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SAP and Oracle
SAP and Oracle-I’ve just finished a global study on the supply chain planning (SCP) market. In the process of doing this, I spoke to every significant supplier in the market as well as many small suppliers with very interesting solutions.
I also spoke to Oracle and attended a supply chain conference put on by SAP for industry analysts. SAP and Oracle are the two largest suppliers of enterprise applications in the world. They are also leaders in the supply chain planning market. I’ve been covering the SCP market for years. It is interesting to note how the way they position themselves against best of breed planning suppliers has changed.
The big ERP suppliers may admit that they have a gap in their functionality but promise that they are working diligently to plug the hole and that the updated solution will soon be available. SAP, for example, admits they do not offer concurrent planning, but that their solution soon will.
In Oracle’s case, the company offered its first Cloud SCP solutions in 2016 and now leads with the cloud solution. While they may sell complimentary on-premise solutions, the majority of their sales come from the Oracle Cloud Supply Chain Planning. Oracle continues to invest heavily in the Cloud SCP, to bring its functionality up to and beyond the on-premise solution.
But Oracle, and particularly SAP, always point out the value of an integrated solution that goes beyond any one application area. Best of breeds will frequently talk about certified integrations to the big enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors and argue that it is really the quality of the SCP solution that matters.
Here is how Vikash Goyal, the Vice President Product Strategy Supply Chain Planning at Oracle, answers that. “Part of our end-to-end value proposition is the integration between our enterprise applications and our SCP solutions. For example, if a company wants to create a new product, there is an approval process, the creation of conceptual Bill of Material (BOM), and the approval of that BOM. Once that BOM is approved, it automatically flows into the manufacturing application, becomes orderable, and becomes plannable in the planning system.” In other words, there is an elegance and seamlessness to the integration that best of breeds can’t match.
