Data Driven Manufacturing - JD Edwards & Oracle BI

Using Oracle BI to Stay one Step Ahead

Your production know-how and processes are an essential part of what has helped you build a great company. Continually innovating and optimizing these processes is key to keeping you competitive. Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) can help you to stay ahead of your competition. By delivering insight into what is and isn’t working, BI helps optimize production, increase profitability and ensure your business stays one step ahead. 

With Oracle BI, data from the JD Edwards Manufacturing Modules is displayed on the dashboards in Oracle BI, and alerts notify you of exceptions to help improve the production process. The main goal is to achieve more efficient, and therefore less expensive and/or better quality production. Clearly, this has a positive effect throughout the entire chain of supply and demand. Let‘s take a look at five "real-life" examples of how Oracle BI can optimize production.

1. RAW MATERIAL POSITION

To keep production lines moving efficiently, you need insight into the position of raw materials. Purchase contracts with your suppliers are a good source of that information. Oracle Business Intelligence provides insight into the extent to which these contracts are actually realized with purchase orders, and to what extent the degree of coverage actually meets the requirements of the manufacturing process. This can be compared with actual consumption, and can be managed in a timely manner in combination with the right forecasting analyses.

2. TRUCKS ON THE PREMISES

Thanks to the dashboards and analyses in Oracle Business Intelligence, you can obtain insight into when trucks arrive at the factory, when they depart and how long they are stationary waiting to be (un)loaded. That way, you can distribute the work of loading and unloading evenly over the course of the day. Plus, it allows you to make accurate appointments with suppliers and carriers. With the analyses generated by Oracle Business Intelligence, you can monitor compliance with these agreements and even implement bonus-fine agreements if so desired. Naturally, that requires the information to be recorded in Oracle JD Edwards. A web-services link with the truck weigh bridge on the lot can help facilitate this.

3. SCHEDULING

Scheduling production processes is a complex operational issue. How can you seamlessly coordinate supply and demand? By combining insight into demand (sales orders), supply (purchase and work orders) and expectations (various forecasting models), Oracle Business Intelligence can provide the right information for scheduling and help you correct the schedule quickly and accurately, if necessary.

4: SERVICE LEVELS

Oracle Business Intelligence can immediately display the effects of the relationship between the raw material (the Bill of Material) and the finished product, for example when problems arise with the supply of raw materials. That way, the sales department can immediately contact the customers to inform them of any consequences. When problems such as these arise, good service and the provision of information to the customer are vital.

5: QUALITY

When the Laboratory System (LIMS) is added to Oracle Business Intelligence in addition to Oracle JD Edwards, a whole new world of possibilities opens up. The timely and sufficient receipt of raw materials for the manufacturing process is one thing, but to guarantee the quality of the raw materials that go into the production process, as well as the finished products, measurement is required. Oracle Business Intelligence can inform you when significant reductions or improvements in quality occur, for example in comparison to previous periods. This allows you to look for the right supplier for the best materials, and to implement improvements in the plant to continue to produce high-quality finished products.

These five examples all come from implementations of Oracle Business Intelligence with Oracle JD Edwards at production companies. We hope you find them interesting, useful and that they will encourage you to take a closer look at Oracle BI for JD Edwards.

You may be interested in taking a look at our Oracle BI Cloud Solutions for JD Edwards datasheet. This option is particularly interesting for those who don’t have the time or the budget for an on-premise BI solution.

Finally, to learn more about BI, please visit my colleague Bob‘s blog on Top 5 Tips when Planning a BI Project.