This afternoon marked the opening keynotes of the Oracle Modern Supply Chain Experience conference that is expected to draw over 2800 attendees.
Rick Jewell, Oracle Senior Vice President for Supply Chain Applications Development kicked-off the event with his presentation titled: The Adaptive Intelligent Supply Chain Cloud. In this presentation, Jewell re-iterated a number of supply chain predictions relative to digital supply chain transformation and on Oracle’s current efforts in development of the Oracle SCM Cloud suite of applications. Release 13 of the SCM Cloud Suite is expected this summer.
Jewell then moderated a customer panel consisting of:
Jeff Abbott, Vice-President, Supply Chain and Logistics, Sears Canada Inc.
Debi Hanes, CIO Supply Chain, General Electric Global Operations
Emre Kusce, Supply Chain Engineer, Transit Wireless
Chris Nerf, Senior Director, Supply Chain, NCR
Each panelist described their business motivations for adopting elements of Oracle SCM Cloud, along with important lessons learned that would be of interest to the conference audience. The session, from this analyst’s lens, provided rather important learnings which Supply Chain Matters will dwell further upon in a subsequent posting
Jewell further took this opportunity to announce Oracle’s upcoming new applications supporting Internet of Things (IoT) Cloud capabilities. This announcement includes expanding its Internet of Things (IoT) portfolio with four new cloud applications to help businesses fully utilize the benefits of digital supply chains. The applications are being designed to enable businesses to detect, analyze, and respond to IoT signals and incorporate these insights into existing and rapidly evolving market capabilities.
Applications will include:
IoT Asset Monitoring Cloud: being designed to monitor assets, utilization, availability, and data from connected sensors and creates incidents in the backend SCM, ERP, or Service Clouds to automate workflows’
IoT Connected Worker Cloud: designed to tracks employees to support safety, service, and regulatory compliance initiatives.
IoT Fleet Monitoring Cloud: Monitors position and progress of passenger, service, and transportation delivery vehicles and driver-behavior.
IoT Production Monitoring Cloud: designed to monitor production equipment to assess and predict manufacturing issues.
This supply chain industry analyst had the opportunity to attend a conference pre-session held by three Oracle development executives that briefed a standing-room only audience on these upcoming applications.
According to the executives, the overall strategy for Oracle is to support five dimensions of supply chain visibility that include market, partner, enterprise asset and social visibility needs. They described Oracle’s unique approach to IoT, namely to bring together structured, semi-structured and unstructured information to support the convergence of operational technology (OT) systems and IT business applications. The approach leverages Oracle’s prior acquisitions of select data analytics tech providers as Oracle’s newly announced Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) platform along with its existing Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms. A design principle emphasized was how to get access to OT data while managing this data in a cost-effective storage and hardware approach. The design approach makes use of supporting a streaming data lake strategy that leverages open source Hardoop running in the background.
Release of this new compliment of Oracle’s IoT cloud applications is expected later this year.
This afternoon’s keynotes included a fairly interesting presentation delivered by K.S. Khurana, Vice President, Sourcing and Engineering Operations at Facebook. He opened his talk with the obvious question, why would a senior Facebook infrastructure development executive be presenting at a supply chain management conference. The answer became fairly obvious 10-15 minutes later after Khurana outlined Facebook’s strategies in the planning, forecasting and acquiring the social media’s giant’s own uniquely designed data center hardware and networking needs while supporting the explosive growth to support data management needs with a fixed staff of 600 operations personnel.
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