Infosys-Oracle Blog

Data base integration technologies are fast evolving. In a way they are giving extended life to the legacy applications with powerful integrations to the new generation applications. What are they and how are they being used?

The objective of adoption of new generation ERP applications (Oracle, SAP, Siebel etc.,) is to provide the efficient system for the businesses to operate with state of the art of technology. In parallel there other technologies that are developing which are capable of real time integration of the so called legacy applications with the new generation applications. This typically requires integration if heterogeneous data systems. This is in a way extending the life of legacy systems. Use of these technologies makes more sense for the business now a day to control the Initial investment costs of Business systems and more importantly manage the change effectively as the legacy systems will continue to exist.
Let us look at the various technologies that are evolving and
1. OBIEE - An acronym for Oracle business Intelligence enterprise edition aims to have the data from any database system to integrate the data with Oracle EBS (Enterprise business suite) and generate powerful reports. All that is required is to build an integration layer for the data transfer and configure the seeded reports.
2. Streaming - Streaming is a streamlined process to capture the changes in the database, load them to a staging table and consume. The staged data can be used for downward integration and continue the existing reporting systems. This is a kind of Push system where the source system needs to push the data to the staging tables.
3. The other advancement is to make the destination system (let us say SQL server) to pull the data from the Oracle EBS or other ERP system. Appropriate materialized views can be created on the source system and the data base links are to be created between the systems. The destination system will keep pulling the transactional data from the source and the same can be used for reporting or queries etc., this eventually reduces the load on the transactional system.
All these advances help the business to retain the existing systems instead of fading out and still get the important business benefits.

There may be new technologies as well in this arena. 

Posted by Murali Krishna Somisetty at 7:38 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Sandeep Suresh Deshpande, Lead Consultant, Oracle Practice, Enterprise Solutions, Infosys Technologies Ltd.

A large part of a Staffing branch's daily activities include communications with customers, applicants, and other contacts. Typically the volume of applicants that a recruiter will work with at any given time can be quite large. At the same time, they are also working with large volumes of orders. The ability to match an employee or applicant to an order in a timely manner is the key to the success of a recruiter.

Despite the advances in analytic systems, it continues to be the case that the recruiter, while an expert in his area, is unlikely to be an expert in data analysis and statistics.  The volumes present a challenge when it comes to remembering details pertaining to each order and the candidate. For example a recruiter may need intelligent information that helps him/her to prioritize fulfilling the orders from a series of orders based on several matrices like:

• Quantum of revenue generated.
• Date of order fulfillment.
• Client qualification.
• Past orders and client payment history.
• Master contract rates.

Conversely, a customer may request that a particular employee not be sent to their site for future orders. The ability for a recruiter to quickly access history details for a customer, order and employee are important components within this process. 

Hence an Integrated PeopleSoft Staffing Solution with business intelligence tools like Oracle Real Time Decision Making Tool & Master Data Management is the need of the hour. These integrations can meticulously achieve many of the required needs of the recruiters like optimizing the customer experiences with cross-channel real-time decisions at the point of interaction. This will result into offering profitable candidates or candidates most likely to succeed there by increasing the percentage of repeat business.

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Guest post by
Vamsi Neti, Systems Engineer, Oracle Practice, Enterprise Solutions, Infosys Technologies Ltd.

Change is inevitable. I was wondering how big a step required to process and manage the change. Business is not an exception, to be in the market accept the truth and "change the business constantly". Here is a real-time example of business change happening today, RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology. A big shopping mall wants to open its new store, to sustain the competition it has planned to use RFID tags on stock (which enables stores to identify and track item in the supply chain automatically and make the customer to use virtual cart). This action has sent employees scrambling to learn about the wireless technology, ordering signage, requisitioning products and launching a PR campaign to coincide with the opening. All of these tasks need to be completed on a schedule. The implementation is very complex due to very high cost, time taking process and risk involved in designing the strategy to respond to market changes instantly.

