Oracle Helps Organizations Improve Productivity Across Global Supply Chains

To help organizations design and operate efficient and agile supply chains, Oracle today announced a series of logistics management updates to Oracle Supply Chain Management (SCM) Cloud. The updates include a new logistics network modeling product and enhanced transportation management and global trade management capabilities. The latest innovations can help customers drive better business outcomes by enhancing supply chain responsiveness, optimizing shipments and asset utilization, and improving productivity across global supply chains.  

“Expectations are not only increasing, they also are constantly evolving. To meet these demands, organizations need customer-driven supply chains that deliver the agility required to rapidly respond,” said Derek Gittoes, vice president, SCM Product Strategy, Oracle. “Disruptions due to customer demand volatility, new product introductions, government regulation changes, and a host of other factors, leave supply chain professionals struggling to adapt. To eliminate this guessing game of how best to respond, we are giving our customers the insights they need to improve decision making and increase efficiency of logistics operations.”

To help organizations quickly and easily analyze and respond to logistics network changes, Oracle has added a new Logistics Network Modeling product to Oracle Logistics Cloud. The new product enables customers to analyze logistics networks using real-time, operational data—all within the context of their own cloud environment. Unlike point solutions that often inaccurately model real-world conditions, Logistics Network Modeling analyzes real production data in the context of a customer’s unique rules, policies, and planning algorithms to show the true impact of change on logistics operations. This enables Oracle customers to enhance decision making and quickly improve agility and profitability.

“With global trade policies in flux, organizations of all sizes are struggling to make sense of changing regulations and unstable global duty rates,” said Gittoes. “To help our customers combat global trade instability and improve efficiency, while lowering costs and minimizing risk, we have introduced a series of updates to Oracle Transportation Management Cloud Service and Oracle Global Trade Management Cloud Service. The latest updates can help our customers reduce risk and take advantage of preferential trade contracts and agreements.”

To help customers lower supply chain costs, reduce supply chain risk, and adapt to evolving trade regulations, Oracle has updated Oracle Transportation Management Cloud and Oracle Global Trade Management Cloud. The latest updates enable customers to better support trade compliance and customs processes, such as country of origin management, or certificate management associated with trade agreements. The net result is more effective use of preferential trade agreements, which can lead to lower supply chain costs and reduced risk.

"Goods are traveling further and faster than ever before, and as supply chains flatten the globe, understanding the complexities and interferences that may arise in real-time can be a game changer for those orchestrating the operations,” said Victoria Brown, research director of Global Supply Chain at IDC. “Furthermore, being able to not only manage those interruptions, but also the cross-border considerations at hand, expedites and simplifies global operations management for shippers helping them take back control of their cargo and freight."

A Winning Cloud Apps Strategy, Cloud Security, and Innovation

Oracle CEO Mark Hurd on May 1, 2019 spoke to reporters at Oracle Media Days about how the company has taken the pole position in the business cloud apps race. He said Oracle will continue to build on its gains in the cloud market through the holistic suites it offers as an alternative to point solutions, and as a company with a history of providing technology both on-premises and through the cloud.

He also said Oracle is proving popular with customers by offering emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and blockchain as features in existing technologies rather than as separate products.

According to Hurd, Oracle will continue benefiting from its legacy customers’ migration to the cloud—a process that is likely to play itself out for a number of years—and by taking market share from smaller vendors who either no longer support their products, or don’t have a clear cloud migration strategy.

“The business apps sector is highly fragmented, but Oracle is growing faster than the market and we are well-positioned to take the lion’s share,” he said.

Hurd said customers will benefit greatly by moving to the cloud, which will allow them to spend more on innovation. “B2B tech is trying to take care of its technical debt it’s built up over the last few decades and trying to clear out its technical debt that’s evolved in its hardware, software, configurations and data center,” he said.

Other key Oracle executives and customers also spoke and made themselves available for questions from reporters in the room.

Driving Growth in the Cloud

During a panel discussion featuring a number of Oracle cloud apps customers, Norman Fray, SVP and Chief Accounting Officer for workforce solutions company TrueBlue, said that his company uses cloud technology to help drive revenue growth.

“Part of the growth strategy for our RPO, our recruitment process outsourcing, is going global,” he said. “Customers are saying that it’s great that you satisfy us in North America, but we need you to help with staffing around the world. One of the reasons we chose Oracle is that we know that you’ll take us wherever we need to go around the world. This will certainly enable our growth.”

In response to being asked whether the cloud enables innovation, he said, “That’s a resounding yes.”

The Threat Landscape and Oracle’s Trusted Security Strategy

Edward Screven, Oracle chief corporate architect, explained why cloud vendors like Oracle will be key to defending corporate and personal data. “Government and businesses can’t be expected to out-innovate cyber-attackers on their own,” he said. “That’s our job. We can build data centers and secure data at scale more efficiently than any individual customer.”

