SA2, 1SYNC, Dun & Bradstreet, etc.) or data quality services such as identity and entity resolution. As a conclusion, organizations looking at Cloud Computing as a strategic way forward should consider:

1. Using MDM to create a single version of the truth before enabling cloud-based applications
2. Combining internal master data with external cloud-based data sources to create a consolidated version of the truth using a co-existence MDM pattern.

Posted by Guest Blogger at 9:23 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 3 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Swati Maskara, Associate Consultant, Oracle Business Intelligence practice, Enterprise Solutions, Infosys Technologies Ltd.

Setting goals is important only to the extent if their success is monitored and information is critical only to the extent if it facilitates action. Integration between defining, communicating, monitoring and correcting strategic objectives has always been a thirst area for organizations. Every organization has employees asking the same question - "How are my objectives and goals linked to my organization's corporate vision, mission and objectives?".

I recently got a chance to explore OBIEE 11g's new functionality - Oracle Scorecard and Strategy Management - and I was impressed by the features provided. Measuring, communicating and monitoring are the three key words that define the Scorecard functionality in OBIEE 11g. Let us explore how each is performed better using Oracle Scorecard.

Measurement

• Measure success using KPIs
• KPI builder allows building multidimensional Hierarchical KPIs
• While defining the KPIs users can set the thresholds within which performance is acceptable
• KPIs can be  sourced from ERP or CRM applications, a data warehouse, BI or Performance Management System and integrated with scorecard

Communication

• New visualizations such as KPI watchlist, Strategy Tress, Strategy Maps, Cause and effect Maps and Custom Views
• KPI watchlist can be used to drill down into various levels of data which the user is authorized to view
• The tool also improves user interface by introducing a comprehensive range of new interactive charting and prompting capabilities, including map visualization options

Monitoring

• Action Framework Feature: Users can also send email alerts, trigger ERP workflows and BPEL Processes, Invoke web services and execute Java Methods by defining contextual actions within the OBIEE Action framework

Lets us understand the scorecard functionality by taking an example of a Consumer durable manufacturer and distributor which aims at increasing the overall market share by 10%. This is the main objective or the organization wide goal of the company. All the departments - Sales, HR, Finance, and Marketing etc have to channel efforts towards achieving this main objective.

Now different departments or units of the organization would have a different perspectives towards this main objective. Oracle Scorecard comes with four such predefined perspectives namely Financial, Customer, Internal Business Process and Learning & Growth (Balanced Scorecard). Users also have the flexibility to create custom perspectives according to organization's requirement. Now, looking at the goal from a financial perspective would involve setting up objectives like increasing revenue by 20% or Increasing Bank Finance by 10% etc. These parent objectives can be further divided into child objectives like reducing COGS, reducing price per unit, improving linkages with Financial Institutions etc. Once the objectives are defined at the most detailed level then various KPIs can be built using KPI builder.

Such detailed definition of organization's objective along with an integrated action framework enables employees within the organization to:

• Evaluate the impact of their actions on achieving success and hence appreciate how their individual objectives are helping in achieving organization's overall goals
• Initiate discussion threads and attach documents thus facilitating greater understanding of organizational KPIs as well as better collaboration with other users
• Align their actions in the best possible way to meet the end objectives hence ensuring corrective actions are taken well on time

Thus the system was rightly referred to as "closed loop BI system" by Oracle at its launch as it closes the loop between insight and action by enabling users to get real time notifications and alerts and at the same time facilitating them to initiate actions directly from dashboard. It also facilitates information sharing between users through its Annotations Attachments and Collaborations facility.

The Scorecard functionality holds potential to organize strategic thinking within an organization and monitor the progress towards achieving strategic goals but  how is this new functionality going to be leveraged by organizations and to what extent is yet to be seen. However the buzz around this functionality seems to be catching up.

Posted by Guest Blogger at 8:40 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Hemant Uttam Selmokar, Senior Project Manager, Oracle Business Intelligence practice, Enterprise Solutions, Infosys Technologies Ltd.

With a lot of publicity around the OBIEE 11gR1 launch, everyone is curious to know what has changed and how it will impact the overall positioning of OBIEE.

Let me tell you that this is really a wonderful product presented by Oracle and it has many new and enhanced features for better analysis, improved visual experience, great charting options and most exceptional feature being the ability to build KPI on the fly. You can read more about the new features in OBIEE 11g here. In this blog, I will be discussing top 5 features (in my opinion) of OBIEE 11g and would be interested to know your views on it.

