Oracle finally took the veil off its much-anticipated Fusion Applications suite and, at first blush, it’s a sophisticated product — lots of functionality, great user interface, nice on-demand/on-premise flexibility. So far, so good. Except one thing is conspicuously absent: a “classic” manufacturing-centric ERP module. This begs the question for the thousands of manufacturers running Oracle’s eBusiness Suite (EBS) or its J.D. Edwards (JDE) manufacturing suite: Is there a migration path to Fusion Apps? And if not, then what?
Those questions will become even more apt later this year, when Fusion Apps is set for general availability. In market timing that hardly seems coincidental, SAP is expected to reintroduce its Business ByDesign sometime in 2010. And, while aimed at the mid-market, ByDesign has one thing that Fusion Apps, which serves mid-market and large enterprises, doesn’t: manufacturing support.
Fusion Apps is not entirely devoid of manufacturing chops. The Fusion Distributed Order Orchestration (DOO) module is a strong supply chain tool that will assist manufacturers in managing complex orders across multiple, heterogeneous systems. But heads-down manufacturing support will be left to EBS and JDE.
This doesn’t mean manufacturers have nothing to look forward to in Fusion Apps. Oracle neatly finessed the potential cannibalization problem that a stand-alone Fusion suite could have engendered by making it possible to implement individual Fusion components alongside the rest of the Oracle portfolio, or any other vendor’s portfolio, for that matter. This means the announced pieces of Fusion — talent management; finance; CRM; project portfolio management; governance, risk and compliance; and procurement — can, with the proper application of middleware, be hung off an existing manufacturing IT environment.