The biggest problem now is deriving any business knowledge out of its vast amount of data to respond to process and management change instantly with the current IT infrastructure, it does not address the fact that business process will continue to change at a rapid pace. Packaged applications like CRM (Customer Relationship Management), SCM (supply chain management) and ERP (enterprise resource planning) have emerged as good standalone department specific systems.

The optimization and automation of business processes allows a new level of flexibility and responsiveness to the changing requirements inherent in an on-demand business environment.

Business Process Management (BPM) attempt to combine business processes, information and IT resources to create a single integrated view of the business. It provides the control in terms of visibility and manageability over their business processes to business managers, which will reduce the gap between business and IT. The BPM scenario is very closely aligned with the SOA life cycle which can help integrating Enterprise packages, numerous data repositories and automate the process in delivering the efficient and agile end-to-end business process management.

As it allows monitoring the automated business processes, both IT performance and business goals can be measured, providing a rich capability for both the business executives and the IT executives to understand, evaluate and improve the organization's capability to deliver business function that satisfies business requirements.

Oracle "the epitome of Business" has timely released BPM Suite 11g.It can be thought of as a layer on top of Oracle SOA Suite which adds new capabilities, makes extensive use of the same core components that you would use when building a BPEL process. In fact, there is only one process engine that can run both BPEL and BPMN processes.

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Guest post by
Nipun Lakhotia, Consultant, Oracle Practice, Enterprise Solutions, Infosys Technologies Ltd.

Transportation Management Systems (TMS) have come a long way from home grown systems primarily aimed to reduce freight spend to highly advanced optimization systems. Let's have a look at some of the most sought after features offered by next generation TMS.

'onDemand' implementation platform is the buzzword in the transportation management systems. New enterprises can quickly embrace sophisticated TMS systems for their logistics operations by leveraging on demand platform. It also enables adoption of best in breed TMS functionalities under one roof - from management of inbound freight, private fleet management to highly advanced business intelligence capabilities.

Collaborative network routing explores opportunities for continuous move and utilization of transportation assets between shipper, suppliers & customers. This feature is effectively used by planners to identify recurring shipment patterns for optimal freight execution.

Demand forecasting is essential to integrate production scheduling with logistics capacity. TMS can bridge this gap by making transportation planning in concert with other operational execution systems.

Carrier procurement is an important area which was earlier overlooked by traditional TMS. Companies can achieve big savings by automating carrier bid evaluation by lane and re-negotiating carrier contracts based on historic usage of transportation services.

Carrier charge backs are commonly faced by shippers dealing with parcel & express carriers. This is a charge levied by carrier due to difference in dimensional weight between shipper's manifest and the actual as computed by the carrier. Shippers are expecting TMS to sync precise information about package dimensions and thereby manage freight costs accurately.

Transportation analytics transforms freight spend data into logistics information. Shippers can utilize this information to identify their best suppliers, decode transportation spend on various commodities, identify bottlenecks and leverage this information to reduce overall logistics costs.

Regulatory compliance is one of the key requirements for international shipping operations. TMS is expected to provide solutions in areas like restricted party screening, dangerous goods classification, custom documentation, audit etc.

TMS providers are proactively looking into new expectations of the transportation industry and coming forward with a suite of specialized solutions. Oracle Transportation Management (OTM) 6.0 series fulfils gaps in the standard TMS offering with the introduction of advanced fleet management, transportation sourcing, cooperative routing and fusion transportation intelligence (FTI) capabilities.

Posted by Guest Blogger at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 3 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Anand N P N, Consultant - Business Intelligence, Oracle Practice, Enterprise Solutions, Infosys Technologies Ltd.

Oracle BI Applications has been in the market for a long time now and has matured as a packaged solution offering over the years. However, as more and more clients choose to implement BI Applications, the question still is - are they making an informed choice? The second major concern is - Is the implementation leveraging the best features of the OBI Apps?

Although the build versus buy debate has now tilted in favour of 'Buy', there are still chances that the choice of packaged BI Applications happens for wrong reasons.

