Infosys-Oracle Blog

Guest post by
Puneet Gupta, AVP and Head - Infosys Mobile Platforms, Infosys

Transcript

Your workforce is mobile. Less than 30% of your employee base can be considered as non-mobile. Your mobile workforce include your field sales and service staff and the corporate nomads. People who work out of offices but the modern workspace necessitates being away from their desks most of the time. 100s of millions are being spent on IT infrastructures and solutions like CRM. But unfortunately almost all this "IT" terminates on the computer on the desks which no longer is the primary computing and communication device.

Mobile email has shown the way. Multiple studies have shown that after mobile email and contacts management, SFA, FFA and customer facing apps mobilizations offer the biggest business case for enterprise to invest in mobility

And the exciting thing is that technology is ready- both from smart phone computing and communications capability. And there are many and great options.  But these options- or diversity is also a significant IT challenge. How do you extend your applications and business process to all the diverse families of mobile platforms- there's iPhone, android, ipad, blackberry, phone 7 and now there are a bunch of tablet options in all shapes and colors ., And there are options like browsers, native clients, messaging etc. How to ensure that consistent security is being enabled across devices and modes of mobile access. How do you make sure that unique experiences are being designed for families like tablets as opposed to porting of desktop experiences to tablets?

Infosys has been investing in this area for over 8 years building mobile middleware platforms like Infosys mConnect that allow you to leverage the power that our partners like Oracle have to offer without having to deal with the non-functional complexities associated with mobility.

Infosys "Next-Gen Customer Experience" solutions are a blend of enterprise applications such as Oracle Siebel CRM and Oracle Business Intelligence working in conjunction with Infosys‟ Intellectual Property such as Infosys mConnect and Voice of Customer. These are well supported by Infosys consulting /implementation /professional services. Mobile CRM applications developed on Infosys mConnect offer Rich User Experience utilizing the Native OS capabilities as well evolving open standards like HTML5. And with very flexible pricing models.

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Meet Infosys experts at Oracle OpenWorld 2011, Booth No. 1813, Moscone South

Explore more at  http://www.infosys.com/Oracle/news-events/Pages/oracle-openworld-sanfrancisco11.aspx

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

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Posted by Guest Blogger at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Shanmugam Gnanasambandam, Principal Consultant, Infosys

Today, enterprises have CRM systems/applications implemented to support their Marketing, Sales and Service functions, which have matured, over the last two decades as an On-Premise Application and also being offered now as an On Demand Application, for access through Desktops/Laptops.

The significant progress of mobile internet, which includes availability of a wide range of affordable smart phones/tablets, high speed internet connectivity on mobile devices and users becoming more and more tech savvy, has created a keen interest in the Mobile CRM space.

Enterprises are keen to explore Mobile CRM for enabling their field forces like Sales and Service teams to access important customer information through their mobile devices (mostly smart phones), on the move. On the other hand the CXOs and Senior Managers need key business information like, customer prospect/order details, operational statistics, performance reports and approval requests, to be accessed through their mobile devices (preferably tablets), to empower them to promptly serve their Customers and to rapidly respond to their Team Members and Partners.

Mobile CRM has a wide range of application areas for different industry verticals like, Banking/Finance/Insurance, Hi-Tech, Retail/Consumer Goods, Telecom, Energy/Utilities, Healthcare, Manufacturing, to name a few. In terms of the CRM functional areas, Mobile CRM offers handy applications like Mobile Sales Assistant, Mobile Field Service Application, Mobile Business Intelligence and Mobile Self Service, to name a few, which are truly beneficial to the employees, partners and customers of an organization.

Enterprises can work with their technology partners/consultants and evolve their mobility strategy, explore various solution options and then plan to implement it, in the near future, to remain competitive in their own market place.

To gain confidence and comfort feel, enterprises can adapt a phase wise solution implementation approach, which could start with a simple proof of concept, which can be tried and tested with the target users for a specific period of time. Then based on the end user feedback, this proof of concept solution could be fine-tuned and developed further into a full-fledged solution, for final deployment.

Some of the critical success factors for selecting and deploying enterprise mobility solutions like Mobile CRM are - Support for Mobile Device Diversity, User Friendly/Rich User Experience on Mobile Devices, Ease of Solution Deployment, Scalability and Good Performance on Thin Client / Thick Client based mobile applications.

While the CRM Package vendors are coming up with their own mobile enablement solutions, there are Mobility Solution vendors offering Mobile Enterprise Application Platforms, which facilitates enterprises to quickly mobile enable their CRM applications.

Instead of looking at Mobile CRM as an option, this is the right time for enterprises to consider it as a necessity and explore/deploy Mobile CRM solutions, to enable, rather empower their employees, partners and customers, to access and act on vital information, on the move. The benefits of Mobile CRM for an enterprise like - increased employee/partner productivity, enhanced customer satisfaction and business/revenue growth, would justify their investment.

Kindly share your thoughts, on this subject...

