Two enterprise apps providers opened the week with new planning products, each aimed at delivering more agility to manufacturers facing fast-changing markets and scarce sales.
Oracle rolled out Oracle Rapid Planning, an application that allows planners to model certain order scenarios and determine their company’s ability to deliver goods. Oracle officials portrayed Rapid Planning as a faster alternative to a number of conventional methods of supply and operations planning, which range from spreadsheet-based tools, to traditional MRP suites, to advanced planning and scheduling applications. While this last tool offers robust scenario planning and what-if simulations, such programs can take a long time to render their models.
“What we really wanted to do [was] come up with something new that instead of having to wait for those kinds of answers for days or sometimes a week, you can actually do that in minutes and, therefore, have a higher chance of getting that rush order [placed] with you instead of your competitor,” said Roger Goossens, Oracle’s VP of advanced planning product management, in a recent briefing with Managing Automation.