Completing its reentry into the transportation management software market, Oracle Corp. yesterday rebranded a product acquired in its November purchase of Global Logistics Technologies Inc. (G-Log) and announced a roadmap for integrating the offering with its E-Business Suite.
The G-Log software -- known as Global Command and Control Center -- will now be called Oracle Transportation Management and will be available as a stand-alone licensed product. It replaces two little-used transportation management products from Oracle: Oracle Transportation Execution and Oracle Transportation Planning.
Those products had attracted only between 10 and 15 customers, who will now be offered a program to migrate their licenses to the new Oracle Transportation Management offering, said Jon Chorley, Oracle's vice president for product strategy, in an interview with Managing Automation. Oracle claims about 70 customers for the product.
Oracle also said it plans to integrate the newly named Transportation Management with the E-Business Suite sometime this year. The company will use its Fusion Middleware suite -- including its BPEL Process Manager tool -- to integrate the Transportation Management application primarily with the order-fulfillment modules of E-Business Suite, Chorley said. That will allow the Transportation Management product and E-Business Suite to share information about carrier selection, trip planning, and freight rating.
Oracle is also considering providing integration between the Transportation Management product and other ERP suites, including its own EnterpriseOne (from JD Edwards) and SAP's mySAP ERP. Oracle, however, has not determined when those integrations will be available or whether they will appear as standard out-of-the-box integration capabilities or tool kits, Chorley said.
Excluding the integration plans, core functionality of the Transportation Management offering remains the same as that of the G-Log product Oracle acquired, Chorley said. The product supports transportation optimization, order entry, procurement, supply chain event management, track-and-trace, freight payment, and historical analysis.
Oracle will stick to G-Log's previous plan to ship a new release of the Transportation Management product this year, Chorley said. New features will include fleet management and mobile access.
Since acquiring G-Log, Oracle has also increased the size of the sales and consulting forces dedicated to the transportation management product, Chorley said. Oracle has also simplified the product's pricing model, which is now calculated per millions of dollars of freight under management.
Oracle's renewed focus on transportation management, Chorley said, is driven by the company's belief that manufacturers face an increasingly complex transportation environment.
"All customers today are looking at lengthening supply chains, global supply chains, and more complicated supply chains," Chorley said. "The net effect of that is to drive a need for better visibility and optimization."
According to a recent Aberdeen Group research report, 30% of companies surveyed said they plan to adopt a commercial transportation management product in the next 18 months.