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Meet Infosys experts at Oracle OpenWorld 2011, Booth No. 1813, Moscone South

Explore more at  http://www.infosys.com/Oracle/news-events/Pages/oracle-openworld-sanfrancisco11.aspx

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

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Posted by Guest Blogger at 2:17 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 2 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Sushal Subashchandra Shetty, Consultant, Infosys

Are you not able to define effective territories for your sales organization?

Is your sales team swimming in the sea without targets?

Is your sales team cherry picking on prospects and you are not aware how to tackle it?

Are you losing track of your sales team's performance?

If answer to all/one of the above questions is yes, then my cent that you ought to read this further. The top problems which one of the large manufacturing company was facing were loss of productivity due to redundant and manual process, lack of consistent and efficient reporting, inaccurate commissioning.

If you are also facing the same problems as above then sales planning solution based on Oracle Fusion Applications is the one-stop solution for you.

Oracle Fusion Territory Management, Oracle Fusion Quota Management, Oracle Fusion Incentive Management modules are bundled together with a tight integration as a sales planning co-existence solution. Let us look at some interesting features of each of these modules:

Oracle Fusion Territory Management

This module will remove the redundancy and automating the territory management process to a great extent. The embedded BI will enhance the reporting, leading to informed decision making in sales teams. The USP's of this module are:

• Simulation and What -if modeling tools to maneuver your territories and visualize the effect of the same on revenue stream
• Territory Validation tools to identify the gaps, invalid territories
• Embedded BI to ensure "data to dollar" transformation, by giving real time reports on the health of the territory

Oracle Fusion Quota Management

Customers always wanted a tool to manage Quotas/sales targets and this module does exactly same. The tight integration with Oracle Fusion Territory Management module is "icing in cake" for this module as the seamless data flow ensures near -to - elimination of manual process for sales planning. This thereby, not only brings in a strategic sales planning engine but also increases the productivity and efficiency of sales team with below tools:

• In built tools for quota management like, Territory Quota Formulas, Spread formulas and Seasonality Factor Groups
• Support of Top Down and Bottom Approach for sales target definition

Oracle Fusion Incentive Compensation

Right Commissioning has always been the "ace in the hole" for retention of top sales talent and Oracle Fusion Incentive Compensation brings in effectiveness and objectivity to this process. The key differentiators for this module is :

• Embedded Dashboard/ Map representation to review the sales teams
• Support of Dispute Management
• Enhanced Sales Communication to enable sales team to achieve targets

This co-existence solution will provide a seamless solution along with your current ERP and CRM systems due to integration built on Oracle Service Oriented Architecture. So, basically you can still continue with your current ERP and other CRM application, but enhance your IT landscape with Oracle Fusion Sales planning solution. You can move your other applications to Oracle Fusion as you build a business case of the same. Thus, Sales planning solution will provide a complete, comprehensive solution for sales planning so that sales team of your organization can do what they do the best by increasing productivity and efficiency and retaining the top sales talent.

Disclaimer: Author has presented her views based on the working experience on Oracle Fusion Applications Beta.

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Meet Infosys experts at Oracle OpenWorld 2011, Booth No. 1813, Moscone South

Explore more at  http://www.infosys.com/Oracle/news-events/Pages/oracle-openworld-sanfrancisco11.aspx

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

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Posted by Guest Blogger at 9:13 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Srinath Pydimarri, Senior Consultant, Infosys

I have been observing the Social CRM market space for the last 1 year and the first impression I get is that organizations are far more closer to the reality of Social CRM - both in terms of their interest in Social CRM and the availability of suitable Social CRM solution options. Our frequent conversations with client organizations have gradually moved from being centered around 'What is Social CRM' to discussions on how Social CRM can be applied in the organization's context. In fact, a handful of our customers are coming up with specific scenarios where they'd like to see Social CRM in play. In many of the cases, however, we observe a sense of uncertainty and a few misgivings accompanying the tangible intent in taking up Social CRM, something that is common whenever organizations are faced with the prospect of new concepts and technologies. Organizations do seem to have a difficult time deciding what their first steps in Social CRM should be. I believe they can deal with this tricky situation by taking hints from the success stories that are slowly stemming around in the Social CRM space.

Having observed some of the best-in-class examples (Cisco, Intuit, P&G, Pepsi, Wells Fargo, Amex to name a few) and interacting with client organizations in this regard, I believe the following  to be necessary steps to ensure your Social CRM journey starts on the right note -

• Get the right team into place
  Social CRM aims to synchronize social media channels and traditional CRM, in an effort to enhance the customer-facing activities of an organization. It is imperative that organizations have a dedicated team that includes expertise on 3 key fronts - social media, traditional CRM and CRM business functions (sales / marketing/customer service) expertise. I believe the best approach is to have such teams led by the business functions as Social CRM usage has to tie-in to one or more of the key CRM functions. Such a team would be capable on answering the following key questions -
• Which CRM functions will social media usage impact and benefit the most
• Which social media is the most appropriate
• How to integrate social media with traditional CRM and act on social data

In addition to the above, such a well-constituted team would be best placed to scale up Social CRM efforts on an enterprise-wide scale

