Oracle Corp. today significantly expanded its supply chain planning and manufacturing operations management offerings by introducing four new products, including the widely anticipated Oracle Manufacturing Operations Center, which will compete with SAP’s Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (MII) product.
The announcements, made at the Oracle Application Users Group conference in Denver, also included two enhancements of Oracle’s Agile product lifecycle management (PLM) application suite.
The Oracle Manufacturing Operations Center fills an important gap in the company’s application offerings for manufacturers by providing customers with a software platform for integrating data generated on the plant floor with business data normally managed by ERP systems. The move will allow Oracle to not only offer an answer to SAP’s MII (formerly xMII) product, but also further emphasize the MES capabilities the company has been building into its E-Business Suite ERP applications.
As previously reported in Managing Automation, Oracle first publicly mentioned the Manufacturing Operations Center at its Open World customer conference in November 2007. At the time, Oracle said the product — then referred to as the Manufacturing Transaction Hub or the Manufacturing Operations Hub — would be available by May.
The Manufacturing Operations Center provides a repository for real-time data collected from plant floor systems, such as PLCs and data historians. Oracle, said Jon Chorley, applications vice president, is using OPC-based communication software from a partnership with Kepware Technologies Inc. to provide the integration between the Oracle application and plant floor system. Oracle expects the new offering to be deployed at the plant level, Chorley said.
The Manufacturing Operations Center, to be available next month, also includes a data model — based on the ISA-95 standard — which can be used to apply business context to plant floor data. Manufacturers will be able to use analytical dashboards and other tools, based on Oracles Business Intelligence suite, to combine real-time plant floor data with ERP data and make timely decisions on exception conditions and responsive actions. Manufacturers might use the real-time analysis to help them decide to move production between plants or give priority to one customer order over another, said Chorley in an interview with Managing Automation.
“Without the kind of context we are providing for this data, it normally would get collected and saved in a data historian somewhere where it would only get looked at when there is an event such as a product recall,” Chorley said.
Oracle has been working with about 20 customers in the design and development of the Manufacturing Operations Center, he said.
In the future, Oracle expects its partners and customers to develop Manufacturing Operations Center-related dashboards and other analytical tools for manufacturers in specific vertical industries, Chorley said.
Oracle also plans to add event management features to allow the Manufacturing Operations Center to play a central role in real-time, closed loop management processes. If, for example, analysis in the Manufacturing Operations Center uncovers a potential plant scheduling problem, the system can execute a change in a manufacturer’s production scheduling system directly, without first communicating with the ERP system.