1. KPI - My first take is ability to build KPI. Building KPI on the fly means taking first step towards new generation performance management and thinking beyond operational reporting and spread sheet analysis. Let us see what you can do with this functionality:
   • Set goals : In terms of target value and actual.
   • Dimensionalize  KPI: Analysis by associated dimensional attribute
   • Drill down on KPI : to see why the KPI is off target or doing excellent job
   • Define various thresholds: For example if
        o Sale is above $1M per quarter then it is okay. KPI is green and business is on track.
        o Sale is between 600k and 700 K then there is some worry. KPI is yellow and you need to be cautious.
        o Sale is below 500k then business is on critical. KPI is red and you need to take drastic actions.
   • Take Action:  With Action Links, you can take action if the KPI is off target or there is something is going wrong seriously. You can trigger workflow, you can send mails and take necessary actions.
   Now the next question which comes to our mind - "Can I have a look at just one KPI at a time or can I look at multiple KPIs at the same time?" Here comes another feature: KPI watch list.
2. KPI Watch List - Very useful feature where you can track multiple KPIs at the same time and you can collect interrelated KPIs and make their list and keep them on dashboard for ready reference. Let's take one practical example - You have defined the following 5 KPIs to see whether business is on track:
   • Sales should be above $1 M ,
   • Average order price should be more than $5K ,
   • Quote to order conversion rate should be more than 70%,
   • Un-realized revenue should be less than $200K ,
   • Inventory in hand should not be more than 100 pieces for less inventory carrying cost.
   What you need to do is define all the 5 KPIs and get them in KPI list. This will enable user to get quick overview of your business health by looking at KPI list. Consider a scenario where un-realized revenue is increasing and also the inventory in hand is also increasing. This means that business is not getting paid for sale as well as inventory in hand is increasing. This situation warrants really quick action. In this scenario KPI Watch list will bring enormous value and control on how you do business. Next question in your mind would be "Why is there just a static list? Can we do something more with KPI?"  Answer is "Yes".
3. OBIEE Scorecards - This is a revolutionary feature in OBIEE 11g in my opinion. You can build Strategy tree /Strategy map as well as Cause & effect maps (Fishbone diagrams). This is visual representation of series of KPIs/measures or objectives to see if it is in line with business's strategic vision or expectation. This is used to showcase visually where the performance deviates from expectations and encourage managers/users to focus on particular areas which are alarming or in warning status. 
   Let's see what more has been added in OBIEE 11g in terms of user experience.
4. Hierarchies and In-place Drill - In earlier version interacting with dimensional hierarchy meant drilling down from one level to next which added a new column to output. In addition to this behavior, OBIEE 11g has provided for interacting with the hierarchy by expanding and collapsing individual levels within the same report column using the plus (+) and minus (-) icons adjacent to the displayed member values. This way you can easily navigate across various dimensions. This is more of a paradigm shift from static hierarchical experience to dynamic hierarchical experience.
5. Sliders - Next take is a jazzy feature which has been introduced in OBIEE 11g: Chart Sliders. This feature gives you a great visual experience with charts and provides the ability to slide through a dimensional attribute. In addition, OBIEE 11g gives you a slider bar with animation capabilities through which you can animate for a bunch of years and the chart will show you how your measures performed over last 5 to 6 years in one go. Animation plus charting at its best and a great experience for users who love animation.

In my next blog entry, I will cover the enhancements to OBIEE Answers and Administration. I would love to hear your feedback on this blog entry.

Posted by Guest Blogger at 12:50 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 3 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Some of the key considerations for upgrade to R12 V/s Fusion in financials area are:

--Data Model Changes: R12 has more data model changes from architecture POV like the introduction of SLA, Secondary ledgers, MOAC etc
--Tried and Tested: R12 has been tried and tested since its launch 3 years back however considering Fusion being new, there are bound to be some "gotchas" intially
--Upgrade path: Oracle has confirmed that they would provide upgrade path from R12 to Fusion immediately, however no committed date yet for 11i customers
--Features and Modules: Version1 release of Fusion financials would not have all functionalities / modules
--Reimplementation: If the client is planning a reimplementation, R12 would be a better platform to simplify business processes and manage change
--Localizations: Version1 release of Fusion financials would not have all localizations
--Customizations: Clients having heavy customization should go for R12 since they would know for sure what standard functionalities can be leveraged to retire / reengineer customizations
--Limited release: There would be limited release of Fusion in initial version and would be a very controlled upgrade by Oracle

Fusion would be a huge upgrade to do from 11.5.10, the terminology I like to use is relocating a household. The data in your current applications is like the "items" you need to relocate from one location to another. One would expect in a household relocation, the "items" will get to its final destination in good and enhanced shape.