• Engage customers using appropriate social channels
  Identifying the appropriate social channel
  Social CRM intends to make CRM activities more customer-centric and it inherently means being able to take an organizations customer-facing activities onto channels that ensure greater customer reach and participation. Couple of key parameters that help in organizations narrow down their choice of social media are - the type of customer targeted (B2C / B2B / B2B2C etc) and the CRM function that is involved (sales / marketing / service). For example, there is a higher chance of connecting with retail customers of beverages on Facebook while corporate customers of a bank are best engaged using a dedicated community. Also, for an organization which aims to reduce its customer support costs, its interests are best served by enabling peer-to-peer support using customer communities where as an organization aiming to ensure greater reach of its marketing communication should resort to Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. Along with these two parameters, it's advised that organizations conduct a survey of / profile their customers to get an on which social channels a majority of their customers are using. In summary, the choice of social media by an organization would be a conjunction of the 3 dimensions - Type of the customer (B2C / B2B), business function (sales / marketing / service) and the preferred channel of the organization's customers.

Engaging customers using social channels
Success of an organization's engagement of its customer using social channels depends on how well it enables the following - connect, collaboration, and contribution. Rather than identifying the success criteria, which would greatly vary at an industry, organization and business function level, I'd rather call out a few guidelines organizations should adhere to in order to avoid failures -

• Mere social media presence presents the danger of social media being hijacked by brand detractors causing untold damage to brand reputation as witnessed in case of many a organizations' case.
• Organizations should establish a two-way communication with customers, and ensure rapid response to customer comments. Opportunities, capabilities  should be created for 'social' customers to actively converse - some useful ways are regular opinion polls / dedicated discussion forums / regular marketing communication / response to customer comments
• Greater a collaborative environment, greater is the customer participation on social channels and greater are the chances of crowdsourcing / customer-driven innovation
• Reward customer contribution. Social Analytics plays a great role in being able to identify key influencers so that organizations reward them suitably and reinforce brand loyalty, while also addressing concerns of brand detractors
• Conversations and content on social channels need to be moderated

We've observed that it takes many months, if not years to reach the right level of customer engagement!

• Identify the low-hanging fruits and execute a Proof of Concept (PoC)
  However much one theorizes on Social CRM, the only way to realize the true potential and the right approach is by doing a Proof of Concept (PoC). Looking at our own experiences, we've been able to understand a great deal on Social CRM once we started developing such PoCs. Customer Support by integrating Twitter and Traditional CRM, Aggregated Social Insights within CRM and Customer Engagement / Cross-sell using Facebook are some very simple, low-cost and easy-to-implement PoCs we developed. I believe organizations should opt for such PoCs as they stand to gain the following benefits -
• Create a Social CRM strategy and roadmap / understand gaps in their existing Social CRM strategy
• First-hand experience of the possible RoI from Social CRM
• Narrow down to specific Social CRM use cases that would be most appropriate for their context
• Understand the level of changes required at organization / business function / IT landscape levels and the cost impact of the same

Many organizations we've come across have started employing a social media tool - either a Social Community platform (Lithium, Jive etc.) or a Social Analytics tool (Radian6, SAS etc). A PoC would need such organizations to take the next step of involving a system integrator with the knowledge of social media tools and capabilities to create the end-to-end landscape required to implement a complete Social CRM solution.

The Infosys Next-Gen CRM Solutions team has been working for more than a year now conceptualizing and developing innovative Social-Mobile CRM solutions which aim to aid organizations start their journey towards Next Gen CRM. The key objective of these solutions is to enhance Traditional CRM systems of organizations with readily deployable, easily configurable Social CRM and Mobile CRM components.  We're interacting with a few existing and prospective Infosys clients across FSI, Manufacturing and CME domains to discuss the possibilities of implementing our solutions -

• Customer Self-Service using Social Media and Mobility
• Mobile Field Service
• Social Commerce
• Socio Mobile Loyalty Management

We'll be glad to discuss with you on how we can help 'give wings to your Social CRM dreams'!

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Meet Infosys experts at Oracle OpenWorld 2011, Booth No. 1813, Moscone South

Explore more at  http://www.infosys.com/Oracle/news-events/Pages/oracle-openworld-sanfrancisco11.aspx

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

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Posted by Guest Blogger at 8:55 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

In this age of N-tier applications, SOA and other cutting edge technologies, PL/SQL has been largely ignored and is considered legacy. Its main use has been relegated to batch processing and Oracle Applications programming. In fact, most modern puritan SOA architects recommend not to use PL/SQL at all as it becomes difficult to manage the logic being embedded in the database. In n-tier architectures where the business logic is supposed to be embedded in the application logic layer, logic embedded in database PL/SQL is almost considered a blasphemy.

I feel that even in modern SOAs it makes real sense to embed logic in PL/SQL for specific scenarios.  

Consider a scenario where an 3-tier application is being designed wherein the User-interface layer interacts with the middleware layer based on SOA which in turn interacts with the database to access & manipulate the relevant data.

