Oracle Corp yesterday announced Oracle Business Models (OBM), a series of applications which Oracle claims enable companies to work out the best way of planning and executing their key business processes. The Redwood Shores, California-based database giant said its consulting services division spent the last year developing eleven standard models, each covering different areas of business practices, for example the ‘order to cash’ model will show a company the best way to track, source, ship, invoice and receive payment for its products. Along with financial management, the models include fundamental business processes such as human resource management, IS management, market management, materials management, operations, order fulfillment and so on.
In the past, said Renee Knee, VP at Oracle consulting, companies had various proprietary ways of mapping out those cycles but they were all very manual and fragmented. Not only did that take longer to implement it was also very inflexible should the process suddenly change. Oracle’s models are designed to provide a standard way to assign who or what carries out each stage of the process, Knee said, whether the particular link in the cycle needs to be done manually, or automated, or by using a supplier, or by linking into a back-end ERP (enterprise resource planning) system. And if a company needs to make changes, it can do so by simulating those changes within the model, she added, without having to disrupt the whole environment. Knee said each model had five levels of analyses. The top levels help companies plan the high-level processes, such as customer orders or sourcing of products and materials. But at the fifth level, the model maps to particular forms within Oracle’s ERP applications that would need to be utilized to best run that business process.
Knee said the first set of models would be aimed at high-tech and discrete manufacturing companies but Oracle intends to develop similar versions of the software for other vertical industries including the consumer products, communications and energy sectors. At first, Oracle, along with the big four consulting houses (KPMG, Anderson Consulting, Deloitte & Touche, Price Waterhouse Coopers) will offer the service on a consultancy basis only, but Knee added that it hopes to start selling the software into corporations after about six months.
