Oracle has unveiled Demantra 7.3 versions for Demand Management, Advanced Forecasting and Demand Modeling, Real-Time Sales and Operations Planning and Predictive Trade Planning. The latest release offers an enhanced new product introduction capability that improves customers' ability to accurately forecast demand for items with little or no history, and provides better insight into product lifecycles, seasonal demand peaks and the impact of promotions.
This is a major new release which provides significant new functionality, John Bermudez, Oracle senior director for SCM product strategy, tells 5 Minute Briefing. With the difficult economy putting in a range of pressures on organizations and companies trying to work with in some cases fewer employees, "the more automated capabilities that we build into our planning systems, the more work people can get done," Bermudez notes. Companies want to be able to respond to their customers and capture every piece of business possible, he adds, noting that the last thing they want is to have a customer order configuration temporarily unavailable, requiring a back order.
Organizations are trying to improve their customer service while cutting costs through measures such as minimizing inventory and shortening lead times, Bermudez explains. "We are seeing customers taking their demand planning and sales and operation planning to a higher level. When business was good, it was okay to tell the boss we didn't ship that on time because we were short of this component and the customer ordered more than we expected. If you are growing at 10% or 15% a year, management isn't happy about the miss, but you can get away with it. When business is off 10% or 20%, and you still use the same excuse you used a couple of years ago, that just doesn't fly very well," Bermudez observes.
In a key enhancement, Demantra 7.3 provides improved capabilities to plan for Configure-to-Order (CTO) products with multiple optional or mandatory sub-components, tracking interaction between items and components including automatic calculation of dependent demand. Additionally, an improved user interface enables customers to create a new product based on an existing product history, manage product launch and lifecycle process and model the gradual phase out of existing products.
With this release, forecasting analytics have been extended with pooled time series modeling that provides an alternative to traditional time series aggregation to model demand patterns across multiple product times series. And, leveraging Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA), integrated business planning is delivered by linking Demantra Real-Time Sales and Operations Planning and Oracle Hyperion Planning.
Demantra 7.3 now runs on Oracle Enterprise Linux. It is available now and includes translations for eight languages.
For more product details, go here.