In the above scenario there is a lot of performance impact for any request made from the user-interface as it has to go through the SOA abstraction layer to reach the database. In this scenario, having additional logic to perform data processing like filtering, aggregation and transformation in the SOA middleware will really hit the performance. SOA tools are not designed to perform data aggregation and complex transformations required in this scenario. Unfiltered Data will need to be fetched from the database and additional logic mostly in Java needs to be written to aggregate the data and perform the complex transformations.

This is where PL/SQL can help Turbo-charge the performance of the SOA-
1. Moves the processing to the database machine and reduces performance hit on application server
2. PL/SQL is designed for performing these data processing operations optimally
3. PL/SQL allows a much higher flexibility from a language perspective in processing the data
4. PL/SQL being close to the data source (within the databse) reduces need for network bandwidth
5. It is very easy to integrate PL/SQL in SOA using adapters

The drawbacks of using PL/SQL are -
1. Source code is embedded in Database and is tightly coupled to the table structures making change a painful affair
2. The monitoring of the PL/SQL code is difficult
3. It is proprietary to the database and hence difficult to port from one database to another

Inspite of the above drawbacks I strongly advocate the use of PL/SQL for extensive data processing requirements in an SOA.

Posted by Satyajith Nair at 4:04 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Granted, it is a provocative headline and I could already visualize question marks being raised on the headline itself of this blog. However, it is time we take a fresh look at good old point of sale (POS) application that has perhaps had its golden run for over 20+ years in its various incarnations by multitude of app developers.

Customer Touch Points:

Though commonly known as cash register to a layman at the checkout counter of a retail store, POS is the only retail applications that a customer comes face-to-face and store sales associate use to ring up a sale, or perform a sale transaction in a technical sense. For the uninitiated, in addition to a performing sale POS also helps perform returns at the customer service counter, and few additional things in terms of beginning of day and end of day processes such as opening the register for the day, totaling the sale at the end of the day/shift, and pass on all transactional information to corporate systems for additional processing and reporting. Therefore, POS is the only retail store application that provides a customer touch point. Similarly CRM applications that power retail sales performed through a call center (Siebel) or web store application that power online sale (ATG) provide the touch points for the end customers.

If these applications and associated channels they help power were to remain separate and islands in themselves, there won't be any need to look at them through a single lens. However, in the last 5 years, especially for brick-and-mortar retailers who have gradually moved into multi-channel world, the processes cutting across the channels not only just intersect but do it in such a way that systems for capturing customer sales order and fulfilling them need much more holistic solutions.

Today click n' collect is becoming extremely popular more so with increasing use of smart phones whereby the customer places an order online and collects the merchandise at a store. In this scenario customer could fully pay at the time picking up the merchandise at the store, or partly pay at the time of order and the rest at the store, or as a third alternative fully at the time of the order. Therefore, in effect two systems - online (e.g. ATG from Oracle) and retail POS (e.g. ORPOS from Oracle) - could end up processing and tendering customer orders, which in the isolated world would have been done only by respective applications. Though from the customer's perspective it is great, which is what is should be, from the system's perspective it is becoming challenging. Let us look at how seemingly simple scenario of click n' collect is doing to the systems:

1. Now the online system not only needs to capture the customer order, it also needs to let the store system know that the order needs to be filled.
2. Store systems, which POS is part of, needs to understand and fill a customer order sent by completely different system. Though rudimentary customer order taking feature has been available in a packaged application like ORPOS, handshake with other order taking system like ATG is not there and will have to be added.
3. When ORPOS fills the order, the store system also needs to loop back to online system to update its status that the order has been filled. Again this is another handshake that in the current scenario will have to be a custom interface solution.
4. If this is not enough, somewhat bigger challenge is financially accounting two different transactions from two different systems to figure out total sale amount realized from the customer order, reducing the inventory, and margins made. Typically one transaction from POS would be funneled and audited through the sales audit system (e.g. Oracle ReSA). Now ReSA will have to reconcile multiple transactions from two dissimilar systems to realize income, and inventory updates, which could again require customization to existing package.
5. We could add more complexity to this scenario, e.g. multiple fulfillments against one customer order, and one could visualize how difficult it would make financial accounting of the sale.
6. I have not even talked about various fulfillment scenarios that could make the entire process even more complex. For example, a retailer might decide to fulfill all customer order from the warehouse instead of from the store where it is being picked up.
7. Another complex scenario is when a customer order is part merchandise sale and part future income e.g. when a telecom provider sells a mobile phone device - a merchandise sale - that also includes a calling plan with monthly invoicing - a future income.

Simpler Systems:

If we had one system that could perform store sale similar to POS as well as handle online and call center orders from customers, our task will be that much simpler as all tendering and sale transaction will be performed with the same system with no necessity to reconcile multiple transactions from multiple systems. Fulfillment and financial accounting will be that much simpler to handle from the system's perspective.

Therefore from Oracle's perspective if ATG, Siebel, and ORPOS were to merge into a single customer sale/order system this could lead to much simpler system than building custom interfaces and providing custom bolt-on solutions for each retailer to achieve the above objectives.

