To help organizations improve operational alignment and financial performance, Oracle yesterday announced the integration of Oracle Hyperion Planning and Oracle's Demantra Real-Time Sales and Operations Planning.
The new integration is intended to enable CFOs to get a reliable revenue forecast that has been validated against the current operating plan, while on the operations side, supply chain and manufacturing managers can reconcile current operating plans against updated financial targets and budgets.
Leveraging Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA), this integration enables Oracle Hyperion Planning to publish the financial targets for revenue, profits and other metrics to Demantra Real-Time Sales and Operations Planning. This improves decision-making through increased visibility into financial goals and helps improve the quality and profitability of the supply chain operations and demand shaping activities.
Demantra Real-Time Sales and Operations Planning provides the current operating forecast and cost of goods sold data to Oracle Hyperion Planning. This operating forecast is delivered in monetary units and enables financial analysts to identify any gaps between the financial plan and current operating plan.
Customers will gain additional benefits from adopting Demantra Demand Management, which enables a global demand planning process that senses local demand changes, generates an accurate forecast and supports a cross-functional consensus planning process.
With this integration, data can be moved seamlessly, preserving the user interfaces from Hyperion Planning and Demantra so that new training or re-implementation is not required.
CFOs are continually looking to improve the accuracy of their financial forecasts, observes Oracle vice president of EPM product marketing John O'Rourke. The new integration of Hyperion-based planning and Demantra allows organizations to ensure that financial targets are understood on the operational side of the planning process, he explains. The integration also enables updated volume forecasts to be passed back up into the financial planning system on a regular basis so that executives on the financial side can update their forecasts and understand what is coming out of the Demantra system, and what the managers and sales and operations planning side of the business are seeing.
For instance, O'Rourke tells 5 Minute Briefing, if a new sales forecast is lower than originally projected, there might be a need to make adjustments in areas such as advertising or travel to make sure bottom line objectives are met, or, if revenues are looking better than originally projected, people on the financial side might want to increase investments in certain areas.
For more on Oracle Hyperion Planning, go here.
For more on Oracle's Demantra Real-Time Sales and Operations Planning, go here.