The reasons usually are -

• Customers expect that BI Apps would solve all their reporting woes with a simple vanilla BI Apps implementation and some customizations. The fact actually is that any analytical tools provide a new view of data and the journey of understanding data through different dimensions just begins.
• Business wants the technical teams to provide all the answers to enable quick and efficient decision making. What business team do not realize is that the tool can only provide right answers if the right questions are asked. This leads to the most pertinent question - Is the business asking the right questions?
• As is the case with most of the BI implementations, the business is not very clear about what KPIs they want to report on. The BI development is almost always iterative unless the requirement is broken down to the lowest level of detail right at the beginning of the development. Business needs to be in loop at every stage of the development life cycle by understanding the key focus areas and pain points which can be addressed by implementing BI Apps.

The decision making process for choosing Oracle BI Apps as a strategic tool should be simple as well -

• Availability of any Oracle source like EBS, Siebel CRM, JDE or Peoplesoft as source systems
• Ability to leverage the best features of the OBIEE tool which is highly integrated with the Oracle source
• Ability to leverage industry best practices which are already available as a part of ETL best practices and Repository best practices. This, according to me is the most important feature of BI Applications

So what are some of the expectations that the customers should have while choosing Oracle BI apps?

• A tested framework against which all enterprise data can be measured: The most important task of BI has always been to be able to present a single version of truth to the business. Oracle BI simplifies this task by providing a trusted framework which is both extensible as well as scalable.
  The benefit of this point is often overlooked by the customers but the realization often comes later only when the users and application support teams in the Oracle BI applications space are far more comfortable with their deployment than the traditional Data warehousing-reporting teams.
• Standard set of KPIs: Oracle's BI Applications leverage industry best practices and provides a standard set of KPIs as an out-of-box functionality. This provides the customers a fair idea of functionality that is already available and can be leveraged without incurring development costs. (Here development is different from configuration. Most development for vanilla BI Apps implementation still falls under configuration and not actual development. Development would ideally be required when a deviation from vanilla functionality is required)
• Reduction of Integration costs: The data in an enterprise is often fragmented and present in many different systems. Hence silos of data or data marts cannot provide the best insight into all the data in these systems. BI Applications solve this issue to a great extent by providing pre-built adapters to EBS, Siebel CRM, JDE or Peoplesoft. There are also Universal Adapters to non-Oracle data sources.
• Alerts: Alerts are a powerful feature when leveraged well and can provide really actionable insights in BI Applications. This facility provides users direct control over their KPIs and any deviations which need to be measured

One of the major contributing factors for the successful implementation and support of Oracle BI Apps is the presence of the right implementation partner for the business. The partner should have an expertise in source system applications for providing the right value-add to the client's business needs. With the right partner and the right set of skill sets, the full capabilities of BI Apps start to unravel and the journey from just 'looking at data' to 'understanding the data' begins.

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It is commonly believed that each WMS implementation is an IT implementation. This is not necessarily true. As a matter of fact each WMS implementation is an operational implementation and not an IT one. The softer aspects of a warehouse, like the warehouse sizing, configuration, location all come into play while consultants device an IT solution for the WMS. If these are ignored, and the WMS project becomes IT-driven it may have potentially negative impacts on the success of the implementation. As they say IT follows business and not vice versa. This is all the more true when it comes to warehouse management systems implementation.

Other classic examples are the designs of interfaces between the host ERP software and the WMS. To reap the best results, the designs should follow the business. There is not a penny's worth to implement a framework that does not resemble the actual operations closely since it will be detrimental to the productivity of warehouse operators and operations at large. This once again substantiates that WMS implementations are operational in nature and not IT.

Sometimes it is best not to implement best practices. Originations should identify the pain processes and try to alleviate them by looking at possible business process re-engineering options or having a few system solutions. The concerted effort should be on a fewer number of processes that are critical to the business. In some cases, that might mean making them world class or best of breed as they say, and in others, it might mean just doing the process in a unique way that is essential for that DC's way of doing business or meeting customer needs. This may translate to customizations to the WMS under considerations.

Retailers around the world have realized that, they all look at SMART ways to reap rich dividents. Sometimes, keeping it SIMPLE counts, it counts really big. Sometimes Best may not be Best.

