Oracle Corp. has been steadily infusing its Fusion line of enterprise resource planning software with analytics capabilities. Now it’s supply chain’s turn.

The company is announcing today that it will add prebuilt metrics and dashboards created with its Oracle Analytics Cloud and Oracle Autonomous  Data Warehouse to Oracle Fusion Cloud Supply Chain & Manufacturing or SCM. The metrics leverage machine learning to help with supply chain cost control and risk exposure.

The announcement comes amid a global supply chain crisis that has led to shortages of a wide range of consumer and industrial items. Retailers and manufacturers are over-ordering supplies in response, making shortages worse and contributing to fears of inflation.

Oracle SCM already comes with an assortment of transactional reporting capabilities but until now uses of had to extract data and move it into their data lakes and data warehouses manually. “It’s a lot of hard work to run a full-blown analytics suite or data warehouse so why not provide a turnkey solution?” said T.K. Anand, senior vice president of Oracle Analytics.

The company began integrating cloud-based analytics into Fusion beginning with the core ERP module in 2019. It introduced analytics for human capital management last year. “This is the next step to providing that full coverage across the Fusion line,” Anand said.

Works on live data

Oracle will enable its data warehouse and analytics suites to work on live SCM data without requiring a data cleansing or extract/transfer/load procedure. The intent is to give customers a subset of analytical capabilities specific to supply chain metrics that apply to performance, identify problem areas and reduce chain disruption. Users will have limited ability to customize their own analytical reports beyond those provided out of the box, although they will have to upgrade to a full Oracle Analytics subscription to use all the available features.

“It’s a comprehensive, common data warehouse/data lake solution for all Fusion applications using a common data model with analytics on top of that,” Anand said. “It’s an invisible cloud service managed by Oracle that will look at data to see what’s changed, bring it over, transform it and the data will just show up.”

Specifically, the dashboards monitor key performance indicators of metrics like order management and fulfillment, inventory and procurement with prebuilt analytical formulas that are specific to supply chain performance. Users can model the impact of supply chain decisions on various areas of the business and pull in live data from other Fusion applications as well as from third-party sources using standard data formats.

AI looks ahead

Oracle said built-in machine learning capabilities can identify cost-saving opportunities, reveal operational bottlenecks and predict future outcomes to help companies quickly adjust to supply chain anomalies like sudden fluctuations in demand or component shortages. For example, Anand said, a manufacturer that is experiencing component shortages for a hot product can search for the same or similar components in its other products so they can be diverted to fulfill demand.

Integration with other Fusion data sources enables users to assess dependencies outside of the supply chain alone. For example, the company said, a customer can use the human capital management application to identify skills needs that plug holes is its supply chain operation.

The capabilities will be sold as a separate product on top of SCM but won’t require customers to opt into a full Autonomous Data Warehouse or Oracle Analytics service unless they exceed an unspecified threshold on the amount of data they use. Pricing varies according to enterprise licensing agreements.

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