Oracle Open World Recap: Part 1
I was at the Oracle Open World all week this year (we had a booth in the Primavera Pavilion). As always, Open World is a great place to meet with WMS customers, exchange war stories and interact with Oracle Product leadership teams. The attendance at Oracle Open World was surprisingly strong, in-spite of the malaise in the general economy. Although overall attendance was indeed down, the people who did show up seemed to be more focused. If you missed Oracle Open World, here is a quick summary of some of the WMS and Mobility sessions that I managed to attend at Oracle Open World:
WMS Special Interest Group (SIG)
The SIG meeting is the morning ritual every Sunday before Oracle Open World. For a number of years I have woken up groggy eyed and made the early AM trek to San Francisco. The returns were always well worth it. Besides the knowledge sharing, its also a good time to chit-chat with old friends in the WMS world. Jennifer Sherman, Aditya Agarkar, Mark Lewis and Bill Reilly from Oracle, Joe Clay from DSI, Sid Ordog from Mod43, Debbie Arnold from DAZ they were all there. I heard that one of the ideas that OAUG is toying with is to reschedule SIGs to a weekday. This is certainly an idea with a lot of merit and it will go a long way to boost audience interest in WMS.
This year, the highlight of the WMS SIG was the customer case studies session. There were two case studies this year. Both the case studies were refreshing and presented for the first time in SIG. Raj Rege, Director of IT at Ikon presented their WMS implementation story along with Joe Clay from DSI. Raj walked through their WMS implementation and how it fits in their business context. The second case study presented by Sid Ordog and covered the MSCA project at TCI. This was an implementation that I personally led. Once again, a very solid case study that demonstrates that a well planned and executed MSCA implementation can deliver a very solid ROI within a short span. Catherine Gauchat from TCI spoke on how their inventory accuracy was now at 100% and how much their productivity had increased. All this from a 6 week implementation, thus proving the point that you don’t need a long drawn out, complex implementation to derive significant benefits.
Transportation & Warehousing: Oracle’s Integrated Logistics Strategy
Derek Gittoes, VP of OTM Product Strategy
Jennifer Sherman, Sr. Director of Oracle WMS Strategy
Derek and Jen did a superb presentation outlining the overall vision of Oracle Logistics. Since R12 and especially in R12.1, Oracle has made significant strides in integrating Oracle Transportation Management and Warehouse Management. I must say that the overall vision of a global logistics platform that Jen and Derek presented is very compelling. I am optimistic that number of integration pain points (see my earlier post here) that exist in WMS and OTM would go away. The key points that I could glean from the presentation are:
- Global Optimization: The point here is to optimize WMS and Transportation together. I have seen too often, companies treating them as two different functions. My take is that, this is because WMS and Transportation Planning software were traditionally developed by different vendors. This leads to localized efficiencies and missing out on larger benefits when the two functions are globally optimized. Oracle has a great vision here and I can’t wait to see it in action!
- Synchronized Execution: The transportation plan remains a plan on paper if it is not executed. This means that transportation plan drives the carrier appointment, carrier appointment drives the wave planning, the wave planning drives the pick, pack and ship operation from the right dock door at the right time.
- End to End Process: The message here is that the entire process: Order, Plan, Execute, Monitor and Settle can be supported on Oracle logistics platform. The process spans order management, WMS, OTM and Financials. Much of this end to end process is already supported and as Jen pointed out in her presentation, there are many more additional integration points in R12.1
More to follow. Stay tuned!
