Oracle Announces Pedigree and Serialization Manager
Earlier this week, Oracle announced that the Oracle Pedigree and Serialization Manager is available. The Pedigree and Serialization Manager is an integrated application designed to improve supply chain efficiency, specifically in the pharmaceutical industry. Oracle’s product can also be used in any industry dealing with expensive products that are at risk for counterfeiting, such as technology, luxury goods or medical devices.
Oracle’s ERP solution will help pharmaceutical manufacturers ensure compliance with electronic pedigree initiatives and global regulatory requirements. Ultimately, the solution is going to reduce risk for companies related to drug counterfeiting or product diversion. Across the supply chain, Oracle’s solution will automatically authenticate serial numbers and ePedigree data. The software will also generate, store and transmit the serial data. The Oracle Pedigree and Serialization Manager will even use its analytics software to detect potential threats.
Oracle’s Manager will help improve the efficiency within pharmaceutical company business processes. Companies will be able to increase the accuracy of returns management as well to reduce associated losses. The Oracle Pedigree Manager will also reduce revenue leakage. Return on investment will increase as a result.
IDC Health Insights is excited about the Oracle Pedigere and Serialization Manager’s release. Its Research Manager, Eric Newmark, said, “Oracle Pedigree and Serialization Manager is well positioned to quickly capitalize on the present solution gap in the drug pedigree space. It delivers all the bells and whistles you’d expect in a serialization and pedigree solution.”
The Oracle Pedigree and Serialization Manager was built to integrate with all other Oracle systems and third party systems for shipping, receiving, manufacturing and packaging. It has an interactive interface and it supports web services and features. Oracle’s Manager was also built to help companies comply with global regulatory mandates for product serialization.
Oracle’s Vice President of SCM Product Strategy commented on the product. He said, “Ensuring supply chain integrity is not only about compliance and protecting your brand, it’s also about protecting your bottom line. By definitively identifying your products in the supply chain and providing a broad set of analytic insights on that data, Oracle Pedigree and Serialization Manager will deliver both. The result is a safe and secure pharmaceutical supply chain, combined with a strong ROI.”
Oracle’s Pedigree and Serialization Manager will ensure that companies’ supply chain is secure and that they will avoid all threats and business risks. Businesses will be able to comply with requirements better and easier. Company revenue will increase as a result.
No commentsOracle’s Major BI Launch
Oracle will be launching their Business Intelligence (BI) tool next month. Oracle, an enterprise software vendor, plans to present one of their most significant updates to their BI platform at a July 7th event in London.
Oracle’s BI will be presented by company President Charles Phillips and Thomas Kurian, VP of Product Development. The enterprise software giant will be releasing Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) 11g with improved analytic processing, reporting, scalability, performance and system management. According to an Oracle blog post, OBIEE will offer users an “unrivaled” user experience.
Oracle’s blog post about the OBIEE implies that the system update will foster connectivity between BI and ERP software systems.
According to the company’s blog post, Oracle event attendees will learn about an “industry-first innovation that connects business intelligence directly to your business processes. You can spot an opportunity or issue, and immediately initiate appropriate action directly from your dashboard.”
Oracle also plans to incorporate BI capabilities in their Fusion applications, later this year.
OBIEE 11g’s launch has been highly anticipated in the business software world. The launch date doesn’t necessarily translate to the date of the Oracle event. However, we can assume the launch date of OBIEE will follow soon after. We’ll keep you posted and let you know how Oracle plans to change the game with their BI enhancements.
No commentsWatch Out IBM! Oracle’s ‘Newest’ New ERP Application
Drum roll please…
Oracle unveils yet another new enterprise resource planning (ERP) application this month; the Primavera Portfolio Management 8. The new application offers companies’ assistance in project portfolio management from conception to execution.
This has been a busy month for the IT giant, as the company is stepping up its efforts to provide new systems solutions platforms for various IT segments.
Oracle’s Primavera Portfolio Management 8 offers improved accountability for managers, who can now track project progress against historical data and projected milestones. The ERP application can also identify risks and potential impacts by measuring “metric thresholds”, thereby allowing companies to make changes and redistribute their resources to meet those metrics. The benefit of “metric thresholds” is that they allow organizations to maximize their business intelligence and smooth out the kinks in the project management process.
In conjunction with the release of Primavera Portfolio Management 8, Oracle has also launched AutoVue 20.0, Tuxedo 11g, Tuxedo Application Runtime for CICS and Batch11g, and Tuxedo Application Rehosting Workbench 11g. Oracle rapid release cycle is a result of their goal to integrate applications into existing portfolios to create complete systems solutions packages for companies. “We’ve already beaten IBM in software. Now we want to beat them in systems,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.
