Supply Chain Event Management (SCEM) is defined as an application supporting control processes for managing events within and between companies in real-time.

This integrated software functionality supports five major business processes including the ability to monitor what is happening within the supply chain, notify the right person in case of a delay or critical event, simulate activities, control your processes and measure your supply chain activities so that you can adapt your business process and make it more effective and efficient. In the graphic you see which core services exist in a SCEM system.

Through these services it is possible to receives updates to events and provides proactive alerts and responses to events throughout the supply chain.

You can take advantage of SCEM to support business in

• Monitoring and Tracking our Supply
• Sharing supply data globally
• Notifying the right persons at the right time when an exception occurs.
• Enabling event reporting

Capabilities of SCEM Application

Helps monitor and track end-to-end business transactions in the Supply Chain by providing a unified view of the business transactions spread across heterogeneous systems.

• Ability to monitor various notable events of a logical end to end transaction in multi-tiered supply chain including activities carried out by the supplier, carriers, to provide visibility beyond your department, beyond your company, to detect an exception and potentially automatically trigger a remedial action.
• Ability to correlate various notable events in multi-tiered supply chain and raise alert for action if delay or non-occurrence of one notable event impacts future activities of the same or other multiple transactions.
• Ability to view real-time auto-refreshed BAM dashboard showing progress and exceptions in color coded display of logical end to end transactions covering all notable events from begin to end throughout the supply chain.
• Ability to trigger email notification based on actionable exception to the transaction occurring in-house processing or during the vendor side processing.
• Allows real time detection and monitoring of business situations and exceptions from huge volumes of event data coming out of numerous sensors and systems, making it ideal for operation managers to quickly respond and take corrective actions.
• Ability to subscribe to an external event streams such as traffic alerts, Sensors, RSS feeds, RFID feeds , synthesize and correlate that massive date with state of the transaction in the system to arrive at potential exception or an action.
• Ability to identify trends and raise an actionable alert.
• Ability to filter out routinely progressing events automatically, and focus only on exceptions thereby improving efficiency of Logistics staff.
• Provides flexibility in modifying Alerts on a live production system without re-generation or re-deployment of the artifacts. Ability to declaratively change the recipient of the alerts/ notification

Oracle BAM Dashboard tracks end-to-end Field Service process too:

• My Oracle Support for issue capture
• E-Business Suite for Field Service & Spares
• Global Trade Management for export compliance
• DHL to track part shipping logistics

SCEM architecture

Oracle Supply Chain Event Management (SCEM) architecture components are as follows

• External Event Sources like B2B messages, Enterprise Event Sources like EBS, Fusion and other Enterprise Applications act as input sources.
• Events relevant to the business process are defined in the Situation template, which are then processed in the mid tier by Oracle Event Processor (OEP).
• Event Routers pick up the relevant events and get the payload associated with the events from the input systems and form the Logical Transaction Object which is cached using Coherence.
• The Situation Processor, or the CEP component, applies the business rules to the stream of events and evaluates them e.g pattern matching, aggregation etc., and arrives at the situation to be monitored which has critical business impact.
• The output (response) of the Situation Processor is sent to the Visualization layers such as BAM dashboards or mobile devices along with alerts and notifications

The current SCEM implementation uses the following Oracle components and technologies from Oracle Fusion Middleware (FWM):

1. E-Business Suite R12.1.3+ (Business event source)
2. Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, (11.1.1.1.6) PS5
   • Oracle Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) 11g [SOA composites]
   • Oracle Event Processor (OEP) 11g [Processing events/logic]
   • Oracle Business Activity Monitor (BAM) [Optional: Presentation layer]
   • Oracle Coherence 3.7.1.1 [Caching infrastructure]
   • Oracle TopLink [Persistence Modeling]
3. Client technologies
   • Oracle JDeveloper 11g (PS5) [SCEM Designer - Design Time, customizations]
   • Eclipse IDE (Galileo) [Customizations - optional]

For more information on Oracle Supply Chain Event Management, check the details

Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning (ASCP) is a comprehensive, internet-based planning solution that decides when and where supplies should be deployed within an extended supply chain (for example, inventory, purchase orders and work orders). This is the supply planning function.

Oracle ASCP addresses the following key supply planning issues:

• Purchased parts planning
• Capacity Modelling and Forecasting
• Supplier Demand Forecasting
• Production Planning and Scheduling
• Available to Promise calculation
• Sourcing Optimization, Supply Constrain Resolution
• Excess and Obsolete Planning and Simulation
• Distribution Planning

The integration with United Parcel Service (UPS) can be described as a collaboration between two companies that have provided its customers with proven transportation services, coming together to provide a common solution for those customers who use both Oracle Shipping Execution and UPS,

The Integration will be in the form of API's Oracle-UPS APIs is a set of programs which integrate shipping information, provided by UPS Online Tools into Oracle Applications suite to help customers streamline operations in the fulfillment cycle.

