The “emerging markets” story continues to become more complex, say experts in the cloud-based warehouse management space. The global powerhouse Oracle, illustrates this by offering a new inventory system.
To help managerreduce logistics costs, optimize inventory levels and improve customer service, Oracle recently announced the release of Oracle Warehouse Cloud. According to spokesmen, the latest global enhancements offer heightened inventory visibility through yard management and integration with Oracle Inventory Management Cloud, as well as improved extensibility with the addition of new REST Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
Derek Gittoes, vice president, SCM Product Strategy, told LM in an interview that Oracle WMS Cloud is designed to address the need of multiple industries.
“The industries that will benefit from these enhancements include manufacturers, retailers, wholesale distributors, and logistics service providers,” he said.
He added that Oracle has added a number of new languages to enhance global support for its new offering. These include “traditional Chinese,” traditional French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Thai and Turkish.
“The regions where we see the biggest growth opportunities are in Europe, the Middle East, Central and South America,” said Gittoes.
Legacy transportation and warehouse management systems are often unable to provide insight into trailers in the yard, which creates a significant gap into visibility that can lead to fulfillment delays.
Spokesmen said Oracle WMS Cloud yard management capabilities directly address this challenge, making it easier to locate shipments in trailers in order to expedite unloading for high priority inventory.
Oracle Integration Service (ICS) based integrations between Oracle WMS Cloud and Oracle Inventory Management Cloud is designed to enable Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Supply Chain Management (SCM) Cloud customers to rapidly implement source-to-settle and order-to-cash flows to improve business responsiveness. The addition of REST web service APIs improves extensibility and enables customers to customize Oracle WMS Cloud for their specific business and industry needs, added spoksemen.
“We were consistently running out of inventory and needed a scalable solution that would deliver real-time visibility into inventory to grow our business,” said Eduardo Gonzalez de Boado Halcon, vice president of Supply Chain at Supermercados Peruanos, “Since implementing Oracle WMS Cloud, our stock outs have reduced by 80 percent and our market share has increased by six percent, which equates to a lot of revenue.”