What Is Your Path for Oracle SCM Cloud Solutions?
Over the past 2 years I have interacted with many of our customers and lot of them deliberate and/or ask, is Oracle Supply Chain cloud real? And is it right for me? Or is it only for the new implementations. ? I have a customized environment will it be able to support my existing business environment? Do I need to move to cloud completely?
With the new SCM Cloud offerings and lot of market talks , presentations, demos seen , customers gets impressed with the functionalities and the UI, but have subsequent questions around how do I get there ? Where should I start?
Some of these are really great questions and the answers to these depend on the business situations, IT systems and landscape. Each customer will have its own unique path to the cloud.
We advise clients to look at the co-existence strategy in order to get started with the SCM cloud. It is in a way a smart move as you are not investing in a huge infrastructure to set up the instance or a big commitment. Start small, see the technology, business benefits you can get and build upon it.
In this series of SCM fusion blogs, we have tried to summarize what are some of the common questions that our clients ask us for your SCM Cloud strategy and how Infosys can help the customers with their SCM Cloud journey. This is the part 1 of the blog where you will get an understanding of the current situation and what are the common questions customers asks for the SCM cloud.
Those of you, who are closely following the Oracle Supply Chain Cloud releases, might be aware that Oracle SCM Cloud is coming up with its newly added tracks and functionalities in Release 11. Those include 1. Enhanced Order to Cash flows 2. Source to Settle (including Procure to Pay and full direct material support) 3. Ideas to commercialization 4. Plan to produce
Customers will have more choices to make from different cloud options like -
Inventory& Cost Management in Cloud
Manufacturing Cloud
Procurement Cloud
Product Master Data management Cloud
Logistics Cloud
Order Management Cloud
Product lifecycle Management Cloud
Supply Chain Planning Cloud
Now with these offerings supported in the cloud, the key question is what customers owning Oracle applications should do with these OR how can they leverage the cloud in their existing landscape
Let me try to provide my perspective on some of these common questions below -
1. Can we really run our Supply chain in the cloud?
We always think that cloud is for Customer Facing applications or Sales, we don't believe that ERP applications such as SCM can be run in the cloud?
2. What should be my co-existence strategy?
3. Should we upgrade our SCM applications or go to SCM Cloud?
4. What should we do with the customizations ?
5. What should I do next? How can Infosys help?
Can we run our supply chain in the cloud ? And is it really like CX Cloud or Sales Cloud?
Things have changed over the past few years, many organizations are thinking of adopting Cloud Supply Chain strategy for their organizations and slowly migrating the applications. Many industry experts believe that today's on-premise solutions will eventually move towards more cloud solutions with only a few still continuing on premise-app. Business users are pushing IT organizations towards cloud solutions as they do not want to continue on long running upgrade projects, want to be current with the functionalities and features. SCM cloud adoption is also seeing a similar trend. Merger and acquisitions also an important factor in SCM that is considering many customers to think about cloud
Defining your SCM cloud strategy is clearly the first step to map which applications make sense to move to the cloud
Cloud strategy involves comprehensive analysis of your IT landscape, Business requirements, Business challenges, Architecture readiness, People skills assessment for your future organization.
This involves defining key business and IT drivers for moving to cloud. For the customers who are moving to cloud for the first time, it is absolutely an essential step to have this road map outlined with a clear long term goal.
In my next blog, I'll discuss the rest of the questions ( 2 to 5) and specifically co-existence strategy around SCM cloud applications. Oracle SCM cloud is real and R11 is promising. We are ready to help clients be successful in this Oracle SCM Cloud journey.
Contact
In case you have additional questions or need more detailed discussions, please drop me a note @ vishwajitshankar_b@infosys.com.
Connect with Infosys
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