Posted by Srinivas Iyer at 5:27 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Rohit Kaul, Senior Technology Architect, Infosys

I happened to read about a Greek philosopher in my kids school books and it reminded me of my school days where we read about methods of learning via questioning. It must have taken a great deal of courage from that man to question and challenge the existing set ups and systems. As it turns out his methodology is what comes naturally to all of us in IT (constantly questioning and brainstorming on the best solutions).

This set me thinking - What questions would the Greek philosopher have asked before choosing Exadata as the preferred solution? Below is a possible set along with elaboration:

All in all, it should stand us in good stead, if we are able to put on the philosopher's cap as customers OR as solution providers, to brainstorm on the best possible solution and keep us ahead of the game. What do you think?

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Meet Infosys experts at Oracle OpenWorld 2011, Booth No. 1813, Moscone South

Explore more at  http://www.infosys.com/Oracle/news-events/Pages/oracle-openworld-sanfrancisco11.aspx

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

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Posted by Guest Blogger at 9:50 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Abhishek Prasad Verma, Lead Consultant, Infosys

Power sector historically has been late in adopting IT to enable and streamline its business processes. The same is evident in its archaic operations and built in inefficiencies. However recently there has been a considerable effort by the utilities to look for all available options to improve operational efficiency in various field of operation like customer services, metering, billing etc. for improved customer services & tariff rationalization. So is the case with Asset Management System. In the first wave of transformation, the industry is looking forward to go softer and leaner i.e. it is exploring IT to replace its "Hard Book" based archaic manual systems.

This transformation is not easy and there are various challenges in getting softer. Few of them are -

1. Streamlining the business processes: Processes in Power distribution company are archaic and often burdened with non-value add activities because of reliance on paper based transactions and over-emphasis on delegation of power in absence of lack of transparency and system. The software can be as effective as the business process. And hence it is very important to streamline the business processes related with asset and maintenance management before having a software design.
2. Creating an Asset repository: Most of the distribution companies do not have a single view of the assets installed on the field because of the use of distributed paper based asset registers. Without a proper system it is practically impossible to track and maintain assets in this industry which is characterized by assets that are geographically scattered and involve frequent movement esp the ones like transformers and meters. Hence it is of utmost importance to create a realistic asset repository in terms of its technical, operational, location, network and financial parameters.
3. Asset Modeling: Asset modeling involves asset classification and identification of relevant parameters for each asset type. Often asset modeling in an asset management system is guided by asset management and maintenance perspective. However for an effective business process cutting across the IT landscape, it is very important to see asset management system in integration with other dependent systems like billing, meter data management, meter data acquisition and energy audit system. The asset modeling in asset management should be holistic in a way that it can capture and provide asset information required by other systems.
4. Asset Numbering: Asset numbering is a way of uniquely identifying an asset and tracking its entire life cycle. Often a debated issue related with asset numbering is intelligent vs dumb numbering. Both have their pros and cons and it is essential to discuss this out in the early stage of the implementation.
5. Treatment of Linear Assets: Linear assets like conductors and cables, unlike point assets are continuous assets and hence modeling them in the system is a bit tricky. They can be treated as group assets based on length or companies may decide to treat each segment as separate Asset. There is a tradeoff between accuracy of information and ease of operation in the system in both the approaches that should be weighed upon.
6. Variations in Depreciation Method: Any asset management system provides standard set of depreciation method like straight-line, No deprecation, Group depreciation, double declining balance etc. But sometimes depreciation method is mandated by the relevant regulatory body ex in India distribution companies follow the depreciation method as prescribed by CERC. It is a variant of a straight line depreciation method where for specific duration the asset is depreciated at fixed rate and hence forth the WDV is equally apportioned to the remaining useful life of the asset. Such methods need substantial customization in the standard packages.
7. The Financial Value of Existing Assets: Most of the utilities value and depreciate assets in group without individual asset level information like asset serial number, installation date etc in their manual books. Therefore the transition from old book based system to IT enabled AM system, has challenges in terms of apportioning the asset value to individual assets on the field. This creates a need to develop an approach to have proper asset valuation from the system in the transition phase.
8. Shift from distributed to collaborative roles and responsibilities: Traditionally asset management was an exercise distributed between O&M and Accounts department. However with advent of systems it becomes more of a collaborative task right from creation to the retirement of an asset. This is an important challenge to be catered to as part of change management exercise.

Though the challenges highlighted above are common for each implementation in a power distribution industry and there are best practices to resolve them, the actual solution may differ from company to company. Hence it is very important for the business and the IT implementation partner to discuss and have a solution map for them early in the implementation phase.

Note: I would like to specifically mention Abhishek Bhargava, Senior Consultant with Infosys for sharing ideas for this blog.