No commentsSAP State of The Union: The CEOs Talk Oracle, SaaS ERP
Today at the company’s Palo Alto offices, SAP’s co-CEOs, Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe, fielded questions about the enterprise software giant’s general state. Last month SAP experienced certain discomfort when Léo Apotheker resigned as CEO after only nine months on the job, and speculators attributed his departure to SAP’s inability to get a solid SaaS ERP product off the ground. Snabe and McDermott offered sentiments on the company’s current strategy, Oracle, and the future of SaaS developments.
SAP has been under fire for their lack of SaaS developments for quite a while now, and to that end the two CEOs said that their on-demand platform, SAP Business ByDesign, is in beta testing and will be generally released this summer. The wait for Business ByDesign ERP has been a long one, so naturally some are remaining skeptical of the platform’s abilities until they see something more than slideshows. McDermott did admit that Business ByDesign has taken much longer than expected, but says that with functionalities ranging from supply chain to cash management to CRM, the product will do much more than competing platforms.
Another hot-button topic the duo addressed: Oracle, their foremost competitor. When Business ByDesign is released, the CEOs posit they’ll be discussing a triumph over Oracle, but for now they chose to discuss their contrasting business model. Oracle has been growing through acquisitions, while SAP has pushed for growth by strengthening and broadening core products. The CEOs are standing by the decision to innovate from within, and plan to give Oracle a run for their money with future Java projects.
This summer will be an important one for SAP. It’s is a large and relatively successful ERP provider, so the Business ByDesign ERP will most likely be a great product, but the platform’s perpetual delays have many worried. SAP recently announced the desire to have 1 billion users by 2014—a feasible but still ambitious task. The success of Business ByDesign will likely be a factor in whether or not they reach this number.
2 commentsNetSuite Poaches from SAP, Boast Big Q4 Earnings
Late last week, NetSuite announced their fourth quarter earnings, and their overall success in 2009 is undoubtedly a harbinger of widespread SaaS ERP uptake within the next few years. And if those numbers weren’t enough, they also announced that RedBuilt LLC switched to their product from SAP—NetSuite has successfully poached SAP customers before, but RedBuilt is the largest one yet.
NetSuite’s annual revenue was up 9% and Q4 revenues were at a record $43 million. Their sales increased as on-premise vendors experienced downward sales trends. SAP’s SaaS sales went up marginally, but their overall software revenues were down 27%, and their biggest boost came from the increase in support sales—typically SAP’s biggest source of income—which increased 11%. Oracle’s numbers fall somewhere in between.
So SaaS sales are on the up and up, but on-premise ERP products are not slipping entirely into obscurity. SAP’s Business Objects line does very well, despite the heavy fire they’ve endured for less effective cloud offerings. Still, RedBuilt’s switch to NetSuite is a good sign for SaaS ERP delivery. RedBuilt is an innovator and supplier of engineered wood products for the commercial and multi-family construction industry, and they’ve switched to NetSuite for managing their corporate offices and four production plants, and perhaps most importantly, the NetSuite deployment means RedBuilt no longer has to pay the $275,000 annual salary costs for SAP and database administration.
NetSuite certainly offers a very complete SaaS ERP package, as do other companies, but the SaaS deployment’s biggest coup so far is its cost, which explains why on-premise ERP is not extinct, and will probably take longer than expected to die out. When SaaS ERP packages are more extensive, then we’ll really begin to see some change.
No commentsERP & Project Management Come Together for Oracle Users
Last week, Oracle launched a new version of their Application Integration Architecture (AIA) Release 2.5 PPM Process Integration Packs (PIPs), which integrates project management and ERP.
The new offering is called Project Portfolio Management Integration Pack, and it connects Primavera P6 with E-Business Suite. In addition to integrating project management data, the new integrator also connects Oracle ERP users to invaluable financial information. It also allows them to synchronize information regardless of which platform houses the project information.
There is also a PPM Integration Pack for Primavera P6 and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, which facilitates the integration of timesheets between the two platforms.
According the press release, the project management PIPs in Oracle AIA Release 2.5 will help project managers and accounting teams to join their business objectives. One of the best things about the new integrator is that it is a standards-based method for companies to integrate their processes across both Oracle and third-party applications.
It’s nice to see a big ERP play bridging the gap between ERP and project management, and hopefully other companies will follow suit.
No commentsFusionOps Insight: The New Business Analytics Dashboard
FusionOps’ business analytics products have been getting quite a bit of attention lately. The general consensus on their offerings—which integrate with users’ existing ERP platforms—is that they are fine products, but in many ways they could potentially threaten the companies FusionOps wants to partner with. Just last month they launched a new metrics delivery dashboard, aptly named FusionOps Insight, and we’re going to take a look at it here.
