Production scheduling has traditionally been considered as a manual and iterative exercise by shop floor planners who are required to continuously balance the material and capacity constraints.  This has often led to poor manufacturing performance, excess inventory buildup, un-planned downtimes and eventually resulted in shop floor nervousness. With the ever evolving supply chain strategies and demand driven production methodologies, finite production scheduling is being seen today as a means to achieve manufacturing excellence and business transformation.

So where does production scheduling fit into the complex equation of Supply Chain Planning?

We all know that material moves through a supply chain from Buy->Make->Sell, where as the planning activity focuses in the reverse direction Sell (Demand) -> Make (Manufacture) -> Buy (Supply). Each of these individual activities can be broken down to their sub levels but as we can see, Make (manufacturing) is where the core production activity is centered in a typical supply chain. Production planning amounts to what and when we need to manufacture in order to effectively meet the customer demands where as Production Scheduling is the actual process of deciding how to commit resources between various possible tasks. In a nutshell, if you have planned to do multiple tasks, you cannot do all tasks in one go – you have to schedule and synchronize them. The end objective of Production Scheduling is to maximize through-put & customer service levels and at the same time minimize downtime, inventory, changeovers, overtime etc. All this leads us to believe that in order to have a perfectly synchronized manufacturing eco system, today’s shop floor planners need efficient and cutting edge scheduling tools.

Oracle’s best of breed Value chain planning solutions (VCP) address a wide array of supply chain planning challenges in today’s world.  One of the key elements of Oracle VCP is Production Scheduling (PS) ,which is a finite planning and scheduling tool that was originally part of JD Edwards which after the acquisition by Oracle, has been seamlessly integrated with Oracle E-Business Suite. Oracle Production scheduling solution comes with feature rich functionalities that would make the life of a shop floor planner more comfortable. The planners can now not only make informed decisions but also align the manufacturing activities to meet the organizations objectives. Some of the high level features of Oracle Production Scheduling (PS) are –

1. Graphical and intuitive UI with high level of flexibility built into it such as Gantt charts, Multi-Capacity Resource views, graphical routings Etc
2. Analytical view with drill down to root cause analysis of constraint violations.
3. Ability to model complex what-if simulations and compare against a base plan
4. Automatic floating bottle neck detection and rescheduling
5. Key Performance Indicators (for e.g. order fill, line fill, Inv. Turns, resource utilization etc)
6. Out-Of-Box integration with Oracle E-Business Suite

Oracle Production Scheduling supports both discrete and process mode of manufacturing. PS can be implemented either in a standalone mode or in an integrated mode with Oracle EBS. PS requires very minimal setups from an Implementation perspective and can be deployed almost immediately.

This is a brief introduction to Production Scheduling (PS) module. In next discussions I would be giving a high level overview of PS’s close cousin – Oracle Strategic Network Optimization (SNO).

With companies continuing to expand their global footprint, it makes business sense to expand the technology and application footprint too, so that the complexities associated with globalization are taken care of.

While continued-support issues like non-availability of critical patch updates makes a strong case in itself for the need to upgrade to the latest available Oracle application release available in the market today, I believe the decision to upgrade to a higher release should stem from a more fundamental need like the additional business value that the new functionalities of the latest release promise to deliver.

IT heads are seeing an increase in requests from their users for an upgrade who want to leverage the enhanced functionalities of Oracle R12 and thus gain a better visibility into their mission critical business processes.

With premier Oracle support ending this November and extended support ending the next year, an upgrade makes a compelling case for the Finance teams as well, who would not be very willing enough to spend on extra maintenance packages and at the same time keep the users deprived of the tangible business benefits that the upgrade brings to the table.

For those who are wondering if an upgrade requires a huge upfront investment, you might be interested in reading this.

More than a decade since I have been associated with global delivery based “Application Management” (read: Application Support) outsourcing, I have seen this service mature and transform.  “Application Management” outsourcing was first among American corporation CIO’s due to relative lower risk and quicker ROI. Among the first focus were; significant cost savings, SLA based services, continuous improvement and best practices to realize efficiencies.  The advent of ERP applications (both for SAP and Oracle Applications) saw benefits beyond  such as  speeding up capital projects implementation and further cost savings with business knowledge gained. The era of “Application Outsourcing” (AO) saw application transformation, optimization and consolidation as major source of efficiencies.

Off late “Revenue Model” coupled with “Application Portfolio Management” is gaining ground in the outsourcing market. This is generally used for support and projects combined.  Let me explain, considering an enterprise IT scenario. (1) Your key applications need a dedicated support. I.e. you’re critical business applications that have highest complexities and larger user base, needs highest level of support and hence a “Dedicated Model” from your service provider is a must to meet your business needs.  (2) Your less complex applications, even if large user base might suffice a “Shared Model”. When managed well, this will provide higher level of efficiencies and greater cost savings. Both these models have been in place for a while, the scope of shared services model has been growing. (3) There is always (small) set of applications that are low in complexities and small user base in most enterprise IT.  These are effective candidate for “Pay-Per-Use” model. I.e. a ticket/transaction based model and one pays for services only when required. Much like our toll roads, you pay when you use. I must warn you though “Pay-Per-Use” term is used in many contexts and generally for projects.

Applications management services are like buying insurance, as contingency. CIOs can now view the entire IT applications as portfolio and divide them to be serviced in “Dedicated, Shared and Pay-Per-Use” model for best efficiencies. The industry should see growing maturity with these offerings in next few years, but this is right time to ask your outsourcer(s). The availability of APM (Application Portfolio Management) tool should further help this cause.

I would love to hear your views or any experience.

We recently conducted a very successful webinar “Peer Advice: The Inside Story on Upgrading to Oracle E-Business Suite R12” in collaboration with CIO.com. One of our customers Clopay Corporation, the nation’s largest manufacturer of residential garage doors along with Oracle Corporation participated sharing their insight and experience. This webinar was very well attended with large number of CIO’s and VP’s of IT throughout North America. You can view more details at our website. A large part of the webinar was devoted to Clopay Corporation discussing their R12 upgrade journey with details on strategy, business case, execution, successes measurement and finally advises to CIOs. Oracle also updated the participants on the business benefits they will realize upgrading to R12. One of the benefits to live interactive webinars is that you can get real world feedback on the fly.

When we asked the participants “Are you planning to upgrade to Oracle EBS R12? More than 50% of the participants mentioned that they are not looking for upgrading to R12 in 2010. I was really surprised that more participants hadn’t started the upgrade planning process. There are many benefits that can be realized by upgrading. Part of the reason could be waiting for Fusion. I expect Oracle will be clearer on this path over the next few months. Companies that are starting to research their service provider will be on top of their game. An interesting next question was – What is your reason for not upgrading until now? 32% of the participants cited no in-house bandwidth as the reason with 30% not sure about ROI. This partially answered above response. Choosing a right service provider to help with your upgrade is critical – given the R12 upgrade momentum, one might want to consider moving fast to get the right attention from a provider whose capabilities fit the best. Creating an ROI can be daunting; this is where methodical approach such as Clopay’s can help in overcoming the issue. Every organization is unique – with Oracle and service provider’s help, IT leadership team can make an appropriate case with ease. I would love to hear your thoughts. Have you started your upgrade yet? If you haven’t started the upgrade what is the reason? I look forward to your feedback and thoughts on this interactive blog.