___________________________________________________________________________________________

Meet Infosys experts at Oracle OpenWorld 2011, Booth No. 1813, Moscone South

Explore more at  http://www.infosys.com/Oracle/news-events/Pages/oracle-openworld-sanfrancisco11.aspx

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

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Posted by Guest Blogger at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Steven Stein, Principal Consultant, Infosys

I am proud to discuss this year at Oracle OpenWorld something we do as consultants for large organizations. This presentation was originally given during a state government implementation. State government reporting is like doing an implementation for 50 different major companies simultaneously. They all had complex statutory obligations, different legacy tools, and different user communities. The leadership of the implementation team wanted to better understand how OBIEE would be able to schedule reports, handle security for such a massive audience, integrate with their portal and ERP system, and what were the benefits of moving off the old tools such as SQR and Crystal. As our team prepared the presentation and were doing rehearsals, we kept switching from one persona to another, saying that the administrator would do this, and then the end user would see this, and these features would be like what an operational user would see, but a manager would want to see something else. My manager said, "why don't we split up this presentation into segments by four different personas." When we did this, it changed everything and made the whole thing so much clearer.

Who are the four personas (four user types)?

The four user types are operational, manager, power developer, and system administrator. There are actually a lot of user types left out of this presentation, including the executive, the performance troubleshooter, the RPD developer. Also I always say in the beginning of this presentation (except in the 5 minute version) that the four user types almost always overlap - rarely is someone purely one user type without having a connection to other types. And in addition to that, the new interface makes the operational user more managerial and analytic naturally.

What is this presentation about?

The presentation is centered around showing the feature/ functionality of OBIEE in the context of these four user types. OBIEE needs to be understood as a system that will be simultaneously in production for all of them. How can massive operational reporting be achieved so that when business opens up early in the morning, all the operational reports are available and quickly retrievable so that operations clerks can do their jobs? For management reporting, can we see a true menu of aggregative analytic reports that perform data mining and actionable navigation that managers can use as a jumping off point for doing all the analytical work they need to do their jobs? What about development of reports, how is it done? In the large multi-unit organization, how can shared folders be organized so that power developers can share their work with the teams, organizations? Finally the systems administrator, who is probably used to managing a large system of reports bursting and distribution, what will his/her life be like after OBIEE is implemented? OBIEE's robust features for role-based and data-based security at the object level, scheduling, output of large result sets to cache that persist throughout the day, publishing to roles, notifications, and FTP and e-mail notifications are all covered.

How can attending benefit me and my organization?

One of my favorite descriptions of user conferences is that it is a place where we who have implemented these systems come together and share expensive mistakes and how to fix them.

The failure to communicate important context about how the OBIEE implementation scales as it is developer for a large organization is a huge problem, maybe the biggest problem with large scale adoption of OBIEE reporting. We found that once we presented OBIEE in the context of these four user types, it made it possible to discuss and understand the points of this presentation in an hour, in a few minutes, or over the course of weeks depending on who was listening and what we were trying to do.

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If you are at the Oracle OpenWorld 2011, we are pleased to invite you for this session:

Four Types of Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Users (Session ID - 9386)

Schedule : Tuesday,  October 4,  10:15-11:15 PDT 

Venue : Moscone West - 2000

Also meet Infosys experts at Booth No. 1813, Moscone South, Oracle OpenWorld 2011

Explore more at  http://www.infosys.com/Oracle/news-events/Pages/oracle-openworld-sanfrancisco11.aspx

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

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Posted by Guest Blogger at 1:40 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

We had earlier discussed about Oracle's OSP, in relation to contract manufacturing and how it aligns to business needs. Subcontracting is another module that has been gaining in terms of popularity. Subcontracting is a common business practice where a brand-owner or an Original Equipment Manufacturer outsources its entire manufacturing operations or a portion of it by entering into a contractual agreement with an external manufacturing service provider commonly known as a Manufacturing Partner. This is the CMO we have been talking along all the while.

From a system standpoint following would be the sequence of events involved in a typical subcontracting cycle.

1. Creation of a subcontracting order and its communication to the CMO.
2. Automatic creation of the discrete job for assembly production in CMO premises.
3. Automatic creation of purchase orders for procuring the component/ingredient items from the retailer.
4. Automatic creation of the sales order for the component items.
5. Shipment against the SO for the component orders to the CMO.
6. Automatic receipt of the component items in CMO.
7. Assembly manufacture in CMO against the discrete job.
8. Shipment of assembly to the retailer.
9. Receive the final assembly in the retailer premises.
10. Automatic completion and closure of the discrete job

It is to be noted that modeling of business cycles requires setting up Retailer and CMO as inventory organizations. The module supports two modes of component types.

Synchronized: In this case the components are shipped to CMO with reference to a specific Subcontracting Order along with the order.
Pre-positioned: In this case the components are shipped to CMO without reference to any Subcontracting Order ahead of assembly requirements.

Also worth discussing is the nature of subcontracting. If the retailer charges the CMO upfront for the components supplied and pays for the services received separately, then we talk in terms of Chargeable subcontracting.

If the retailer nets off the payables and receivables invoices in the case above, it is termed as Buy/Sell subcontracting.

Today systems are available with strong features that can suit ever increasing business needs. In certain cases we might have to customize the vanilla application, but as they say IT always follows business.

Posted by Amit Sinha at 11:28 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Nipun Lakhotia, Consultant, Infosys

All organisations are bugged with 'Go Green' mantra. Carbon reduction is no longer an environmental decision that is forced upon as an obligation. Emergence of carbon trading and related economic benefits has evolved carbon emission reduction as one of the strategic decision. Even customers are willing to pay premium for offerings with greener credentials.