Posted by Amit Sinha at 3:33 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Enterprise mobility requires extending Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply Chain Management (SCM) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems beyond fixed infrastructure to create an agile and responsive enterprise. Banking, energy, utilities, healthcare, and manufacturing are gravitating towards connected devices and networked systems.

Companies are introducing tablet PCs in the workplace. Security concerns must be addressed to extend enterprise applications to mobile devices. Business-critical functions such as sales, field service, inventory management, logistics, and customer service have to be delivered on-the-go. An integrated mobile platform for cross-application collaboration allows both the company as well as its digital customers to take informed decisions in real time. In effect, mobile computing has shifted the enterprise focus from 'connecting systems and data' to 'connecting people on-the-go'.

The diversity of mobile devices and platforms increases the complexity to create a personalized application for each user - smart phones versus tablets, custom-built versus commercial mobile middleware, web-based versus thick client applications, and in-house versus cloud-based service, among others. Mobility also requires enterprises to strike the right balance between the cost of operations, complexity in architecture, ease of deployment, security, flexibility, and the features and functionalities of core applications.

How close is your company towards realizing enterprise mobility?

Ravi Kumar S. is the Vice President and Global Head - Oracle Practice, Enterprise Solutions, Infosys Technologies Limited.

Posted by Ravi Kumar S. at 5:34 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 2 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Traditionally retailers have many a shipping sites from which they fulfill the retail stores or end customers. The shipping networks and the distribution points may seem to be a complex mesh to begin with. Upon careful analysis many a retailers have established that it is economical to fulfill their end customers by shipping via a consolidation distribution center. Principally, the savings from a consolidation distribution center comes from reduced transportation costs. Also in certain scenarios it also leads to reduced inventory from holding inventory in fewer locations.

What we are talking of here is that a Responsive supply chain is also a Responsible supply chain, it is more environmentally and socially responsible. And at the end of the day it is also more financially viable. These practices can lead to reductions in empty and circuitous miles, and also increased cubic capacity utilization. They can also lead to reduction in the number of vehicles required, reduction in net freight expenses and other operational efficiencies. The savings opportunity comes from switching expensive LTL freight out of the plant to full truckload to the distribution center.

The million dollar question is when is it more economical to ship direct to store and when is it more economical setting up a consolidation center. For the sake of comparison, if an organization is thinking about shipping a couple of cases via parcel from multiple sites Direct To Store is the way to go. If an organization is thinking about LTL shipments from multiple ship locations it starts to be more economical to look at a consolidation center. The other factor is the distance from the shipping site to the consolidation center. If by combining all the store direct orders you can ship a Full Truckload to the consolidations center and then combine that with the freight from multiple factories it reduces the inbound freight cost and the store delivery cost which would offset the cost of a consolidation center. Mathematics involved here is far complex as I have stated though.

Let us now look at the IT side of this initiative. ERP host systems can be modeled to align the distribution point network and the carrier routing maps to derive the most optimum carrier and service levels to be used for transportation. Although the warehouse can be provided with veto of optimize the carrier, nevertheless the prescribed shipment information can be sent down in the pick release instructions. There are many best of breed and ERP warehouse and transportation management systems available in the market that can help achieve these results. Rate Shopping modules are widely available in almost all packages like Manhattan (Rate Shopping), JDA Software Services (Pfastship), High Jump's Warehouse Advantage (K-Ship) and Oracle Shipping execution that can help achieve and benchmark these transportation strategies. Oracle Transportation Management is also a widely used product to achieve load consolidation.

There are many means but only one end. Green Supply Chains are the need of the hour and pulse of the industry. Green supply chains have yielded Green dividends, as many retailers have already realized.

Posted by Amit Sinha at 4:01 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Chander Mohan Bhargava, Lead Consultant, Oracle Practice, Enterprise Solutions, Infosys Technologies Ltd.

In Insurance Company, Billing system retrieves policy and billing details from policy administration system and handles the following transactions from a systems perspective:

• Billing and Statements
• Premium Collection
• Billing Adjustments and Refunds
• Billing related Inquiries and Customer Service
• Cancellations

Because of the criticality of the above mentioned processes and lengthy insurance policy premium paying terms, billing is regarded as the key customer service touch point. Most of the carriers have marked it as "Very Important" for customer satisfaction, indicating it impacts Customer retention in a big way.