Oracle - UPS integration will enable Oracle customers to:

• Verify address/postal code for their shipment.
• Inquire about time in transit for ground shipments.
• Get shipping costs for deliveries.
• Track the packages after shipment.

Oracle-UPS APIs will be used throughout the Oracle ERP application suite. Order Management and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Applications will use these APIs to verify address and postal code and to provide customers with shipping service selection while taking orders.

Shipping Execution Applications will use these APIs to integrate UPS functionality seamlessly into the Oracle Shipping functionality.

Read this:

• KNOW WHAT IS SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT (SCM)? : An Overview
• SCM Subsystem

This article is an easy guide for Techno-functional consultant to understand SCM from Implementation as well as Oracle Application product Prospective.Lets start the topic with some of high points of earlier post .

• As mention in earlier post a Supply Chain is a network of retailers, distributors, transporters, storage facilities and suppliers that participate in the sale, delivery and production of a particular product.
  • Make a note a supply chain is product specific, not company specific
• Supply chain management (SCM) is a systematic approach to manage the entire flow of information, materials, and services from raw material suppliers through factories and warehouses to the end customer.
• Moreover , SCM involves the flows of material, information and finance in a network consisting of customers,suppliers, manufacturers, and distributors.
• You should be clear with Flow that SCM can manage :
  • The flow of actual materials, the top middle bars
    • From suppliers : flows of raw materials, intermediate products, finished goods
    • Reverse material flows : returns, repairs, servicing, recycling, disposal
  • and the information flows
    • From suppliers : manufacturing capacity, delivery schedules, promotions they have going
    • Reverse flows : sales, orders, inventory, quality, promotions
  • And finally, there are financial flows:
    • From suppliers: Credits, consignment, payment terms, invoice
    • Reverse Flows : payments, consignment
• Supply Chain Management is the management of the entire value-added chain, from the supplier to manufacturer right through to the retailer and the final customer.
• SCM has three primary goals: Reduce inventory, increase the transaction speed by exchanging data in real-time, and increase sales by implementing customer requirements more efficiently
• The need for SCM is because effective Supply Chain Mgt. is the next logical step towards increased profits and market share.
• Supply Chain Management (SCM) in line manager prospective is "let's-keep-things-moving-efficiently".

Read the rest of this entry »

Manufacturing environments can be classifed as discrete, repetitive, or process, or combinations this post will give more insights on different methods.

Project Manufacturing

Project manufacturing is used to meet demand driven production requirements for large contracts or projects.

Project manufacturing allows you to plan, schedule, process, and cost against a specific contract or a group of contracts for a specific customer.

Also it is possible to make task references to planned orders, jobs (part of Discrete Manufacturing), purchase orders, sales orders, miscellaneous transaction and other entities within Oracle Manufacturing.

Discrete Manufacturing

Discrete manufacturing is used for assemblies that you make in groups or batches.

It involves defining jobs with a job name, a job type, assembly, a job quantity, a start date, and an end date and use assembly bills of material to create job material requirements and routings to schedule job production activities and create operation specific material and resource requirements.

Discrete manufacturing is the most common production method for the application of flow manufacturing. Shippable end items are usually measured in individual units or "each". The production quantities produced in manufacturing can vary from one to large order quantities. In contrast to process intensive factories, discrete manufacturing usually requires more people than machines.

Flow Manufacturing

Flow Manufacturing is an innovative manufacturing approach that aligns production with customer demand.

Flow manufacturing employs Just-In-Time (JIT) concepts such as manufacturing to demand (vs. forecast),

• Production lines for families of products
• Pull material using kanbans
• Consume automatically material and costs upon completion

These in turn helps decrease inventories, optimize machine utilization, reduce response time to customer needs, and simplify shop floor activities. The most important part is to design production lines and production processes so that each line can produce a constantly changing mix of products within a family at a steady rate.

In flow manufacturing a product progresses through its manufacturing processes without stopping, like water in a river, hence the term "flow.

The goal of the flow manufacturer is to design and create a manufacturing line capable of building different products, one at a time, using only the amount of time required to actually complete the work.

Wait time, queue time, and other delays are largely eliminated in flow manufacturing.

