February 11, 2007
Oracle Supply Chain Management
The management of complex global supply chains can be challenging. From Planning through Execution, it would be convenient to have a road map from those with expertise in the discipline. The Supply Chain Operations Reference outlines the entire business process. The Overview Booklet is free to download, while you willl have to register to get ont the site for the detailed reference model.
The ideas outlined can be found in the Oracle Supply Chain Solution, which includes not only Advanced Procurement, but also Supply CHain execution, PLM, Advance Plannning, Manufacturing and Transportation Management, among others.
For global manufacturing and distribution companies, an efficient Supply Chain Management proces is a critical success factor to ensuring margins are maintained across complex trade, tariff, tax and regulatory boundaries. The risks inherent in managing a global supply chain are also further complicated by fluctuating foreign exchange, ensuring secure supply lines, managing supplier relationships while recognizing time zones and cultural diffferences.
The consulting SME will review these risks against standard SCM risks matrices, verify secure and efficient electronic transaction processing exchanges follow best practices, while also validating that approproate COSO controls are in place throughout the business process.
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February 4, 2007
Service Oriented Architecture
This CIO article announcing support for SAPs ESAO in addition to Oracle's SOA launched a year ago validates the growing popularity of software integration services based on Service Oriented Architecture to stitch disparate systems together. SOA may be viewed as a panacea for solving the Best of Breed integration problem. Too often, though, IT organizations will roll out a new methodology to resolve transaction and reference data synchronization issues, without dealing with some of the underlying issues with BoB.
The issue that many organizations face are that the Best of Breed point solution approach is costly. While one has the advantage of simple, easy to use and meets end user exact requirements, the 'behind the scenes' costs of support, integration, software upgrades, end user training, as well as the overhead of managing data access and data quality, ensuring governance and controls are in place for all the applications at the same level, all of which can be quite daunting. Enter Oracle's unique approach 'Applications Unlimited', which uses the Fusion Middleware to integrate all of the Applications Suites (Oracle E-Business Suite, JD Ewards, Peoplesoft Enterprise, and Siebel) together.
Nevertheless, the Best of Breed approach should still be evaluated carefully before embarking on the support and operation of disparate point applications. The investment should cover not only IT initial hardware, software and implementation and customization costs, but also software support fees, IT operations support, ongoing training, skills enhancement as new features are introduced and product knowledge management, integration, and upgrades - often on different technology stacks and on different schedules. On the other hand, the benefits arising from the implementation must be carefully evaluated as well. The direct savings arising from the efficiencies gained from a point solution in one process may likely be offset by the negative as well as positive impacts to one or more other business process efficiencies, which are often unexpected or under-estmated. In any event, a full analysis of the costs and benefits of a BoB implementation should ensure that the true costs and benefits are included in any recommendation.
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October 31, 2005
Activity Based Management - lessons learned
Read several interesting articles recently and a course came out from Better Management on Activity Based Management. Keeping in mind the goals of these methodologies, which is ultimately to ensure the enterprise is profitable, then Value Chain Analysis is one approach that shows promise.
More thoughts .... later
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