The various researches performed on the key processes of the Insurance carriers have substantiated that the Billing System employed by the Insurer can have 'Positive' impact on the Customer-Insurer relationship. Some of the key Billing features are given below:

1. Timely and Accurate Billing
2. Support for providing multiple bill plans to help customer to choose the plans that best fit their unique financial circumstances.
3. Ability to provide agents and customer service representatives with a 360-degree view of customer and account information to help faster resolution of customer inquiries. 
4. E-billing and Web-based, self-service options
5. Single-invoice generation capabilities for multiple policies billing, which might be issued from same or different LOB from same carrier to same customer.
6. Flexibility to adjust the payment schedule in case of a specific scenario. For example, impact because of economic downturns which we have seen in the last few years.
7. Capabilities to support the change in the risk coverage& hence the premium for a given time period.
8. Options to receive payment from multiple channels and timely notification for the premium payment or premium due notification.

Till recently legacy systems were capable enough to support the key billing needs of the carrier. But now, there is a greater need to have system which can be fine-tuned to changing needs of the customer by having rules in places to make it customer centric instead of transaction oriented as outlined earlier in this blog.

For a carrier, it is also important to have a billing infrastructure which has edge over competitor with capabilities like enabling business to introduce new products in short span of time, Capabilities to process the high volume transactions, availability of various Integration touch points to support the web based self-services, Reconciliation between various systems across enterprise and last but not least a way for efficient and cost saving processes.  To meet these needs - legacy implementation are proving to be a bottleneck. To avoid the bottleneck due to legacy Billing systems & to have cost effective solution, more and more carriers have started to modernize their billing infrastructure as a strategy which are based on various billing packages offered by IT Vendors.  

In the upcoming blog, we will discuss more about the various strategies on upgrading the Billing systems and products which are available in the market. 

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Guest post by
Samrat Vangari, Systems Engineer, Oracle Practice, Enterprise Solutions, Infosys Technologies Ltd.

Amidst soaring competition, meeting needs of a customer no more solely define Business. There is an addition "Accelerated Approach" to complete the definition of business. Adaptively, Business Intelligence restraining its familiarity and to curve it upwards, is all set with its comprehensive and Accelerated Approach.

BI with its accelerated approach ensures quickest and easiest way of analysis and reporting. Let's understand the scenes behind the screen that make it happen.

• Pre-Built Application: Built application is provided by pre-mapping the required tables with the application. This helps the users to avoid designing or modeling from scratch and turn out to be efficient and time saver. 
• Interactive User Interface: Users can create interactive dashboards and reports based on the requirements. This helps to be specific and provides the users comprehensive, interactive and a better application.
• Download and Deliver Facility: Reports and queries can be downloaded to various applications such as Power Point, Text, Excel, Word and PDF. Constitutes the ability of delivering reports to users through email or on their mobile devices. Also provides a facility of viewing reports online. Hence avoids the necessity of logging into the application to view the required information.
• Hierarchies: Dimensional hierarchies are provided or can be created. This facilitates drill down into data from high level of detail to the lowest level of detail. Few examples are as follows: i) Drill down from year, to quarter, to month and to the day. Ii) Drill down from product team, to product group and to product detail. 
• BI Tool Guide: Detailed information about the BI tool is provided to help the users to explore the application and to clarify in doubt. Hence, leaving no room for confusion or doubt. 
• Social Media: This is one of the keenly focused areas by BI, endeavoring to provide analysis on unstructured data available on various social sites on net. This facilitates a better understanding between consumers and producers. 
• Embedded business intelligence: Ability to navigate to the different applications or sites from the report where the users can modify or update the information considerably reducing the risk and time.

Equipped with all the above mentioned facets, BI is well placed on the track of acceleration providing sophisticated features, interactive and intelligent application. The beginning of approach is frictionless and highly appreciated leaving only space for glad acceptance of any new ventures by BI.

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