Oracle Corp, Belmont, California has extended its applications offerings with Oracle Core Manufacturing, a full-function manufacturing product family, including Oracle Inventory, Bill of Materials, Work in Process, Master Scheduling, Manufacturing Resources Planning, and Order Entry (CI No 1,275). The company claims that Core Manufacturing will enable manufacturers of any size and type achieve world-class manufacturing by improving productivity, lowering costs and reducing production time. Oracle notes that a manufacturing operation is a distributed system and that companies have found that they cannot run a distributed manufacturing process on a centralised computer, but need a computer hierarchy to manage the manufacturing process. And Oracle claims that Core Manufacturing offers the first set of full-featured, portable, decentralised manufacturing software products designed for distributed manufacturing. The company cites a Gartner Group report on Computer Integrated Manufacturing that suggests manufacturers are increasingly going for products that are based on an SQL database, offer hardware independence, integrate tightly with each other, and enable strategic alliances among Computer-Integrated Manufacturing vendors, and Oracle claims that Core Manufacturing is the only available product that meets these criteria, sZS,KQwill run on all the systems supported by the Oracle database management system. Designed to be very easy to use, Oracle Core Manufacturing has Lotus- or Macintosh-style menus, pop-up windows, graphics, on-line Help, and other options to reduce keystrokes. Inventory is designed to help manufacturers control inventory levels to improve product quality and throughput, make better pricing decisions to maximise profits, and improve cash flow by reducing their inventory investment. Bill of Materials is conceived to give engineers a tool to configure products quickly and accurately; Work in Process is designed to enable production to be scheduled for maximum throughput and to facilitate just-in-time techniques; Master Scheduling is designed to link marketing schedules tightly to production schedules. The Manufacturing Resources Planning module is conceived to save money and improve control over production cycles by minimising inventory, and tightly linking materials plans to production schedules; Order Entry is designed to give the sales department immediate, accurate price and delivery commitments. Core Manufacturing works with the existing Oracle Purchasing member of Oracle’s Financials product family, and with other Financials modules – General Ledger, Payables, Assets – to provide a tightly integrated manufacturing and accounting system. No date for MVS, MS-DOS Core Manufacturing is going only to favoured customers until May next year, when it is due to go on general release on the US but the claim that the thing enables users to set up a completely distributed system provided only that they use machines that run Oracle is stretching things a bit – the initial versions are for DEC VAX/VMS, Sequent Computer Systems and Pyramid Technology machines, next up are Sun Microsystems and BiiN machines – although that one may go on the back burner until the company’s future is decided. As for IBM mainframes and MS-DOS micros, both widely used in manufacturing, those are among the generality of other mainframe, minicomputer, workstation and microcomputer systems for which there is no date.
