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.