Process Manufacturing

Process Manufacturing automates the entire product lifecycle for recipe-based manufacturing, from new product development, recipe management and production, to cost, quality, and regulatory management. It enables you to formulate products to individual customer specifications, manage variability, optimize capacity, and drive continuous process improvement.

Continuous manufacturing is another name of "process" manufacturing.

Assemble-to-Order(ATO) Manufacturing

This is where available options for unique product configurations. You can master schedule models and options then create work orders to build these unique configuration.

Repetitive Manufacturing

You use repetitive manufacturing for assemblies you make on a continuous or semi continuous basis over a predefined interval.

You identify which assemblies are built on which production lines in advance. You can build assemblies on dedicated lines (one assembly per line) or on mixed model lines (many assemblies per line). You can build an assembly on multiple lines.

You define repetitive schedules by the assembly, its daily quantity and its production lines, no job or work order exists. You can schedule production of a single assembly continuously for just a few hours or for any number of days.

You can schedule repetitive production based on the fixed lead time of your production line if the lead time does not vary from one assembly to another assembly. If the lead time varies by assembly, you can schedule the repetitive production time based on the routing of the assembly the line is building.

In repetitive manufacturing, you charge the cost of production directly to the assembly and line. You analyze and report costs by assembly and line during the period close. At period close, all charges to a repetitive assembly for that period are totalled and divided by the number of assemblies produced during that period. Period close also calculates assembly costs and usage variances.

Oracle Applications supports discrete, project, repetitive, assemble-to-order, and flow (work order-less) manufacturing methods

As usual APIs facilitate integration with complementary third party , in-house developed, or legacy applications. These APIs are standard in Oracle Process Manufacturing in various releases.

The benefits of OPM APIs are same usual:

• Automate data collection from plant devices
• Reduce custom interface code
• Provide easier software upgrades
• Allow connection to legacy systems
• Eliminate manual data entry and errors

So here are the List of APIs for Integration in OPM (Adopted)

• Production / POC
  • Start Resource Usage
  • End Resource Usage
  • Close Batch
  • Cancel Batch
  • Release, Certify, and Close Step
  • Post Resource Transaction
  • Incremental Resource Transaction
  • Timed Resource Transaction
• Costing
  • Item Cost
  • Resource Cost
  • Allocation Definition
  • Burden Details
• Formula
  • Create Formula
  • Insert Ingredients, (By)Products
  • Create Formula Usage Rules
• Inventory
  • Create Item
  • Create Lot
  • Create Item/Lot UOM Conversion
  • Create, Adjust, or Move Inventory
  • Change Lot Status or QC Grade
• Quality
  • Assays
  • Specifications
  • Samples
  • Sample Labels
  • Results

You can see the more details for API's and underline API name either document Part No# A83748-01 or you can check in the responsibility IREP

Obvious question was asked by yet another reader after this post?

"What are the modules that come under the umbrella of OPM ? "

Th answer is OPM includes OPM Process Planning, Product Development(which includes Formula,Recipe,Quality), Production, Financials(Costing,MAC), Logistics, Regulatory Management etc. These are products which come under this umbrella..

• OPM Cost Management
• OPM Formula Management
• OPM Intelligence
• OPM Inventory Management
• OPM Laboratory Management
• OPM Master Production Scheduling
• OPM Material Requirements Planning
• OPM Production Management
• OPM Purchasing Management
• OPM Quality Management
• OPM Capacity
• OPM Sales Management
• Oracle Financial

Is there any difference from Oracle Discrete Manufacturing?

Yes, there is ..If you came from Discrete manufacturing background, these are one -to-one mapping between modules.

.. OPM history

The history of Oracle OPM is one decade old, This is worth to know about OPM Life Cycle.

Next would like to provide some more information for OPM API's availability....

Aberdeen Group, has recently published one report for "ERP Options for Process Related Industries ", Here is the link for free report.

What you should know about Oracle OPM products

Oracle OPM designed exclusively for catering the business need for process manufacturers industry like:

• Consumer Packaged Goods
  • Food, Beverage, Health and Beauty, Household Products
• Industrial Products
  • Chemical, Pharmaceutical, Petroleum, Metals, Mining, Paper and Glass

The difference between Discrete and Process manufacturing can be best understood in my previous post.

Oracle OPM product Strengths

For those who are very new or not aware to Oracle OPM product, here are some of high points of Operational Functionality that product offered.Moreover there is significant changes has been seen in age of internet that has re-defined the operation of the supply chain(SCM) thus Oracle OPM Products too.

Please Check with Oracle OPM Page, to see what are the recent changes has been incorporated. based out of my exposure very long time back, these are the functionlity that product had.

