In this Supply Chain Matters blog posting, supply chain business process and technology industry analyst Bob Ferrari provides highlights and takeaways from Oracle’s Future of Business online event held this week and specifically, an announcement related to newly announced advanced analytics capabilities focused on analyzing supply chain impacts to business performance metrics.

 

The Event

In conjunction with a virtual event held this week, enterprise infrastructure and Cloud applications technology provider Oracle announced general availability of a new Cloud based analytics capability that provides the tech provider’s Fusion Cloud Supply Chain and Manufacturing (SCM) customers the insights needed to detect, understand, and resolve issues faster across the supply chain.

The event itself was the fourth in a series of focused events titled the Future of Business. These events are anchored by Steve Miranda, Oracle’s Senior Vice President for Applications Development. Supply Chain Matters has provided previous highlights of these effective, rapid-fire events including the event held in July of this year.

This week’s event featured TK Anand, Senior Vice President for Analytics Product Management, as well as customer testimonials from representatives from CORSAIR Gaming and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). The former was especially of interest since it was disclosed that the gaming company served as one of the customer co-development partners for this week’s newly announced SCM analytics capabilities.

In his talk, Anand noted Oracle’s product strategy relative to advanced analytics began in the summer of 2019 and has moved toward releases of pre-configured Oracle Fusion analytics offerings associated with specific Oracle Fusion ERP applications such as financial management and HRM needs beginning in May of 2020. These capabilities have been anchored in design principles for purpose -built capabilities aimed for line-of-business and functional users that feature pre-built data models, key performance indicators and dashboards. Analytic capabilities are coupled to conversational and other user interfaces that can provide cross functional business process insights for business users. They feature ready for use formats and provide abilities to mine data from other Oracle or non-Oracle sources of data.

Business and functional users are thus able to leverage advanced technology such as artificial intelligence and machine learning without deep knowledge of data science such as SQL calls and more easily understand where data has originated and how such data can be analyzed to determine implications.

In a featured interview with the CIO of CORSAIR Gaming, Steve Miranda indicated that the company was one of the principal Oracle customer design co-development partners for the newly announced Fusion SCM Analytics application announced this week. The gaming company has had to deal with the effects of a global wide shortage of semiconductor graphic processors amid increased orders for the company’s most popular gaming device. Noted was that in the company’s recent report of financial performance, company executives indicated that upwards of 10 percent of revenues were impacted by the semiconductor device shortfalls.

 

Announced Fusion SCM Analytics Capabilities

The termed Oracle Fusion SCM Analytics capabilities announced this week provides Oracle Fusion Cloud Supply Chain and Manufacturing (SCM) customers the insights needed to detect, understand and resolve issues in a faster manner. This capability is built on Oracle Analytics Cloud and Oracle Data Warehouse and delivers pre-built metrics and dashboards to help line-of-business and supply chain leaders to better control costs, reduce risks, ensure customer satisfaction, and meet revenue objectives. In essence, Oracle Fusion SCM Analytics becomes a system of insights for analytics data related to supply chain performance and key business metric outcomes, options or scenarios.

The new capability has reportedly been pre-designed to provide a more comprehensive view of supply chain wide operations with an emphasis on what impacts supply chain performance might have on business metrics and further allow businesses and associated supply chain management teams to better prepare for anticipated or future disruptions.

Highlights of this capability include:

  • Key performance indicator (KPI) focused dashboards designed to provide deeper insights into order management fulfillment, inventory and procurement processes. These pre-built capabilities provide access to comprehensive metrics as to how the supply chain is performing, what specific areas need to be improved and in what area cost savings can be achieved.

 

  • The ability to correlate supply chain processes with specific business goal attainment related to optimizing resources or achieving specific customer service goals. As an example, business leaders dealing with challenges related to supply chain talent needs have the ability to examine human resource or finance data within Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM or Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP to better identify labor and skill needs. There is a further ability to access third-party data ESR data (Environmental, Social and Governance) that might include industry benchmarks or other external datasets.

 

  • With pre-built leveraging of machine learning and predictive analytics, users can better detect, formulate and predict supply chain issues such as operational bottlenecks. An open architecture supports access to data from external supply chain stakeholders, services providers or others that can brought into the analytics dashboards. Oracle has further added flexibilities in user interfaces to include voice on any device.

 

As noted, Fusion SCM Analytics is the most recent advanced analytics offering and adds to recent offerings in Fusion ERP Analytics and Fusion HCM Analytics.

Oracle Fusion ERP Analytics reportedly delivers the insights needed to uncover the underlying drivers of profitability and identify opportunities to optimize working capital with ready-to-use financial insights. To enable finance, procurement, and business leaders to better manage business operations and improve spend, Oracle has this week announced new procurement, project, and expense analytics capabilities.

Oracle Fusion HCM Analytics reportedly delivers the insights to analyze workforce diversity and compensation ratios, mitigate employee attrition, understand employee retention trends and perform other essential analysis activities. This week, Oracle announced newly added pre-built performance and internal mobility, compensation, and workforce skills analytics capabilities.

Readers can view this latest Oracle Future of Business Session at this Oracle web link.

 

Added Perspectives

It is rather important to seek solution approaches that are pre-configured and pre-built for the analytical, data management and analysis needs at-hand, and for the ability of all levels of business and functional users to be able to readily embrace the application’s functionality.

Assimilating both internal and external information sources as well as heterogenous applications is another important consideration, as is the technology provider’s timetables in the ability to provide these capabilities. The goal is to lessen the need for reliance on centralized IT or data science teams to perform such analysis for multiple business users and teams.

Another important consideration is the timetable and roadmap of an individual enterprise or SCM technology provider to be able to make available all of the necessary threshold advanced analytics needs that can span multiple or hybrid Cloud environments as well as legacy on-premise systems.

Bob Ferrari

 

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