Oracle Jumps into Manufacturing Operations Management Market

by Jeff Moad

Posted on Tuesday, April 15, 2008 4:49:09 PM

Oracle Corp. today significantly expanded its supply chain planning and manufacturing operations management offerings by introducing four new products, including the widely anticipated Oracle Manufacturing Operations Center, which will compete with SAP’s Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (MII) product.

The announcements, made at the Oracle Application Users Group conference in Denver, also included two enhancements of Oracle’s Agile product lifecycle management (PLM) application suite.

The Oracle Manufacturing Operations Center fills an important gap in the company’s application offerings for manufacturers by providing customers with a software platform for integrating data generated on the plant floor with business data normally managed by ERP systems. The move will allow Oracle to not only offer an answer to SAP’s MII (formerly xMII) product, but also further emphasize the MES capabilities the company has been building into its E-Business Suite ERP applications.

As previously reported in Managing Automation, Oracle first publicly mentioned the Manufacturing Operations Center at its Open World customer conference in November 2007. At the time, Oracle said the product — then referred to as the Manufacturing Transaction Hub or the Manufacturing Operations Hub — would be available by May.

The Manufacturing Operations Center provides a repository for real-time data collected from plant floor systems, such as PLCs and data historians. Oracle, said Jon Chorley, applications vice president, is using OPC-based communication software from a partnership with Kepware Technologies Inc. to provide the integration between the Oracle application and plant floor system. Oracle expects the new offering to be deployed at the plant level, Chorley said.

The Manufacturing Operations Center, to be available next month, also includes a data model — based on the ISA-95 standard — which can be used to apply business context to plant floor data. Manufacturers will be able to use analytical dashboards and other tools, based on Oracles Business Intelligence suite, to combine real-time plant floor data with ERP data and make timely decisions on exception conditions and responsive actions. Manufacturers might use the real-time analysis to help them decide to move production between plants or give priority to one customer order over another, said Chorley in an interview with Managing Automation.

“Without the kind of context we are providing for this data, it normally would get collected and saved in a data historian somewhere where it would only get looked at when there is an event such as a product recall,” Chorley said.

Oracle has been working with about 20 customers in the design and development of the Manufacturing Operations Center, he said.

In the future, Oracle expects its partners and customers to develop Manufacturing Operations Center-related dashboards and other analytical tools for manufacturers in specific vertical industries, Chorley said.

Oracle also plans to add event management features to allow the Manufacturing Operations Center to play a central role in real-time, closed loop management processes. If, for example, analysis in the Manufacturing Operations Center uncovers a potential plant scheduling problem, the system can execute a change in a manufacturer’s production scheduling system directly, without first communicating with the ERP system.

This, too, is an echo of SAP’s strategy. In January, for example, CEO Henning Kagermann told analysts and journalists that SAP plans to bring real-time, closed loop management capabilities to its applications using tools from recently acquired Business Objects.

Oracle’s Chorley, asked to compare the Manufacturing Operations Center with SAP’s MII, said the latter “is firmly in the [enterprise manufacturing intelligence] space. It doesn’t come with a well-established data model, so a lot of projects consist of defining that. And that slows down customers’ ability to get a good ROI.”

Separately today, Oracle announced:

•  

   

   

• The Oracle Demand Signal Repository. Mainly for consumer goods manufacturers selling to retailers, the Demand Signal Repository captures a wide range of demand data (such as point-of-sale information) coming from a variety of retailers, mixes it with syndicated data, and provides tools for analyzing the data and integrating it with dedicated demand management applications such as Oracle’s Demantra.

   

   

  The product includes analytical tools and industry-specific workflows. Initially, the workflows include one for category management and another for trading partner scorecarding.

   

   

• The Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center. Aimed at business executives and managers, the Command Center sits on top of Oracle’s Advanced Planning applications and provides role-based analytical dashboards, what-if analysis, and process and task management. The process and task management is provided by Oracle Fusion Middleware components, including the Oracle BPEL Process Manager.

   

   

   

• Oracle Service Parts Planning. This offering is based on the service parts planning module that had been part of Oracle’s E-Business Suite. The company has repackaged it as a stand-alone product and enhanced it with the forecasting engine from Oracle’s Demantra applications, Chorley said. The enhancements allow the product to do a better job of considering things like service part types, according to the company.

   

   

   

• Two upgrades to Oracle’s Agile line of PLM applications. The upgrades include Oracle Agile PLM 9.2.2.4 and Oracle Agile PLM for Process 5.2. Agile PLM 9.2.2.4 offers support for Oracle’s Application Integration Architecture (AIA), which allows for easier integration with other Oracle applications, including E-Business Suite, JD Edwards, and Siebel. Agile PLM for Process, which does not currently support AIA, will gain that functionality in an unspecified future version, officials said.

   

   

  In addition, the new release of Oracle Agile PLM includes support for a new multi-type design object that will let manufacturers more easily manage data from products that incorporate mechanical, electronic, and software design information.

   

  The new release of Agile PLM for Process (formerly Prodika) includes deeper formulation capabilities that allow for improved prototype traceability, label and ingredient statement tools, and nutritional and compliance reporting.