Solving the Toughest Supply Chain Challenges with Oracle IBPX

Posted on by Kevin Creel

As organizations confront the increasingly complex supply chain disruptions stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic and natural disasters, there’s a growing need for new, more tightly integrated supply chain planning (SCP) and enterprise performance management (EPM) solutions that can rise to the occasion. In June 2021, the White House highlighted several overarching issues for supply chains worldwide, including:

  • The economic snapback in early 2021, during which many new jobs were created and purchasing activity ramped up over a relatively short period. This sudden spike in demand overwhelmed companies whose operations had shrunken throughout 2020.
  • Pressure on manufacturers in particular, who ranked ahead of all other industries in terms of their exposure to domestic supplier delays. Sixty percent of all manufacturers reported experiencing such supply disruptions.
  • Inventories for some products, like automobiles, shrunk to enough to meet just one month of demand. Before the pandemic, dealerships averaged about 2.5 months of supply. High demand and shortages of semiconductors have hurt this sector.

Meanwhile, flooding throughout China and Germany during the summer of 2021 disrupted many key supply chains. In a repeat of 2020, global restrictions of land access to sailors — as a way to control coronavirus spread — are also back, creating further slowdowns, according to Reuters.

These challenges, which can be difficult to foresee and respond to, require consolidated planning, supported by real-time execution and monitoring. Oracle Integrated Business Planning and Execution (IBPX) delivers this unique combination of capabilities, giving manufacturers a single clear view into their operations and the ability to seamlessly translate plans into action across a wide range of use cases.
 

 

What is Oracle IBPX?

Oracle IBPX is a single integrated platform that includes the following main components:

  • Oracle SCP: This application offers end-to-end supply chain planning in the cloud. Using SCP, companies can see demand insights and supply constraints, gather stakeholder input, and apply machine learning to data for better forecasting and sales and operations planning (S&OP).
  • Oracle EPM: With this solution, companies have the ability to model and plan processes across divisions including finance, HR, and sales. For example, Cloud EPM Financial Close and Consolidation enables more streamlined accounting processes than an equivalent on-premises system.

In practice, Oracle IPBX natively integrates S&OP and sales and order execution, or S&OE, into the same architecture, opening up key capabilities such as:

  • What-if analyses of scenarios, informed by Internet of Things (IoT) sensor data flows, artificial intelligence (AI), and prescriptive analytics.
  • A unified planning framework with built-in functions that can be scaled across workforce, sales, supply chain, capital expenditure, and S&OP planning.
  • Zero-latency backlog management, enhanced by an overview of order promising, plus full analysis of constraints and pull-in feasibility, to animate the risk of order delays.
  • Advanced scenario planning, backed by integrated execution for releasing scheduled sales orders.
  • Event detection and monitoring, powered by AI and machine learning algorithms that recognize patterns and evaluate risk.
  • Accurate sensing and prediction of customer demand to stay ahead of possible demand-supply mismatches.

The benefits of Oracle IBPX

In a world of frequent and often unpredictable supply chain disruptions, Oracle IPBX offers a comprehensive architecture for staying proactive and seeing the entire supply chain at a glance. For example, the combination of IoT data, AI, and prescriptive analytics within IBPX can automatically detect and respond to key events, helping organizations avoid being caught off guard. Even if an automatic response isn’t possible, IBPX notifies the right person to update the plans within it. Diagnosing the impact of potential disruptions and planning around them also becomes easier in IBPX. Moreover, the holistic insights offered by IBPX let manufacturers see how their performance compares to industry benchmarks and against internal metrics. Using this information, an organization can continuously update its plans in real-time.

Interested in getting started with Oracle IBPX? Inspirage is an expert Oracle partner with experience implementing SCP, EPM, ERP, and other Oracle solutions for organizations across multiple industries. Learn more about how we can guide your next project by contacting us directly.

Kevin Creel | Key Contributor

Kevin Creel is a co-founder of Inspirage and currently serves as President, Strategy and Business Development. Mr. Creel leads the global business strategy and development organizations at Inspirage. He is a recognized subject matter expert for supply chain management business process and system design. Kevin frequently presents at industry and analyst events on subjects such as cloud supply chain systems. Prior to founding Inspirage, Kevin worked for Oracle Corporation as a product manager leading supply chain systems design with a focus on high tech and configure to order products. In this design role he acted as a “voice for the customer” leveraging his 15+ years of experience in business leadership and system engineering roles in the high tech and semiconductor industries. In 2008, Kevin was recognized by the Oracle Technical Network as an Oracle ACE for his thought leadership and educational contributions within the Oracle professional and user community.