HFS Highlight: Find your supply chain’s digital thread to get a control tower that really controls!

Oracle’s cloud-based supply chain management platform, Oracle Cloud SCM, is giving clients the agility they need to respond to pandemic-shocked supply chains. 

Now that the world has experienced what a disrupted supply chain looks like, everyone understands what a supply chain is. The pandemic has hit industries very differently, but broadly there has been a spotlight on planning and visibility and a desperate scramble to glean insight over the end-to-end supply chain. From warehouse and transport management through to geopolitical risk and stability of supply, the conversation is becoming more and more nuanced—and enterprises have to rethink their supply chain processes and operations and how they view it as the critical spine of their businesses.

Oracle is in a continuous improvement path to improve its supply chain platform

With the addition of around 200 features/quarter, Oracle has a strong roadmap to build a comprehensive supply chain platform. The present view of the Oracle supply chain platform, Oracle Fusion Cloud Supply Chain Management (Oracle Cloud SCM), is described in Exhibit 1.

Exhibit 1: Oracle intelligent supply chain and manufacturing platform

Source: Oracle

Exhibit 2 highlights some of the features and functionalities that Oracle embedded into its solutions in recent quarters and how the future roadmap looks like.

Exhibit 2: Oracle has several exciting features and functionalities planned for future rollout

Source: Oracle

Find your supply chain’s digital thread for resilience, agility, and better customer and employee experiences—by combining emerging technologies on top of a cloud underpinning.

Combined with the overarching agility of a cloud-based supply chain management platform, woven-in emerging technology allows enterprises to build a digital “spine” or “thread” through the supply chain to improve visibility, get insight, and make rapid decisions in responding to supply chain shocks and the new, evolving customer demands.

For example, integrating platforms with the internet of things (IoT) devices and application produces that visibility and brings in the key operating data you need, and compiles it alongside enterprise management data from ERP and other systems. IoT, combined with forms of artificial intelligence (AI) and smart analytics to manage and extract insight from the data and process, can be integrated with supply chain planning and management tools through to the execution systems—all to improve decision making quality and response time. This can all be extended to the entire business ecosystem to connect across supply chains and through to the end-customer.

Visibility tools like augmented reality (AR), digital associated, blockchain tracking apps, and much more can be brought in alongside analytics, AI, and IoT to produce whatever unique comprehensive set of outcomes customers need.

Oracle is also integrating its manufacturing and enterprise solutions portfolio to bolster its supply chain offerings. For example, it is leveraging MES and PLM platforms among others.

With 2800+ customers and around 400 implementation go-lives in this year, Oracle Cloud SCM has observed a high adoption rate

Oracle’s supply chain management functionality in its cloud platform is helping clients respond to both the shocks and need to reinvent business models during the pandemic—and do so with rapid development cycles to meet the response times their suppliers, partners, and customers all demand:

• Western Digital managed to open 8 different manufacturing facilities in the first 2-3 months of the pandemic through its accelerated digital transformation efforts.
• FedEx is accelerating its logistics innovation through the Oracle ecosystem where it can share best practices with other companies in the same storm of disruption.
• Land O’Lakes, the dairy and broader agriculture cooperative, managed a huge shift in consumption patterns from large orders to restaurants, etc. to lower-volume retail that led to bigger demand fluctuations.
• Lululemon managed a massive shift to e-commerce—something that we’re seeing throughout the retail industry where firms throughout the supply chain are having to be brutal and moving on from customers, suppliers, and partners that can’t keep up with change or simply don’t want to; we’ve seen this put by one senior retail exec as “winning with the winners” of digital.

The Bottom Line: Your supply chain control tower needs to give you control… not just visibility

While so many platforms built for supply chain visibility offer genuine value propositions, integrating a cloud-first approach with a multiple-emerging-technology combination can get enterprises closer to a one-stop-shop for supply chain management: monitoring, visibility, and insight for rapid decision making, combined with the agility at the scale of a cloud-based platform. This is also becoming critical for the post-pandemic world as the demand uncertainty increases and the collaboration between the supply chain and operations is the need of the hour.