Oracle Corp. today announced a broad set of new logistics management capabilities within its Oracle Fusion Cloud Supply Chain & Manufacturing or SCM suite.

Updates to Oracle Fusion Cloud Transportation Management and Oracle Fusion Cloud Global Trade Management are aimed at helping organizations reduce costs and risk, improve customer experience and adapt better to business disruptions.

There has been plenty of that lately. An Oracle survey last September found that 87% of consumers said they had been negatively affected by supply chain issues over the past year, most of which are holdovers from the height of the pandemic. Oracle SCM encompasses a wide range of applications, including supply chain planning, procurement, order management and capturing customer demand from multiple channels, manufacturing and maintenance.

A new machine learning-based algorithm in Transportation Management enables users to evaluate more accurately the potential impact on delivery times of both macro-level interruptions such as extreme weather and network-level disruptions such as labor and capacity shortages (pictured). Previously, transit time predictions were limited to the shipping history of a supplier. External information can now be integrated from about a dozen partners such as risk management software provider Supply Network Visibility Holdings LLC, which does business as Everstream Analytics.

Better spot bids

Enhanced shipping capabilities include automated spot bidding, the ability to combine and track multiple shipments in the transportation management application and automated global trade analysis on trade agreements in Oracle Global Trade Management. Most companies move freight under contract at pre-defined rates have to go to the spot market on occasion, said Derek Gittoes, Oracle’s vice president of supply chain product strategy. Providers can now come back with multiple conditional bids factoring in such variables as the size of the shipping container or time of delivery.

“Bids can be distributed via email or via direct access from transportation service providers,” Gittoes said. “In some cases, we submit directly to digital freight networks and can show customers what’s available and at what price.” Previously, bids were limited to one per provider and there were no conditional accommodations.

A new automated global trade analysis feature provides support for hundreds of preferential trade agreements so that shipments can be analyzed for possible discounts or special treatment. “At a transaction level we can now analyze the items that are being shipped and the applicable trade agreements and, based on the bill of materials, say whether it meets the rules for preferential trade agreements,” Gittoes said. Previously, such analysis could only be done on a product basis.

Talk to me

Oracle also continues to find new uses for its Digital Assistant, a conversational service that is built on prebuilt skills and templates. Real-time, multilingual voice and text response capabilities in 18 languages are now available within Transportation Management and Global Trade Management.

Finally, new transportation and analytics capabilities in the Transportation Management and Global Trade Management applications enable customers to access, analyze and interpret transportation and global trade data more quickly to reduce costs and improve planning.

“Specifically, we’ve added data visualization using the Oracle analytics engine on top of the Transportation and Global Trade products,” Gittoes said. “They can look at how accurate their predictions have been over time or analyze their savings from certain trade agreements without switching to a reporting tool.”

The new features are included as part of subscription fees for existing customers.

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