Oracle Strengthens Supply-Chain SuiteOracle Strengthens Supply-Chain Suite

Oracle hopes a healthier supply-chain offering will sooth its hurting applications business, where license revenue has declined for five straight quarters when compared with year-earlier measures. The software developer Thursday will announce the next iteration of its supply-chain management suite, which accounts for about 40% of the functionality in Oracle's E-Business Suite applications portfolio.

Company officials say there are thousands of improvements to the various supply-chain modules in Oracle Supply-Chain Management 11i, release 8, with a focus on process automation in new areas, improved business-to-business collaboration, and real-time business intelligence. 11i was plagued with thousands of software bugs and patches in earlier versions, but senior VP Don Klaiss says the glitches have been exorcised through more rigorous quality control and testing.

New in 11i are applications for managing warehouses, transportation resources and processes, property, and leases. Oracle has also repackaged functionality developed for electronic B-to-B exchanges and integrated that functionality with its supply-chain environment. For instance, collaborative-planning capabilities that help companies and their suppliers share inventory information and identify potential supply-and-demand mismatches have been brought over from Oracle's Supply-Chain Exchange. And collaborative-sourcing capabilities that handle things such as sourcing, procurement, and auctions were borrowed from Oracle's Exchange Marketplace.

Oracle has also tapped into some of the capabilities in its 9i database to make it easier for companies to deliver hourly or daily reports to managers on information culled from the transactions running through its supply-chain apps. The upcoming release of 11i will include tools for delivering business-performance reports to managers in 12 predefined areas, ranging from senior executives to sales professionals and inventory managers. Klaiss says the tools are a cheaper, easier alternative to building a dedicated data warehouse for such analysis.

Only about 3,000 of the 13,000 companies using Oracle applications have made the move to 11i since the suite first shipped nearly 18 months ago, but Klaiss says the pace of migration from older Oracle applications is increasing. Earlier this week, Oracle said that Emerson, a technology and engineering company, plans to use 11i across its more than 60 divisions.