Oracle announced the availability of Oracle Transportation Management 6.3 and Oracle Global Trade Management 6.3, which provide new capabilities including enhanced fleet management, transportation sourcing, transportation business intelligence, transportation planning, rail transportation, workflow and event management, freight payment, billing and claims, document management and customs management. By delivering comprehensive transportation and global trade management functionality on a single, unified platform, the new releases aim to help customers support business growth and market expansion by reducing transportation costs, increasing operational efficiency, improving customer service, decreasing supply chain lead times and mitigating supply chain/trade compliance risk.
Leveraging two specialized mobile applications, the new release of Oracle Transportation Management supports key business processes such as the freight tender process, order/shipment visibility, event management and access to transportation business intelligence on mobile devices. The new capabilities help companies better understand where shipments are and minimizes the cost of transporting them, Derek Gittoes, Oracle vice president, Logistics Product Strategy, tells 5 Minute Briefing. For example, he notes, with the new mobile capabilities drivers can provide shipment status updates on smart phones, automatically picking up on the phone’s latitude and longitude.
In addition, all of the business intelligence, including transportation-related reports, metrics and KPIs can now be delivered on mobile devices as well. In addition, for companies that have dedicated or private fleets of trucks, drivers and equipment, there is a new user interface that integrates geospatial street-level views and mapping of data, to enable users to see orders, shipments and routes and in order to better plan delivery routes.
Shipment optimization improvements in the Transportation Management solution also help organizations better handle issues such as how to consolidate smaller shipments into larger ones, and provide insight into the least costly way of shipping them. “We did work around shipment unit optimization, looking at the optimal way of packaging products in order to minimize transportation costs. That is something that is unique to our product,” adds Gittoes.
New capabilities in Global Trade Management focus heavily on helping companies improve and streamline their processes for making sure they are compliant with government agency regulatory controls including customs requirements and complex license requirements such as International Traffic & Arms Regulations (ITAR) controls. “Most companies are compliant today. It is just that it takes a lot of manual effort to do that,” says Gittoes, explaining that by automating highly labor intensive tasks, companies can save time. “If you can do it faster, it can actually have a significant cost impact,” he adds.
For example, says Gittoes, there is a new module called Oracle Custom Management which helps companies manage their customs procedures, particularly the preparation of information that is required to make a customs filing. This helps them with determining which filings are required, preparing the information, validating it, and then actually producing the document or electronic filing, including currency and weight and measurement conversions.
“We also enhanced license management which is relevant for companies that have very highly controlled goods,” explains Gittoes. For companies shipping highly controlled goods, special export licenses must be in place, and the new license management capabilities help them adhere to the requirements of the license, such as the quantity it covers, and when the license expires. “As you are processing shipments, it automatically assigns the right license to the shipments so that those companies are compliant when they are actually shipping the goods out the door.”
And lastly, Oracle has also introduced a new restricted-party screening workbench so companies can be sure that they are not shipping to companies that are on a government agency’s “do not do business with” list. The new workbench improves the screening process, making sure companies are compliant with the least effort required on the part of the individuals doing the job, says Gittoes.
More information is available about Oracle Transportation Management 6.3 and Oracle Global Trade Management 6.3.