Insight is being marketed as a Performance Management application, but it’s really an analytic dashboard environment that delivers metrics on inventory management, procurement and spending, supply chain management, and supplier performance. Customers can download a trial version of the support software, then grant FusionOps read-only access to SAP ERP information, and from there the data is uploaded and customers are notified when particular metrics and reports are available online. Some are considering it business intelligence rather than business performance management because the data supplied by the dashboard is not focused on a company’s strategic goals.
FusionOps Insight works alongside another on-demand service, FusionOps Streamline, which automates supply chain and procurement processes for SAP and Oracle ERP environments (Insight for Oracle will be available in future). Streamline was launched in January of this year, and as a SaaS ERP product, it has been lauded for it cost-effectiveness and speedy deployment times.
While FusionOps (which is not related to Oracle Fusion…this confused me at first)offers a lightweight product and good ROI, it’s tough to disagree with critics pointing out that the company will have some difficulty staying afloat if they continue running on a partner system. Oracle and SAP both have business intelligence and analytics modules, so the idea that they’d give FusionOps that business for very long is doubtful. But only time will tell.
No commentsMicrosoft ERP Aims to Dominate the SMB Market
Microsoft’s Dynamics ERP may never have the enterprise-market potential touted by SAP and Oracle, but the company is aiming to dominate the small- to medium-sized business market.
Microsoft doesn’t break down revenue reports from its Dynamics line by segment, but Ray Wang, a partner at the Altimeter Group analyst firm, estimates that Dynamics ERP brings in between $1.1-$1.2 billion per year. Dynamics EMEA’s director of ERP field marketing, Phil Battersby, calls the midmarket their “sweet spot,” and states that Microsoft isn’t trying to poach enterprise customers from SAP and Oracle. Battersby acknowledges that those companies have been giants in that market for a while, and now Microsoft wants to carve its niche in the SMB space.
According to Computer World, there is plenty of room for Microsoft in the SMB market. For one, many midsize companies are looking for on-demand replacements for legacy systems. In addition, smaller companies who are expanding will likely be looking for unified ERP systems, and here Microsoft Dynamics ERP has an advantage: their user interface closely resembles that of the MS Office Suite applications these businesses are likely already using for business management.
Another factor boosting sales in Dynamics ERP: it’s done entirely through a partner system, where partners polish the system for local sales. This locality also adds a personal touch that is apt for dealing with SMBs. Of the partner system, Battersby also noted that it helps Dynamics ERP expand into more verticals.
No commentsNetSuite Targets A New Audience, Announces SuiteCloud Connect for Large Corporations
It isn’t news that cloud-computing software vendors are hawking their products as the perfect solution for mid-market enterprises experiencing a cash crunch, and now these vendors are pushing their applications to large enterprises trying to maintain circulation to their branches. Today at the Oracle OpenWorld convention, NetSuite announced a new version of their OneWorld product, which gives Oracle E-Business Suite users the savings and efficiency benefits of the cloud at a divisional level, while retaining current investments in Oracle applications at the corporate level.
During the economic crisis (from which we thankfully appear to be emerging), many corporations were unhappy with investments made in integrated productivity software suites, finding them unable to deliver the functionality and flexibility needed for managing multiple divisions. With cloud services, OneWorld for Oracle intends to bridge the corporate-branch gap, offering a modern solution for management from corporate systems. OneWorld for Oracle has been praised in particular by multinational companies looking to eliminate the restrictions of time zones and geography.
NetSuite’s new application is powered by SuiteCloud Connect, through which divisional users can send data to corporate, and adapts to several industry standard technologies for data migration. Of course, SuiteCloud Connect is not only for Oracle, but can be integrated into a number of ERP systems—it is essentially for any large enterprise wanting to blend their technology investments with on-demand services.
No commentsOracle ERP works for Eaton Steel Bar
Eaton Steel Bar was pleased with its implementation of Oracle ERP. The implementation of this ERP solution has provided Eaton Steel Bar with a vast amount of new information regarding its business processes as well as helped reduce costs in running its business. Eaton is now using a host of Oracle products including its ERP solution to help maintain its business and keep it running smoothly.
Oracle has not only made life easier at Eaton, but it has also provided a better experience for anyone who interacts with Eaton, including customers and vendors. Eaton is now able to better manage its Manufacturing processes with the new features that Oracle has to offer. With the implementation of Oracle ERP, many processes that were done manually before are now able to be automated making work more efficient and a lot more productive.
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