Choosing exactly how you approach supply and value chain analytics isn’t a matter of answering just one question. To really understand the needs of your business, you have to answer a handful. Ask yourself these questions and see how they relate to your company’s approach through the lens of Value Chain Planning (VCP) software and its many modules. These aren’t the only questions to ask, but they’re a great place to start:

• Can I use the key information provided by my VCP applications? Am I effectively using the data in the planning applications to support planning and execution? Or is it buried in the applications?
• Do you need to build an internal warehouse for storing the data? Or will Oracle’s Advanced Planning Command Center (APCC) provide the right level of support for your specific business requirements without any changes? The most important thing to consider here is whether the degree of the data fitness – how ready and able the data is to be used in supply chain analytics – will help or hurt your operation. APCC can definitely provide some companies with data that’s fit for their purposes, right out of the box. But that’s not the case for everyone.
• How will you and your staff deal with the hardware and the software needed to deploy the analytics solution? And, once it’s installed and up and running, how can you make sure it keeps getting used correctly? Remember, you’ll have to update your key performance indicators and have some other responsibilities to align with the changing business processes.

What it does
Oracle’s APCC is a powerful tool right out of the box, but it isn’t right for every company or every situation. Without taking away any of the many advantages provided by the VCP applications, Inspirage has developed the Analytics in the Cloud offering to help companies tailor Oracle’s solutions to their own individual and often unique needs. On top of the strong key performance indicator tracking already available in APCC, we’ve added ready-made sets of KPIs and associated reporting. You’ll also be able to develop your own custom KPIs and reports that can drill further down into the available data and find individual problems.

Wondering how it connects to your existing VCP systems? Like the name says, it’s cloud-deployed. Your existing VCP platforms are connected to our privately hosted cloud server through two key steps: The cloud solution first integrates to your VCP applications to extract the demand and supply chain data. It then generates leading practices-driven  dashboards, reports and KPIs to enable both the plan evaluation and plan execution processes. Forecasting, inventory and supply chain planning and simulations create your operating plan, which feeds into the execution. You can review metrics to identify capacity, inventory and other supply chain risks, monitor demand and supply exceptions and ultimately assess overall effectiveness, making the next iteration of the cycle more powerful – whether you’re using S&OP, IBP or another approach.

Our cloud-based solution is ultimately about making VCP data and APCC more effective for companies. The Analytics in the Cloud solution provides a common reporting solution, support for various aspects of troubleshooting, use and optimization. With it, you can realize better outcomes and more in-depth reporting for your supply chain.