Oracle gets supply chains communicating with new digital assistants

To help organizations plan and execute more efficient and agile supply chain operations, Oracle has expanded Oracle Supply Chain Management (SCM) Cloud with new collaboration, integration, and digital assistant capabilities.

The latest updates to Oracle SCM Cloud were recently announced at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco. They include the introduction of Oracle Business Network, a B2B network, and a new digital assistant for supply chain.

“In many cases, the natural complexity of an organization’s supply chain is made worse by the complexity of the technology used to manage it,” said Jon Chorley, chief sustainability officer and group vice president, supply chain management, Oracle.

“To outpace change and stay ahead of competitors amid changing market conditions, organizations need technology that removes complexity and provides clear and actionable insights into their business.

In an interview, Chorley added that the relaunching and branding of oracle business network enables suppliers to register with a “pre-connected network comprising about 10,000 trading parties.

“These are both structured transactions, and informal exchanges like social and email,” he said. Adding that there may be a subsequent application of track and trace.

“What’s important,” he said, “is that there’s a strong focus on the ability to identify provenance and secure information.”

Oracle Business Network: Oracle SCM Cloud includes comprehensive capabilities to connect various trading parties for B2B collaboration, either directly or through third-party networks, such as Transcepta for e-invoicing,

Justransform for logistics and GHX for healthcare. The release of the Oracle Business Network further simplifies this process by enabling customers to easily search for and connect to trading partners who are already registered on the network directly from within Oracle Cloud Applications.

This enables seamless electronic exchange of business documents and removes the complexity of establishing and supporting these trading relationships. In addition, a planned integration with Oracle DataFox will enable real-time trading partner insights from DataFox’s AI-sourced-and-managed firmographic dataset to reduce risk and to further improve business agility.

Oracle Digital Assistant for Supply Chain Management: Digital assistants represent a new paradigm for user interaction, where there is a “conversation” between the user and the digital assistant with “skills” to monitor activity and spot and solve problems rapidly and effectively.

Oracle Cloud Applications are developing digital assistant skills across a wide variety of use cases, including supply chain. Oracle Digital Assistant for Supply Chain Management provides an intuitive and conversational user interface to help supply chain managers simplify root-cause analysis for improved supply chain performance. Initial functionality will focus on logistics uses cases (including checking on status, tracking deviations from plans, and reporting incidents), with plans to expand to all aspects of supply chain.