He noted that “AI and machine learning in the Oracle Cloud can detect and automate responses to unusual activities, helping protect customers from internal and external threats.”

“We can patch with zero downtime, and this is fundamentally different to what is offered by other cloud vendors,” he added.

“Oracle is a security company and always has been,” he said.

The Future is Autonomous

Andrew Mendelsohn, EVP, Database Server Technologies, Oracle, and Steve Daheb, SVP, Oracle Cloud, spoke about the Oracle Autonomous Database.

"Emerging technologies are permeating every aspect of life,” Daheb said. “We’re seeing self-driving cars, we’re seeing precision medicine, we’re seeing smart cities. We’re at a tipping point where enterprises are starting to outpace consumers in the adoption of emerging technology.”

Andy Mendelsohn noted that “If you talk to CIOs and CTOs today, they’ll all tell you that we’re transforming to be a data-driven enterprise—100% will tell you that. But if you go on-prem, they have data all over the place. Their data scientists can’t find the data, they don’t know where it is, they don’t know how to move it to where it’s useful. That’s something we address with our autonomous database. They’ll have a metadata catalog that shows where the data is, and they just want to run some analysis on it. They don’t want to do the plumbing. They just want to do something useful with the data.”

Key Tenets of Oracle’s Next-Gen Cloud Infrastructure

Kyle York, VP, Product Strategy, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and Rahul Patil, SVP, Software Engineering, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, spoke about the characteristics of Oracle’s next-gen cloud.

"We reinvented the cloud, so that customers don’t have to reinvent their applications,” Patil said. “Most other cloud vendors require customers to rewrite or rearchitect their applications.”

“The company that is trusted with the most data will win—and that’s why Oracle will win, because our customers have their mission-critical information on Oracle,” he added.

Latest Oracle Demand Forecasting Service to Optimize Inventory

Retailers can now improve inventory management through a single view of demand throughout their entire product lifecycle with the next generation Oracle Retail Demand Forecasting (RDF) Cloud Service. With built-in machine learning, artificial intelligence and decision science, the offering enables retailers to gain pervasive value across retail processes, allowing for optimal planning strategies, decreased operational costs, and enhanced customer satisfaction. In addition, modern, intuitive dashboards improve operational agility and workflows, adapting immediately to new information to improve inventory outcomes.

The offering is part of the Oracle’s Platform for Modern Retail, all built on the cloud-native platform and aligned to the Oracle Retail Planning and Optimization portfolio. Learn more about Oracle Retail Demand Forecasting Cloud Service here.

“As customer trends continue to evolve faster than ever before, it’s imperative that retailers move quickly to optimize inventory and demand. Too little inventory and customers are dissatisfied. Too much and retailers have a bottom line problem that leads to unprofitable discounting,” said Jeff Warren, vice president, Oracle Retail. “We have distilled over 15 years of forecasting experience across hundreds of retailers worldwide into a comprehensive and modern solution that maximizes the forecast accuracy for the entire product lifecycle. Our customers asked, and we delivered.”

For example, the offering was evaluated against the data of a major specialty retailer following the 2017 holiday season. The scenario ran 2.2M units sold, representing over $480M in revenue. With the forecast accuracy improvements, the retailer could have achieved the same sales with at least 345K units less of inventory. In tandem, the retailer could have improved 70 percent of promotional forecasts using completely automated next-generation forecasting data science—all while delivering the same level of service to customers.

“As unified commerce sales grow, the ability to support all four business activities (demand planning, supply planning, inventory planning, and sales and operations execution/merchandising, inventory and operations execution) across all sales channels becomes even more important. A 2017 Gartner survey of supply chain executives highlighted the importance organizations place on their planning capabilities.” Of the “top three investment areas from 2016 through 2017, 36% of retail respondents cited upgrading their demand management capabilities,” wrote Gartner experts Mike Griswold and Alex Pradhan. Source:  Gartner Market Guide for Retail Forecasting and Replenishment Solutions, December 31, 2018

Maximizing Forecast Accuracy Throughout the Product Lifecycle

With the next generation Oracle Retail Demand Forecasting Cloud Service, retailers can:

• Tailor approaches for short and long lifecycle products, maximizing forecast accuracy for the entire product lifecycle
• Adapt to recent trends, seasonality, out-of-stocks, and promotions; and reflect retailers’ unique demand drivers, delivering better customer experience from engagement to sale, to fulfillment
• Leverage dashboard views to support day-in-the-life forecasting workflows such as forecast overview, forecast scorecard, exceptions and forecast approvals
• Gain transparency across the entire supply chain that enables analytical processes and end-users to understand and engage with the forecast, increasing inventory productivity
• Coordinate and simulate demand-driven outcomes using forecasts that adapt immediately to new information and without a dependency on batch processes, driving operational agility

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