Related article

• Discrete & Process manufacturing in ERP ?
• KNOW WHAT IS SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT (SCM)? : An Overview
• 11i EBS and Food Industry

Commonly used SCM Jargons.

• Lead Time - is the time between the initiation of any process of production and the completion of that process. E.g. lead time for ordering a new car from a manufacturer may be anywhere from 2 weeks to 6 months. In SCM, lead time reduction is an important part of most of the manufacturing companies.
• Cycle-Time - The time elapsing between a particular point in one cycle or production and the same point in the next cycle
• Safety Stock / Buffer Stock - is a term used to describe a level of stock that is maintained below the cycle stock to buffer against stock-outs. Safety Stock or Buffer Stock, exists to counter uncertainties in supply and demand
• Advanced Ship Notice (ASN) - is the notification the supplier sends the manufacturer in reaction to the pull signal notifying the material in on the way and confirming inventory will be replenished to meet the requirement.
• Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) - is the exchange of electronic data between business partners who use a number of different hardware and software solutions. The exchange can involve documents such as sales orders, invoices, and advanced shipping notices (ASN).
• Vendor-managed inventory (VMI) - is a family of business models in which the buyer of a product provides certain information to a supplier of that product and the supplier takes full responsibility for maintaining an agreed inventory of the material, usually at the buyer's consumption location
• Logistics Management :The management of transportation operations of all types,including tracking and managing every aspect of vehicle
  maintenance, fuel costing, routing and mapping, warehousing,communications, EDI implementations, traveler and cargo handling, carrier selection and management, accounting.
  • Logistics is –
    • Key to Supply Chain Management
    • Often performed by a 3PL or 4PL
    • Begin to contribute large portion to the organization costs
• 3PL (Third Party Logistics) - is a outsourced or "third party" logistics services to a company for part, or sometimes all of their supply chain management function. Third party logistics providers typically specialize in integrated warehousing and transportation services that can be scaled and customized to customer’s needs based on market conditions and the demands and delivery service requirements for
  their products and materials
• Lot Sizing – is simply a size or quantity in a lot. But plays a very important role in a supply chain. One key decision of production planning is the batch or lot size
• Inventory Turns – often referred to as stock turns, turns, and stock turnover. This measures the number of times invested in goods to be sold or used over in a period
• Replenishment Time – is time required to replace the consumed stock.
• Supply Planning – is the ability to use the distribution plan, inventory plan, sourcing plan, and materials plan to determine the best way to meet demand. Supply planning encompasses the allocation and deployment of resources, as well as facilitating order promising.
• Production Planning – Planning is the ability to create a plan of record from the requirements of the demand, supply and capacity plans. Production planning (PP) encompasses the allocation and deployment of resources to optimize plant capabilities
• Demand Planning – is simply put is foreseeing the actual demand or requirement of the market. It is used to monitor & make sure the "health" of a supply chain

In last post we have understood SCM flow. Let's talk in term of SCM IT requirement. SCM subsystems are important because this is required to support manufacturing managers in making their decisions so that they can optimize the trade off between capital tied up in stocks and inventories, versus the ability to deliver goods at prices and delivery dates agreed with customers.

A typical flow and SCM cycle can be understood as fig below:

Typically A SCM consists of these sub-systems can be categorize and consist of:

Demand Management

This is basically co-ordination sales forecasts from all the players, including sales representatives at the point of sale through production to raw material suppliers, so that everyone is working to the same plan, rather than creating unnecessary safety stocks.

Distribution Resources Planning (DRP)

This will Keep track of the status of production and procurement of materials for each order, where the goods are located, what transport and warehousing is in use, what stock to keep and when to re-order.

Transport Management Systems (TMS)

This kind of subsystem normally keep the information such as :what modes of transport at what cost are available to the shipper; what costs and timings are associated with each route; the order in which to load transport; optimization of multi-segment deliveries; compliance with documentation required for customs and shippers.

Warehouse Management Systems (WMS)

These are the systems which are used to optimize the storage and picking of goods in a warehouse, also includes compliance with carrier and customer documentation standards.

Supplier Relationship Management (SRM)

This kind of subsystem keeps the information about suppliers of direct and indirect materials, such as agreed terms of trade, records of status, records of contacts between the enterprise and the various points of contact in suppliers.

Component Supplier Management (CSM)

Management of lists of preferred suppliers and preferred parts; terms of trade such as delivery and price associated with them; rationalization of existing parts to minimize costs by substituting equivalent parts.

I guess, the next question in mind would what are applications which are going to enable if anyone is going to roll out SCM functionality in Oracle EBS. Keep watching this space.