Complementing its existing suite of Value Chain Planning applications, Oracle has announced the availability of Oracle Rapid Planning to help companies improve their ability to quickly adapt to unplanned supply chain events. Rapid Planning is a new product, created from the ground up with brand-new technology, Oracle's John Bermudez, senior director, planning product strategy, tells 5 Minute Briefing. It is designed to enable planners to rapidly replan their supply and demand, and react to changes that have happened between their weekly planning runs such as the opportunity presented when a customer that calls in and wants to know if they can double the size of their order, and the challenges of an urgent engineering change, an unexpected production shortfall or a supplier quality issue.
Oracle Rapid Planning supports customers with real-time, event-driven planning and simulation that delivers predictive and actionable intelligence, enabling planners to react to these changes. Embedded analytics, robust exception management, and a spreadsheet-style user interface provide insight to identify the most profitable decision.
One of the most important aspects of the new product is that it provides results back in both detail but also aggregate business metrics, Bermudez notes. "With the Rapid Planning product, they get the results back in high-level metrics of their choosing." It enables the user to pinpoint and evaluate the impact of a change such as the effect of accepting a large new order on other customers.
The introduction of Oracle Rapid Planning is intended to support companies as they attempt to operate on a more global basis with less inventory, Bermudez observes. "We built it because of the change in business processes. It happens to be coming out at a time when companies have to be more responsive than ever due to the economy," Bermudez adds. "It is timely that the release is now."
Oracle Rapid Planning can deployed with current and prior versions of the Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne and Oracle's Value Chain Planning applications such as Oracle's Demantra. Additionally, Oracle Rapid Planning can be implemented as a standalone product for use in heterogeneous environments including SAP.
For more information about Oracle Rapid Planning, go here.