Overview

Fast, accurate order promising is the key to retaining existing customers and attracting new customers. Oracle Global Order Promising allows you to make quick delivery promises your customers can rely on. Oracle’s order promising capabilities include robust support for distributed global order promising and multi-level supply-chain Available to Promise (ATP), Capable to Promise (CTP), and Capable to Deliver (CTD). You can consolidate supply and demand information from multiple transaction systems to provide a consolidated global picture of demand and supply. Order promising is accessible from multiple order entry systems or order capture systems such as web stores and call centers. Effective order promising can “save the sale” when a fixed lead time promise date would have been too conservative, or when the current stock is limited, but more is on its way (or can be produced). Just as importantly, it can prevent unrealistic promise dates that lead to late deliveries. You can still use lead-time-based promising when available inventory balances or future supply data is not available.

Improve On-Time Delivery via Multi-Level Supply Chain Available and Capable To Promise, and Capable To Deliver

Large global companies have many different manufacturing and distribution locations that can ship the same product to customers. In this environment, you must be able to easily and quickly identify which location has the appropriate product and select the best location. Oracle Global Order Promising helps you determine the best location based on the product and order request date. Comprehensive sourcing rules determine the acceptable choices, enabling you to maintain control over what orders get routed to which fulfillment locations. You can perform a multi-level component and resource availability checks across your entire supply chain for the products requested. This means, for example, that you can effectively promise against your key component suppliers’ capacity. You can control the organizations and suppliers to be included in the availability inquiry, and you can control the number of levels in your supply chain bill to be considered in your check. At each level in the supply chain, you can specify the key components and bottleneck resources for which to check availability. In addition, multi-level ATP also considers transit lead-times including the specific shipping, receiving, manufacturing, and carrier calendars of each node of your supply chain, enabling you to consider your trading partner’s calendar restrictions in moving, receiving, or delivering goods.

Maximize Profitability through Allocated ATP

Not all customers or demands are completely equal. You have commitments to key customers. You also have new markets you are trying to enter or grow, and new sales channels you are trying to develop. When the total supply is not adequate to meet total demand, intelligent allocation needs to be done to ensure you meet your strategic objectives. Allocated ATP enables you to allocate or ration your scarce materials and resources among multiple sales channels or customers based on your business strategy, which is typically determined as part of your sales and operations planning process. You can base the allocations on forecast or constrained demand and time phase the allocation to reflect changes in your monthly or quarterly objectives. During order promising, Oracle Global Order Promising honors the allocation rules, including priorities and ‘stealing’, and calculates order fulfillment dates, considering the allocated material and capacity at each level of the supply chain. At any point, you can compare demand to the sales channel allocation and adjust the allocation to maximize fulfillment and profitability.

Operate your business 24×7 with real-time updates

In today’s complex environment you cannot afford downtime in your order promising process. You may have complex global operations that are interdependent, and you may have orders being captured via multiple sources including self-service web stores or portals. Oracle Global Order Promising provides a unique patented process that enables you to guarantee accurate availability information with virtually no downtime. It also provides real-time updates to your tactical supply plan (maintained in Oracle® Advanced Supply Chain Planning), as each order promise is instantly visible in your plan for downstream execution. The plan is also kept updated with any necessary incremental suppliers identified during capable to promise calculations, allowing timely execution and supporting your progress towards lean execution.

Promising for complex configure-to-order products

Oracle Global Order Promising provides unique capabilities to support complex configure to order products. You can promise accurate availability for the most complex configured products, including multi-level configurations that are produced across multiple levels of your supply chain. This includes products where you have outsourced manufacturing to contract manufacturers and need to communicate configuration information to suppliers and calculate sourcing and availability based on specific unique options.

Effectively manage your order backlog

Oracle Global Order Promising supports both the initial promising of availability as orders are captured, and the re-promising of orders when changes to supply or demand cause you to manage your backlog. When changing conditions cause you to re-allocate supply to your order backlog, you can use the Backlog Scheduling Workbench to flexibly prioritize and schedule your backlog based on your business rules.

Zero downtime through a database-centric architecture

Oracle Global Order Promising runs completely inside the Oracle database and as such as only one very reliable and proven moving part without the need to run anything ‘in memory’. In addition, no sales order is lost as the engine automatically re-promises sales orders against the new plan. This unique underlying architecture avoids order promising downtime when your supply chain plan is refreshed as a basis for new order promises, a common problem for all order promising systems. The database-centric architecture automatically delivers high performance by leveraging core technologies such as multi-threading and hot backup and recovery.

Integrated Planning Solution

Oracle Global Order Promising is part of Oracle’s Value Chain Planning solution and provides synergy when used with other products. For example, you can use a constrained distribution or supply plan from Oracle® Advanced Supply Chain Planning or Oracle® Rapid Planning as a starting point for 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. Another example is the ability to allocate supply either by user-defined rules for allocating to classes of customers or types of demand, or to use the demand prioritization directly from your planning process, enabling you to directly translate sales and operations planning decisions into allocated order promising.

VALUE CHAIN PLANNING — A COMPLETE SOLUTION

Oracle’s Value Chain Planning solution enables companies to efficiently design, plan, and service their value chains from factory to shelf. Its componentized architecture enables you to start with any product and expand to other areas at any point in time. The Oracle Value Chain Planning architecture leverages the scalability and security of Oracle’s Database and Fusion Middleware technology and can be deployed as a single instance with Oracle E-Business Suite, or integrated with other systems. Whether you implement one module or the entire product solution, Oracle Value Chain Planning enables you to share unified supply chain planning information across the enterprise so you can make informed decisions faster.