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Oracle Corporation

With 27 years of experience as atechnology leader, Oracle hasearned its reputation as a trustedadvisor by saving our customersmillions of dollars and helpingthem improve efficiencies.

Increasingly unique and unpredictable customer demands for innovation, speed, quality and service compel supply chain participants to rapidly adopt new e-business practices. These practices allow companies to lower costs, increase velocity and drive new business, enabling them to survive and thrive in an increasingly competitive environment.

Creating a supply chain that fosters collaboration and offers trading partners visibility into demand and supply is essential to reducing overall supply chain costs, inventory carrying costs and order fulfillment time. But to make the leap from integrated enterprise to fully networked value chain, organizations need to adopt collaborative solutions that embrace supplier relationship management strategies and offer real-time visibility throughout all tiers of the supply chain.

Business intelligence capabilities are critical to improving forecast accuracy, research and development productivity and management of variable customer demand. Critical decision support tools enable companies to dominate when faced with the challenges of global competition. As a key element of Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Supply Chain Management is the only completely integrated solution to deliver value in five critical business areas – product development, planning, procurement, manufacturing and order fulfillment – offering both enterprisebased and business-to-business collaboration solutions. Oracle delivers intelligence capabilities that enable companies to monitor and continuously improve supply chain performance. A fast, flexible, modular implementation approach fits the needs of different companies and entire supply chains, resulting in the biggest impact and return on investment – real bottom-line value delivered throughout your entire supply chain.

Oracle Supply Chain Management breaks down the barriers to communication among organizations, spots opportunities for revenue growth and savings, employs true business intelligence in every decision at every step in a process and gets the job done better and faster while using fewer resources.

Manage Products From Concept to Release

Collaborate to Create More Innovative And Competitive Products and Services

Accelerating time-to-value and collaborating with customers and suppliers to get the right products to market faster, are part of every organization’s product development challenges. To meet market expectations, businesses must be able to gain customer input from all points of interaction, distribute information to strategic partners and collaboratively execute product improvements and new product designs. Oracle Product Development brings together engineering, manufacturing, customers and development partners to collaborate throughout the entire product life cycle, from concept to release.

Drive Performance From Forecast to Plan

Enable Real-Time Collaboration Among Trading Partners

Business leaders know that they must make the right products at the right times at the lowest cost in order to achieve growth. However, typical forecasting processes are inaccurate, the result of limited collaboration and visibility among manufacturing, sales and marketing departments, or with customer planning processes. Advanced planning solutions can offset risk and help improve forecast accuracy, which in turn helps improve revenue and reduce costs. Oracle Advanced Planning delivers a holistic, synchronized view of your supply chain to help you achieve accurate consensus forecasts faster, optimized inventory, faster planning cycles, increased on-time delivery and extended visibility across all tiers of the supply chain.

Maximize Savings From Procure to Pay

Automate All Types of Purchases For Greater Efficiency

Procurement represents a critical opportunity to cut costs in the supply chain. Traditionally, procurement processes have been manual and paper-based. This results in inefficiencies, inaccuracies and waste that can be easily eliminated with procurement automation. With Oracle Procurement, businesses can automate the complete procure-to-pay process and analyze purchase transactions to further drive continuous process improvement. Using Oracle Procurement, companies can identify savings opportunities with spend analysis; source, negotiate and collaborate more effectively with suppliers; and automate employee requisitioning and receiving, while lowering costs with streamlined supplier collaboration.

Deliver Personalization From Demand to Build

Speed Time to Market for Products and Services

The challenge to manufacturers is to make and deliver high-quality products that satisfy the unique needs of each customer. Oracle Manufacturing provides a comprehensive selection of manufacturing solutions combined in one backbone, along with the flexibility to employ these solutions concurrently for maximum efficiency. Such flexibility is fundamental to adoption of mass customization – the key strategy to help manufacturers meet the demands of customers for personalized goods and services.

Fully integrated with Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Manufacturing products offer customers a high-performance manufacturing solution that enables businesses to incorporate any manufacturing method into the planning model.

Streamline Fulfillment from Order to Cash

Respond Quickly to Changing Customer Demand

Your business starts and ends with your customers. Sales orders represent your customers. How you manage them is the most tangible aspect of service in the eyes of your customer. Oracle Order Fulfillment helps companies improve customer satisfaction and streamline fulfillment by enabling companies like yours to capture multi-channel demand, provide accurate order promise dates in real time and flexibly fulfill orders without expensive software customization. Additionally, Oracle provides robust logistics capabilities to ensure customer shipments are executed accurately and efficiently according to schedule.

Complete, Collaborative, Intelligent and Open

Oracle is the Leader in E-Business Supply Chain Management Solutions

Complete

Oracle enables transactions to flow seamlessly throughout Oracle’s supply chain modules without delay or redundancy. This is possible because Oracle built Oracle Supply Chain Management from the ground up leveraging leading Internet practices and a common data model. Critical information is shared across applications, eliminating the need to synchronize and ensuring accuracy so you can rapidly respond to and satisfy changing customer demands. As the only provider of 100 hundred percent Internetbased applications, tools and database technology, as well as global consulting, education, support and partner services, Oracle provides the most complete e-business supply chain management solution.