Posted by Sachin Chitlange at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest Post by
Sanil Kumar Bhaskaran, Consultant, Oracle Business Intelligence practice, Enterprise Solutions, Infosys Technologies Ltd.

I do not intend to start this blog enumerating the enormous benefits an enterprise can reap out of an EPM investment. The fact that meager 23 percent of the companies have been able to get higher returns on their equity owing to their EPM initiatives, itself makes us ponder about the underlying challenges in having an effective EPM platform. Let's look at these challenges from the other side of the table - from a Business perspective and not as a System Integrator.

One of the main reasons why EPM initiatives fail is the lack of focus on key value drivers over the long term, which results in the wrong choice of metrics to measure performance .This is more of a strategic choice. Challenges appear in various aspects of an enterprise. Let's take a look at them one by one.

Management
The biggest challenge in any EPM initiative is to find the right Sponsor, who is influential enough in the organization to mobilize resources across functions as the success of any EPM initiative lies in an effective cross functional team, which is a snapshot of the whole enterprise. The sponsor needs to be a visionary, who believes that the investments made in Technology can give the organization a cutting edge over its competitors. It is also critical where the EPM team is placed in the reporting hierarchy; it should be positioned high enough to demand attention and low enough to stay with the real world.

Financials
While the drivers for an initial EPM investment may be a short term objective like Financial Consolidation/Planning and Budgeting or reporting solution, the EPM platform should be supporting integrating capabilities across business processes to realize long term value of the investment. Having said so, the challenge in appraising an Investment decision in an EPM Platform is determining the ROI, as the tangible financial gains out of an EPM investment is tough to measure and is bound to give an unrealistic picture. In most of the cases there is no direct relationship between an increase in top line/ bottom-line and an investment in EPM solution, the gains are usually attributed to it, hence not quantifying the gains This in turn is a crucial factor in deciding on the continued funding of the project.

Operations
The underlying business model of an enterprise could be a hindrance to an effective EPM Platform. In most of the cases the challenge that the team faces is to address a plethora of Point solutions, multiple business intelligence systems and fragmented implementations owing to a decentralized management. It takes significant effort to convince others to embrace a preferred program and to justify it. The EPM team will need to understand the line of business needs in the context of the company's overall business objectives, as well as cross line of business issues. There could be conflict of interests between the Business units /Functions in this regard .The best approach to address this is to have an EPM Center of Excellence/Competency center being driven across the enterprise. The EPM center could be funded by any of the three models available: Overhead, Pay-per use or subscription based to address the needs of each BU's or Functions.

Human Resources
The success of such an initiative will be largely determined by the quality of its people. To serve its end users the team should acquire a wide range of business, IT and analytical skills from various departments within the organization. Recruitment could be challenging in finding the right candidates with the right skill sets.
Any transformation project is bound to have a reduction in headcount owing to streamlining of processes. The challenge that organizations would face on this front is relocating/training the displaced personnel and managing expectations with them. This should be handled through effective change management.

Firms which overcome these challenges and have a long term vision on their EPM investments lead the way! I would be interested to hear some of the typical challenges that your organization might have faced during an EPM implementation.

Posted by Guest Blogger at 9:37 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

In today's scenario, organizations are facing many problems in managing content with nearly 80% of the unstructured information, lots of content duplication and spending around 15-20% of the operating revenue in fixing problems that arouse from inappropriate data.

To maximize content management efficiency, improve security and reduce costs, organizations need a comprehensive enterprise content management solution that fits easily with their business processes. Oracle Enterprise Content Management Suite 11g meets these demands delivering the high performance and scalability required to face the challenging enterprise content management environments.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) enables organizing and storing an organization's documents, and any other content, which relate to the organization. ECM provides the strategies and methods used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. It provides easy management of information in an enterprise, information being in the form of a paper document, a database print stream, an email or even an electronic file.

