Oracle introduces upgrades and new offerings for Oracle SCM Cloud

Taking steps to help shippers keep up with changes in their businesses, Oracle said today it has rolled out expansions it its Oracle Supply Chain Management (SCM) Cloud offering, which is part of Oracle Cloud Applications Release 13. 

Company officials said this new release is comprised of various features, including: supplier collaboration, quality management, maintenance, sales and operations planning, demand management, and supply planning along with expansions across all existing solutions.

Oracle said that Oracle SCM Cloud is comprised of six new applications and hundreds of new capabilities that support data-driven business models with modern end-to-end supply chain best practices, among other things. The new product offerings within the release are Oracle Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) Cloud, Oracle Demand Management Cloud, Oracle Supply Planning Cloud, Oracle Supply Chain Collaboration Cloud, Oracle Quality Management Cloud, and Oracle Maintenance Cloud.

And it also said that existing Oracle SCM Cloud modules–including information-driven navigation, inventory, manufacturing, mobility order management, and user experience-have been enhanced.

Jon Chorley, Oracle Chief Sustainability Officer and Group Vice President, Supply Chain Management Product Lifecycle Management, said in an interview there were multiple drivers for this new release.

“Customers want a next generation supply chain solution on the Cloud to reduce costs, improve flexibility and provide innovative business solutions,” he said. “Oracle is the first to deliver a no-compromise, best in class such solution. We rounded-out an already strong supply chain suite with four new products in the supply chain planning area, a new product quality product and a new maintenance management product. This is in addition to over 200 major features across the entire product line.”

When asked how this new release helps customers be more efficient for various processes, including improving customer service and customer-direct channels, while increasing margins, reducing inventory costs, and minimizing supply disruptions, as stated in the press release, Chorley said the key is the connection of the digital thread across the entire supply chain, explaining that each product function provides best in class functionality in their own domains but also connect and feed the domains of the rest of the suite.

This is supported by an intuitive, information-driven user interface that exposes any issues to the user and enables them to take immediate and direct action to resolve, he noted, with the result being a more efficient, flexible and responsive system.

In terms of how Oracle SCM Cloud is able to support current and future business challenges for customers, Chorley pointed out that because the system is delivered on the cloud the software is always current.

“As Oracle delivers new capabilities these are available to our customers to exploit to the benefit of their business,” he said. “It is this continuously evolving innovation platform that provides the long term value to our customers. For example, we are adding Big Data. Machine Learning and IOT capabilities and linking these all to the supply chain solutions.”

And the customer learning curve for ease of use and customer experience as it related to the releases significant changes between Oracle’s cloud offerings and more traditional on-premise solutions is the quality of the user experience, which, Chorley said, significantly reduces what he called the “tribal knowledge” needed to leverage the application. He said this also applies to the set up, saying that with Cloud computing a customer can be up and running with an instance more or less as soon as the order is placed, and that instance can be readily scaled as volumes increase.