At Oracle Corp’s User Group meeting in San Diego on Monday (CI No 3,413), chief executive Larry Ellison indulged in a little role- playing, albeit typecast as a chief executive, to demonstrate the new Business Intelligence System which Oracle has integrated with Release 11 of its Oracle Applications suite. With an Oracle executive posing as a chief information officer and then a chief financial officer, Ellison played out the CEO having to deliver 1,000 notebooks to a customer that wanted a two week delivery time. His accomplice showed the integrated business intelligence system delivering on the spot availability, informing his CEO that delivery would take four weeks. Why? Drill down into the manufacturing system and discover where the bottlenecks are. Can we outsource? Yes. What will that do to our margins? Drill down into the financials system and check the impact on margins. And on it goes. Such is the vision for Oracle 11, which Ellison says will deliver information driven applications offering two levels of entry, intelligence and news for a top level user, and deeper analysis for those that need to know why a condition has occurred. This creates an ongoing process whereby better information enables better business processes, and great business processes generate more information. This is the area in which Arbor Software Corp is constantly claiming to challenge Oracle, with its own integrated business intelligence and applications (CI No 3,413). Oracle Release 11 offers Flow Manufacturing, which Oracle claims is an industry first. Flow Manufacturing is a technique pioneered by manufacturers to cut inventory costs and reduce production cycle times. It also incorporates advanced manufacturing planning and scheduling, a global consolidation system to integrate with financial systems, new end-to-end competency management in the human resources system and integrated sales force and service automation. It is shipping now.
