The software giant’s cloud-based supply chain suite acquired new products aimed at better integrating the order process with inventory management and fulfillment.
The software company Oracle on Monday released a set of cloud-based solutions to help companies manage their quote-to-cash process in a more integrated fashion.
The new products, Oracle Order Management Cloud and Oracle Global Order Promising Cloud fit into a broader package it calls the Oracle Supply Chain Management Cloud.
The products are designed to harmonize the process of taking an order with that of fulfilling the order, along with steps in between like visibility.
“In the past, these different processes were often siloed, particularly when some elements operated in the cloud and some did not,” Oracle said in a statement.
In an interview with American Shipper, Jon Chorley, Oracle group vice president of supply chain management product strategy, said, “Supply chain has been a laggard – it’s still to be fully developed in the cloud. A lot of what we’re doing is complementing our cloud applications in an ERP context. So, we have broad human resources, procurement, customer relationship management, but what we didn’t have was the capability to take and process orders.
“Now we’ve added the ability for them to take orders, process and fulfill those orders, access inventory through to accounts payable.”
Chorley said there is a disconnect between what a company sells and what it can efficiently fulfill.
“Let’s say you’re a Salesforce customer,” he said. “You’re running it through your marketing department. But when it comes to taking or configuring an order, you use a third party. Folks sometimes actually have a third party system. Those third party systems don’t usually have full-blown inventory management or fulfillment capabilities. Then you get into one or two or three master data synchronization efforts, and it’s difficult to get a picture of what’s going on across the transaction. It’s difficult to enforce policies across those systems.
“And so you get revenue leakage. People are selling products you can’t ship, they aren’t selling product you can ship. They’re missing up-sell opportunities. With (the new) release, that quote-to-sales process is completely integrated front to back. It becomes a much more well-orchestrated process, where marketing integrates with the sales activity. As an order is being captured, you have ability to direct sales person to do the right thing. Sell the old stuff or promote the new stuff.”
Chorley noted that an Oracle survey found retailers have an average of 5.4 order capture systems and 4.6 order fulfillment systems. As retailers have rushed to meet consumer demand for e-commerce orders and other new channels, the system integrations supporting those orders have not kept pace.
“No business is static,” said Chorley. “They bring on a web store. They probably have things buttoned down, and then all of a sudden, they’re doing a web store. Or they make an acquisition, or they get into an after-market service. Those things tend to get people to do tactical solutions, which adds to the complexity. It’s necessary, but it comes at a cost.
“Moving stuff to a cloud, they broke apart the comfort zone of a single order mgmt system. They faked it on the back end. They have absorbed the complexity and cost on the back end. And they’d like to resolve that. Any processes will require exception management and they’re looking how to manage that better.”
Chorley said the Oracle’s new products are meant to “help people consolidate that on the cloud.”
In particular, the touch points connecting the new products to Oracle Transportation Management – its TMS platform – are in the fulfillment area. Orders processed in the order management and order promising products are passed to OTM system to schedule dock appointments or secure capacity. Chorley said the idea is to do that earlier, so that transportation managers can make better decisions.
“Uncertainty upstream causes exception management downstream,” he said. “You might be having to scramble to meet a customer promise because the promise was improperly given. You generally try to keep the promise, but that sometimes means tight shipment deadlines, expediting. Through a revenue management process, capturing the demand properly, and then driving that into fulfillment system in the optimal way. So instead of it being an exception management process, the hope is you can secure more consistent logistics capacity, go (less-than-truckload) instead of parcel, structure things in a more managed way.
“Taking and shipping orders is a mature business practice,” added Chorley. “What’s happening is businesses are coping, they’re coping with that complexity. They’re executing coping mechanisms, and some are doing it well, but it’s coming at a cost. Not so much that people don’t know what best practice is, it’s they’re dealing with systems that offer a low level of support of what they need to do.”
Oracle expands cloud quote-to-cash capabilities