Collaborative

By extending automation beyond your enterprise to include your trading partners and customers, you can share real-time information about critical activities, such as designs, forecasts, capacities and deliveries. Oracle’s collaborative exchange applications, an integrated part of Oracle Supply Chain Management, make it possible to conduct business with multiple trading partners from a common transaction platform, enabling a more flexible and efficient response to dynamic market conditions. Oracle’s pre-configured, role-based portals also speed collaborative communication among trading partners.

Intelligent

Oracle Supply Chain Intelligence automatically generates exception notifications based on tolerances you specify. You can immediately drill down to the specific transaction(s) causing the alert. For instance, you can learn of manufacturing cost overruns as they occur and determine whether the cause is related to supplier quality issues or manufacturing process problems, so you know immediately what action to take to resolve the problem.

Open

Comprehensive and tightly integrated, Oracle Supply Chain Management is also open and modular. This means you can implement modules based upon your business priorities. A company can start with Oracle’s Procurement solution, and then add Oracle’s Planning, Manufacturing or Fulfillment solutions in the future. The Oracle modules seamlessly integrate with each other, or can be connected with third-party or legacy systems via Oracle’s workflow engine, XML/EDI connectors and published APIs. Predefined workflows that control transaction processing can be easily modified using a “drag-and-drop” interface and are preserved through upgrades.

The Next Step

For more information on Oracle Supply Chain Management applications and services, visit our website at www.oracle.com/applications. You can also call an Oracle sales representative at 1.800.633.0517.

Case Study: GE Energy GE Power Systems

Industry: Energy

Employees: More than 10,000

Faced with the cost-cutting requirements common in its industry, GE Energy's aero products needed to find a way to reduce expenses while automating its business and manufacturing processes. “We're looking at any area where we can reduce costs. And we need our employees to be the most productive they can possibly be,” said Judy Warfield, information management manager for GE Energy.

Armed with about 3,000 business requirements, the manufacturer of gas turbines for industrial and marine uses began its search for an integrated set of applications that would replace its 12 disparate legacy systems and automatically manage critical information. Moving to Oracle E-Business Suite not only allowed GE Energy to replace its legacy applications, but also allowed the company to replace the different technology stacks that had supported them. “We removed all that disparate technology. Now, we have one stack of Sun servers that's located in the central facility, and we removed all the cost of those different servers and the maintenance associated with them,” Warfield said.

Better Information Leads to Better Decisions

Today, GE Energy's single instance of Oracle E-Business Suite supports operations in nine countries and currencies. The suite's closely linked modules give the company a clear picture of its manufacturing and service costs. “The biggest improvement to the business is in the overall cost analysis process,” Warfield said.

Project managers are being held more accountable for responsibly managing their projects, according to Warfield. “The integration of Oracle E-Business Suite allows us to track the total cost of the projects that we work on. We're able to review costs immediately and make better decisions,” she said. At any one time, GE Energy has 100 to 200 field service projects open, usually lasting from one day to several months. “Oracle E-Business Suite allows project managers to manage their budget to actuals, which they could never do before without painful number crunching. Now, they're able to review their budget at any time, find where their margins might be eroding and make appropriate decisions,” she said. “It's changed their level of productivity. They're able to be much more proactive.”

GE Energy manages a complex manufacturing environment with its Oracle solution; a typical bill of materials includes 6,000 parts, for example. “We do most of our planning and forecasting in the master production schedule in Oracle Discrete Manufacturing,” Warfield said. “Some of our parts have ninemonth lead times, so we plan parts before we ever get sales orders. We reflect our forecasts in Oracle Order Management, which we then use to manage our shipping, too.”

Improved Revenue Recognition

By moving away from paper-based processes, the company has reduced invoicing time for field services from more than a month to just one day. “Before, pages were stuck in overnight envelopes, sent to other places to be approved and signed, and sent again in overnight envelopes to actually produce a bill,” Warfield explained.

“All that is completely gone – along with the significant costs associated with overnight shipping,” she continued. “The information immediately comes into Oracle Project Costing the day that the field techs are out in the field, and then directly into Project Billing. Depending on processes or tasks being completed, we can invoice the same day the task completed. It's totally changed our ability to review costs and invoice quickly.”

Auto-Sourcing Speeds Processes, Ensures Integration With Financials

GE Energy also increased process efficiencies in other areas, according to Warfield. Oracle Purchasing and Oracle Manufacturing allow the company to automatically re-order parts when inventory falls to predefined levels. “Auto-sourcing has enabled us to source engine parts and repair processes automatically from the time a worker on the shop floor determines he needs the part. He enters the part number, and within that day it's on order,” Warfield said. “The auto-sourcing rules make it a quick process, because there's no person engaged.” Warfield estimates that auto-sourcing has cut two to three days from the sourcing process.

The close link between Oracle Purchasing and Oracle Financials has also made the company's finance team more effective. “We used to have separate purchasing and financial systems that weren't well-integrated. We've eliminated all the integration issues and the time delays. We are now in one application, so when the purchase order is received it is ready to be matched with the invoice, and the invoice can be paid,” Warfield said. Payables have also been simplified. “It's a very shortened process. We went from a minimum of two to three days to do a full batch of payables down to one day,” she said.