Backbone of any green supply chain is the green transportation processes - from planning to execution. As per report by leading supply chain journal, as much as 75 per cent of a company's carbon footprint comes from transportation and logistics alone. This provides a strong business case for incorporating mechanisms that reduce carbon footprint in transportation supply chain.

"You cannot manage what you cannot measure" - Logistics industry should develop international standard for carbon accounting and reporting. These metrics will drive all initiatives pertaining to carbon reduction and should generate significant data points to correlate economic benefits from such programs.

Perspective towards logistics service providers is also changing. Lowest bidders no longer rule the trade. Shippers expect service providers to align their systems to reduce carbon emissions and provide data points to support their green initiative.

Transportation planners should not only optimize loads based on service time, mode, carrier, utilization etc. but should also account for environmental impact such as carbon emission, carbon credits, environment tax etc. For example, DHL provides carbon emissions data on each shipment level.

Planners can leverage Transportation Management Systems (TMS) to transform logistics supply chain via

• Efficient load configuration - Container dimensions and space requirements
• Dynamic route optimization - Based on real time traffic information
• Co-operative routing - Load sharing across multiple service providers
• Mode shift - Replacing ground/air modes with less polluting rail/water
• Reduce idle time - Dock Scheduling
• Optimum Packaging - Reduce paper consumption
• Support processes - EDI for invoice/voucher settlements

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 pre-built dashboard  for measuring various green metrics like CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) emissions, NOX (Oxides of Nitrogen) Emissions, PM (Particulate Matter) Emissions, Total Fuel Consumption etc. As per Oracle, formulas used in OTM Green Dashboard are designed as per data provided by the EPA SmartWay program that is intended to offer a baseline for green calculations.

___________________________________________________________________________________________

Meet Infosys experts at Oracle OpenWorld 2011, Booth No. 1813, Moscone South

Explore more at  http://www.infosys.com/Oracle/news-events/Pages/oracle-openworld-sanfrancisco11.aspx

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

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Posted by Guest Blogger at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Contract manufacturers provide advantages over internal manufacturing thereby leading to lower costs, access to external expertise and reduced capital expenditures. It is obvious that in order to make the CMO engagement symbiotic and mutually beneficial, the contract manufactures need to live up the customer's quality standards.

The world of a contract manufacturer is also infested with many challenges. As contract manufacturing business development wins more deals, the risk of the contract manufacturer not being able to recover his investment decreases because similar outsource product manufacturing programs often have similar startup support requirements.

Typical support investments, for outsource manufacturing programs include NRE expenses (non-recurring engineering) and ENRE expenses (extended non-recurring engineering).

While I was researching on contract manufacturing engagements I came across a risk management discussion that I would like to share with you. The risk management equation below emphasizes components of the process when contract manufacturers assess risk mitigation and risk management, where:

1. N = Number of deals the contract manufacturer wins from the retailers each year
2. NRE = Non-recurring engineering expenses (NRE)
3. ENRE = Extended NREs (ENRE) expenses
4. P-Vol = Product life cycle sales volume
5. TP = Transfer price for the value added services
6. CRE = Cost of recurring expenditures (excludes CENRE)

Contract Manufacturer's portfolio Risk Management is represented by:

Summation ( NRE+ ENRE) / Summation P-Vol (TP-CRE)

Please refer: http://www.ventureoutsource.com/contract-manufacturing/benchmarks-best-practices/contract-manufacturing-risk-mitigation-and-risk-management

There are a few factors that can jeopardize a contract manufacturer's profit and adversely impact the CMO engagement. These are:

• Late time-to-market: Speed to market is a key benefit for a typical CMO engagement
• Limited flexibility
• Poor quality of products

Once the contract manufacturers are able to strike the equation above,  supply chain bubble settle and CMO engagement bears fruition.

Acknowledgement: Contract manufacturing risk mitigation and risk management by Mr. Mark Zetter

Posted by Amit Sinha at 5:05 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Vinayak Gangadhar Kurdekar, Technology Lead, Infosys

Businesses today need to increasingly leverage a unified platform to host all their database and applications at one place. To meet this challenge, Oracle has designed the Exadata server technology that bundles database and applications together to provide high performance, high availability, scalability and throughput. Mere implementation of the exadata server and its components is not enough. Disasters can strike at anytime. To ensure survivability and safeguard against any major disasters, effective backup and recovery solution is a must. The backup and recovery strategy needs to be not only precise but proven in all aspects. To achieve this Oracle has come out with multiple backup and recovery solutions designed in-house and third party.