Oracle Enterprise Content Management suite offers the BEST OF BREED content management products:

• Oracle Universal Content Management
• Oracle Imaging and Process Management
• Oracle Content Conversion Server
• Oracle Information Rights Management
• Oracle Document Capture
• Oracle eMail Archive Service
• Oracle Universal Records Management

This offers a complete solution to customers looking for a user-friendly, manageable and unified system across the enterprise. A unified approach removes the barriers for creating or managing composite applications. For example, an organization might have a requirement to maintain various versions of a Web site or restrict authorization to Web content during litigation. Or, an organization may have to use digital asset and document management functionality together. Providing the overall architecture on a single high security model, and API reduces Band-Aid integrations, presents a common IT infrastructure and thus cuts down the development and support costs.

Some of the major benefits of ECM are:

• Minimize risk and control the content lifecycle phases.
• Allows organizations to control access to content, maintain histories and automate the positioning of content.
• Additional features are applied, such as version control, providing indexes for easy search, and enabling secured metadata management. Services can be added to help process, distribute, publish, classify and retain, expire, and delete content.
• Support content sharing across the enterprise allowing content to be delivered to the right people in the right format on the right device at the right time.
• Finding and eliminating redundant steps and automating the steps.
• Automate processes routing, converting Web formats.

-Madhavi Madas
Madhavi is a Technology Lead with 5.5 years of experience in Infosys. She has very good knowledge in Oracle Applications, PL/SQL, Oracle Forms, Oracle Reports and SOA. Presently, she is working with AIACOE and anchoring trainings and knowledge management activities.

Posted by Guest Blogger at 9:52 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Out of Stock is a common problem that has smitten retailers immemorial. It is a part and parcel of the industry dynamics. One of the core WMS concepts can come in really handy and act as a panacea.

At the heart of operation of a modern WMS is the concept of task management. Put simplistically this concept ensures the right person at right place at the right time. WMS then doles out the work electronically via RF devices, voice systems or light systems to the best warehouse operator for the task and receives an acknowledgement that the work was performed. The system then switches to the next task. This may happen for many operators at the same time. Task interleaving is also common where different types of tasks can be combined to optimize efficiency.
 
Efficient task management could be put in place to avoid stock out situations. Task management could be linked to employee scheduling to optimize what staff is needed where and when, based on sales history and other factors. RF devices could be easily tied to a WMS and used effectively to avoid the stock out situations for a retailer. What is needed is an inventory source of record, wireless infrastructure and a WMS with a Task Management engine.

Consider a common business situation. A replenishment activity indicates that a location needs replenished based on the threshold level set for the SKU, and a specific task is set for the move. It goes into the queue, and is prioritized based on other variables. If it is a hot selling SKU, meaning it is increasingly in danger of going to zero at the shelf, the task rises in the queue. Warehouse operators will be instructed for their tasks at their RF terminals and they confirm it is done electronically. A task management engine would certainly provide order to the high entropy prevalent in the retail world.

Oracle WMS provides a robust task management system and a rules engine that could be used to alleviate the problem discussed above. A Warehouse Management Control Board is a tool that is available with WMS that could be used to monitor, plan, control, and execute various warehouse operations. The Warehouse Control Board enables us to view workloads across the entire warehouse, manage exceptions, and review, release, reassign, and re-prioritize tasks.

I think, problems at hand need just the due attention and a simple solution is around to address them. Retailers pan globe are using the task management concept to provide world class services to their customers. Customer is the KING, right!!

Posted by Amit Sinha at 3:27 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Consignment operations at a typical HTDM organization form an integral part of the sales process. It is a strategic operation both from volume and revenue standpoint.

Business Requirement:
• Maintain stock in the customer owned warehouses in order to reduce the lead time.
• To meet the customer demand, based on their forecast, by replenishing stock in the customer owned warehouses.
• Export Control and legal compliance.
• Invoicing customers for product consumption from consignment locations.

In order to meet the business requirements, organization may choose to implement a solution via Oracle EBS.

Organization Structure:
• Consignment warehouses should be set up as separate internal organizations in the Oracle Inventory Module. This gives an advantage of explicitly tracking inventory at any given point in time.
• Specific nomenclature should be attached to the warehouse.

Order Entry:
• Manual Order Entry: The process starts with the user entering the consignment pull sales order upon receipt of pull information from a customer.
• Order Import: Alternatively, for EDI connected customers, the pull orders are directly imported into the system.

Based on the pull, the inventory status (on-hand) will be reduced in the consignment subinventory to reflect the current on-hand quantity. Appropriate inventory accounting entries should be passed. The order line (consignment pull order line) gets closed. An invoice will be generated for the shipped quantity. Appropriate invoicing accounting entries will be passed.

Stock Replenishment in Consignment Warehouse:
• Replenishment of the stock in the consignment (VMI) warehouse could be regulated and planned by a central planning engine, via a main warehouse. We can integrate Oracle E-Business suite with the Planning engine in order to achieve this. This could be a custom solution.
• IR-ISO cycle can be used to replenish the consignment warehouse.
• Depending on the proximity of the VMI warehouse from the main warehouse, the direct or in transit shipping networks are setup between the main and the VMI warehouses.
• We can also provide for internal requisitions that are imported via EDI using the Oracle Open Interface.
• Stock movement would have to be based on FIFO method of inventory management.

Export Control and Legal Compliance:
System can be modeled to support the export control regulations and the document printing requirements whenever the consignment warehouse is situated outside the host country.

Inventory Synchronization and Reporting:
• System can provide for Inventory Synchronization for the VMI warehouses using the EDI data sent by the warehouse.
• A number of reports can also be made available to support the consignment operation in the system.

There could be other specific business requirements like consolidated AR invoice generation that could be solutioned for. This means generation of one invoice for a period of time like one day, one week etc. that suite the business needs.
To summarize, one could leverage Oracle INV, PO, OM and AR to provide seamless integration to support the consignment operations at a typical HTDM organization, providing customization wherever necessary or desired.

Posted by Amit Sinha at 4:11 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

How often do organizations feel that managing change on a single global instance is a nightmare? Although a single global instance has a lot of benefits compared to multi instance installations managing change is probably the biggest challenge on a single instance environment. The complexity of the environment also adds to this challenge.

How do you ensure that you control the changes happening to the instance and at the same time try and progress all changes that are required by the business to move forward? The changes could involve bug fixes to custom code, patches from product vendors, enhancement requests to add custom functionality, system or application configuration changes. The biggest factor that needs to be kept in mind in a single instance environment is DO NO HARM to existing sites already live and working on the environment.

What kind of tools and techniques are used by your organization to track, manage, migrate and automate these changes across your test and staging environments to your production system? Are these tools ERP package specific or they can be used across any package? What kind of efficiency and productivity gains do you achieve by using these tools and techniques?

Posted by Somnath Majumdar at 4:15 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Introduction of new regulations or changes in existing regulations at local or international level can lead to drastic changes for an enterprise. IFRS is one such change which would change the financial statements for ever. US markets would also be affected starting 2013 though SEC is yet to make any decisions on the start date as to when to adopt IFRS.
The key IFRS differences which would have big impact on US companies are:
1. Consolidation, Associates and Joint Ventures
2. Property Plant and Equipment
3. Employee Retirement Benefits
4. Borrowing Costs
5. Inventory valuation
 
Though oracle claims that it is ready for IFRS with multiple solution options like Sub ledger accounting, Oracle General Ledger or Hyperion Financial Management, some key solutions would have to be worked as per the client situation. The most complex solutions to design would be Fixed Assets and Inventories since these solutions would have sub ledger level impact

No ERP package provides an out of box solution to immediately converge to IFRS especially at sub ledger level. However let's look at some of the features of Oracle R12 which can be used at sub ledger level to achieve asset componentization and thereby comply with IFRS standard on Property plant and Equipment

FOr Propery Plan and Equipment, as per IFRS every asset need to be componentized based on its useful life and residual value. Hence in the current state For eg: an aircraft would have to be broken into Engine, Body, Seating arrangements etc to be capitalized separately. Following features of Oracle Fixed Asset subledger would be useful to converge to IFRS

a) Asset Tax book which can now post to a secondary ledger in R12 to calculate differences as per IFRS while converging to IFRS
b) Parent child asset feature to group assets after componentization
c) WEB ADI to download, make changes and upload the assets
d) Group asset feature to group assets of same class
e) Unplanned depreciation
f) Out of box Asset Impairment functionality

Infosys provides an out of box PPE (Property Plant and Equipment) convergence solution to be IFRS compliant using the above functionalities of Oracle. Infosys has been closely following IFRS and has established an IFRS center of excellence for its clients to provide proof of concepts and demos. We invite your comments and suggestions if any on this blog to handle specific client situations for PPE.

Posted by Sachin Chitlange at 8:07 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )