Does it take you too long to respond to critical business questions or events that occur throughout the day? For example, do you need to quickly respond to changing supply chain conditions? Can you respond to a request for a large important customer order instantly? Can you assess the impact of an unexpected reduction of supply to your customer demand before it becomes reality? Can you calculate the impact of an engineering change or production shortfall on your service levels?
Inspirage is a leading implementer of Oracle® Rapid Planning which enables you to dramatically reduce your decision making time through real-time event driven planning and simulation.
Download the Oracle® Rapid Planning Datasheet
Overview
Today’s dynamic and rapidly changing supply chain conditions require planning tools that quickly react to unexpected events such as a new ‘hot demand’ from an important customer, a product quality issue that needs to be addressed, a supplier yield bust, or a sudden product line breakdown. Oracle Rapid Planning leverages a fast, incremental planning engine combined with mass editing of source and planning data capability and a powerful productivity enhancing user interface to instantly assess the impacts of business changes without having to wait for your daily tactical plans to complete and your ERP to catch up.
Embedded analytics, robust exception management, and a spreadsheet-style user interface provide predictive and actionable insight to identify the most profitable decision. Your decisions can be translated directly into action with seamless integration to execution since the integration with Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne is provided out-of-the-box. Rapid Planning can also be deployed in heterogeneous environments and co-exist with your existing ERP and planning systems.
Key Features
- Fast event-driven material and capacity planning
- Mass edit and manipulation of items, bills, routings, ASLs, resources, capacity, supply, and demand data (without requiring immediate changes in ERP)
- Next-generation productivity enhancing spreadsheet-style user interfaceModel the realities of your supply chain: alternates, substitutes, demand priorities, ship methods, line rates and so on
- Improve revenue with clear to build and late demand analysis
- Integrated with Oracle E-Business Suite and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne via Value Chain Planning Integration Base Pack (select releases and features apply)
Key Benefits
- Quickly respond to events
- Rapidly plan your entire value chain
- Make better decisions faster
Quickly react to supply chain disruptions
Having a good tactical plan, for example from Oracle® Advanced Supply Chain Planning, is a good starting point, but is not always sufficient. Issues and disruptions occur throughout the day or between your planning cycles and you often need to make decisions within minutes. Oracle Rapid Planning offers fast, incremental plan runs, easy manipulation of planning data, and automated constraint-based decisions making to help you make decisions in the shortest possible time.
Fast incremental plan runs driven by real-time events
Oracle Rapid Planning evaluates the impact of changes. Individual events such as changes to supply and demand orders are processed incrementally. Oracle Rapid Planning enables you to run multiple simulations to evaluate various actions and alternatives to get to the most effective set of actions to solve any problems caused by supply chain disruptions. For example, you can enter a new demand or simulate the effect of a new engineering change and quickly see the impact.
Easily manipulate plan data
Oracle Rapid Planning enables you to assess the impact of engineering, demand, and supply changes without having to access your execution systems. You don’t have to wait for ERP transactions to catch up before running ‘what-if’ simulation scenarios. Instead, you can easily simulate data changes within the plan and enable your planners to be in complete control. For example, you can edit an individual demand record to assess the impact and feasibility of accepting a critical customer order; or, select multiple records and make mass edits to determine how to reallocate based on a critical constraint so that you meet revenue targets.
Leverage automated decision making
To respond to supply chain events effectively, you need a plan that is feasible and achievable. Unlike conventional unconstrained planning tools, Oracle Rapid Planning simultaneously takes into consideration all of the key material, resource, and lead time constraints in your supply chain. You can easily and quickly identify the bottlenecks in your supply chain and what action needs to be taken to resolve these.
Oracle Rapid Planning enables you to make better decisions more quickly by automating planning decisions and recommending a broad range of alternatives to resolve issues. For example, it can recommend fulfilling demand via substitute products, producing products using substitute components or alternate resources, the use of alternate processes (alternate bills of materials and alternate routings), or the use of alternate suppliers or transfers from alternate facilities. The alternates chosen are controlled by user defined ranks and priorities. This enables you achieve a much better and automated starting point to meet your objectives.
Provide predictive and actionable insight
Oracle Rapid Planning provides embedded analytics and a spreadsheet-like user interface that enables you to assess the business impact of scenarios to determine the most effective course of action.
Analyze plan performance indicators
To make effective decisions, planners need to translate planning decisions and actions into business impact to assess how their actions will affect business performance. Oracle Rapid Planning provides embedded analytics with a large number of pre-seeded key performance indicators that enable you to easily analyze your ‘what-if’ scenarios in terms of business impact. For example, you can evaluate changes to the plan in terms of how it will impact your revenue, costs, and gross margins; how plans perform in terms of capacity and supplier utilization; or how decisions impact projected excess and obsolete inventory. You can also drill from the key performance indicators directly to the related exceptions to determine the conditions that cause performance issues.
Leverage embedded insights
Oracle Rapid Planning provides analysis for key business decisions like clear-to-build analysis and late demand diagnosis. Using the clear-to-build analysis and simulation, you can easily determine which orders have all the required materials to release to production. You can also identify which critical orders need to be pulled in to meet service level or revenue targets, and simulate to identify what changes need to be made to the schedule to manufacture them. The late demand diagnosis and constraint details enable you to immediately drill from a late order to the root cause, and directly to potential actions to resolve the issue.
Compare different plan simulations
You can also assess the combined impact of multiple decisions to make effective recommendations. Oracle Rapid Planning enables you to evaluate alternative scenarios or business strategies. Plan comparison views enable you to compare multiple scenarios side by side to determine what set of decisions should be taken and which scenario makes sense in terms of business impact. For example, you can compare performance indicators, detailed exceptions, supplies and demands, and material and resource requirements between plans. You can also directly identify which specific orders have changed between simulations, and the degree of improvement or new problems.
Translate decisions into actions immediately in ERP
Oracle Rapid Planning can be implemented standalone, or integrated with Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne. All data necessary for planning is brought into Rapid Planning automatically and completely out-of-the-box. Plan recommendations such as changed purchase orders, work orders, and transfer orders can be released directly into execution if immediate action is required.
Integrated with Oracle’s Value Chain Planning solution
Oracle Rapid planning enables additional value in your existing planning processes via integration with other Oracle® Value Chain Planning products.
Demand sensing and shaping
Oracle Rapid Planning complements the demand sensing and shaping capabilities of Oracle® Demantra Demand Management. You can use Demantra Demand Management to get insight into changing demand patterns, assess the impact of new product introductions and promotion strategies on your consensus demand, and leverage better statistics to arrive at a more accurate forecast, which can be used by Rapid Planning to drive downstream supply decisions.
Sales and operations planning
Oracle Rapid Planning improves your sales and operations planning process by enabling you to collaborate with your internal organizations and external trading partners on a common set of demand data. Oracle Rapid Planning provides the operations planning portion of the sales and operations planning process. It provides fast what-if simulations to help you determine the most profitable use of your resources and determine the actions needed to meet your revenue and cost objectives.
Tactical supply chain planning
When deployed with Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning, you can use Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning’s plan results as a starting point for intra-day simulations. Rapid Planning provides to fine tune what planned orders can and cannot be overridden in the simulation so preserve key decisions already made in the batch tactical plan. When done with the simulations, the results can be published back to Advanced Supply Chain Planning which will enforce the decisions made in its next daily planning run.
Collaborative planning with contract manufacturers and suppliers
Oracle Rapid Chain Planning enables you to pull your trading partners into the planning process. For example, the output of your plan can be published to your suppliers via Oracle Collaborative Planning directly from the Planner Workbench. The commitments from your suppliers come back as supplier capacity that is considered as a constraint in determining what you can produce to meet your demand based on your supplier capabilities.
Accurate and reliable order promising
Oracle Rapid Planning can be the basis for promising deliveries to your customers with Oracle® Global Order Promising. This provides increased accuracy and reliability of your order promises, as the starting point is a feasible supply chain plan that has determined the most profitable selection of facilities, resources, and sources of supply to meet your expected demand.
Enable other decision makers to analyze key planning information
Oracle Rapid Planning is fully integrated with Oracle® Advanced Planning Command Center to provide key supply chain decisions makers the capability to analyze output from your supply plans, together with data from Demantra and other Advanced Planning products (for example in their Sales and Operations Planning dashboard). With Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center you can compare key corporate performance metrics for your business strategies and alternatives as represented in your strategic and tactical plans.