1. Disk based backup and recovery.
2. Tape based backup and recovery.
3. Backup and recovery using dataguard.

Oracle's solution for effective backup and recovery of exadata is achieved using time tested recovery manager. Using recovery manager or RMAN in short we can take full backups and even incremental backups of the exadata server. RMAN is designed to work intimately with exadata server providing for block corruption detection during back and restore. The backups can be automatically parallelized across the exadata storage servers to save time. In addition, the backups can also be compressed using native compression methods and Exadata hybrid columnar compression resulting in substantial savings in terms of storage space and time required to perform the backup and restore operations. Disk based backups have the added advantage that they can be used directly without any type of restoration required. Approximate backup and recovery rates using exadata database machine for physical files are:

Exadata has been designed to integrate with Oracle Secure backup (OSB) and other third party solutions for taking tape based backups. Using Oracle secure backup we can backup both the filesystem and the database. OSB can be used to encrypt backups for increased security and reliability. Tape based backups can also be scaled linearly by adding media servers and tape drives. Multiple copies of tape based backups can be stored at offsite for added safety. If dataguard is configured as a high availability measure then both disk and tape backups can be performed on the physical standby environment without impacting the performance of the primary system.

The backup and recovery solution for performing either disk or tape backups can be fully automated by using RMAN scripts. This requires minimal human intervention and removes the manual effort required for performing daily backups, resulting in huge cost savings to the customer. Many customers have successfully adopted this concept in their production environments.
___________________________________________________________________________________________

Meet Infosys experts at Oracle OpenWorld 2011, Booth No. 1813, Moscone South

Explore more at  http://www.infosys.com/Oracle/news-events/Pages/oracle-openworld-sanfrancisco11.aspx

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Posted by Guest Blogger at 2:30 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Guest post by
Swati Maskara, Senior Associate Consultant, Infosys

The Economics of Cloud Computing is by now well established with its claim to reduce cost, improve efficiency and decrease time consumption when a cloud environment is used by a business.

With respect to Business Intelligence there is a need to understand dynamics of cloud computing for performing business analytics. The article intends to do so by addressing few questions around Cloud computing:

• How Cloud qualifies as an efficient platform for performing Business analytics?
• How is Cloud model different from SaaS?
• How organizations can derive maximum value from a Cloud setup and what are the major challenges?

The article discusses these aspects in detail to bring forth the view point that Cloud model for performing BI is undoubtedly going to restructure and modernize IT within organizations.

How Cloud qualifies as an efficient platform for performing Business analytics?
With respect to BI, Cloudanomics provides the ability to perform advance and complex analytics on terabytes of data stored on the cloud infrastructure and deliver management reports. 

• Cloud Computing- The off premise arrangement
  Cloud Computing offers significant cost and efficiency advantages by providing the customers with the hardware, software, security and required domain expertize needed to create and manage huge data marts and data warehouses. The data marts created are then linked to computational tools available on the cloud facilitating business analytics. The analysis is made available to the customer by integrating the reports generated on the cloud with client's environment. This requires a defined data integration and BI Strategy.
• Cloud Computing- The Benefits
  Cloud customers are relieved from investing upfront in storage space for creating data marts, acquiring and upgrading the computational tool to perform analytics, required manpower or licensing the software. These are made available by the vendor on a pay-as-you-use basis. Data marts created using Cloud infrastructure can be cancelled after the business requirements are met and the hardware and software deployed becomes available to be used elsewhere. This ensures optimum utilization of resources by the software companies.

How is Cloud Computing different from software as a service (SaaS) model which already provides on demand BI solutions to customers?

Following are fundamental differences:-

• SaaS delivers an application as a utility whereas the Cloud delivers computing as a utility. Cloud customers can make use of advance computing technology available on the cloud
• SaaS model is based on Multi-Tenant Data Architecture whereas Cloud customers have dedicated servers for storing their  data
• Cloud customers have greater control over server settings and hence ensuring greater security

Hence Cloud platform ensures enhanced data security, improved ability for analytics and greater control.

How organizations can derive maximum value from a Cloud setup and what are the major challenges?

Apart from the above advantages Cloud Computing for BI can come very handy for mid-size businesses and Non Profit Organizations where the analysis is usually performed by either using alternate low cost BI tools or the traditional spread sheets. Also industries facing a seasonal demand for analytics can make use of Pay-as-you-use Model. Cloud platform can also be leveraged to provide a medium to the client for evaluating and testing various technologies. Organizations need to learn how to derive maximum value from a Cloud setup.

Cloud technology for performing analytics however, has to deal with issues around data security and data integration. Businesses are often reluctant to share sensitive information on the cloud. There is a need for the vendors to design products which meet the quality and integrity standards required by the clients before they place mission critical data on the cloud. Also there has to be a clear data integration and BI strategy in place for the reports and information to be delivered back to the enterprise as and when required since the availability of accurate and timely information defines the thrust for any BI tool.

With more and more organizations using Cloud platform for performing analytics, the inhibitions of businesses will also decrease, however there is a need for vendor maturity in order to provide clients with better and more efficient platform for performing informed analytics and improve the quality of services.

___________________________________________________________________________________________

Meet Infosys experts at Oracle OpenWorld 2011, Booth No. 1813, Moscone South

Explore more at  http://www.infosys.com/Oracle/news-events/Pages/oracle-openworld-sanfrancisco11.aspx

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

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Posted by Guest Blogger at 3:49 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 2 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )