Fusion of ERP solutions, and a look at the plant floor ahead

At Oracle, it's usually CEO Larry Ellison who gets all the headlines. But these days, John Wookey, senior VP of applications, is gathering column-inches of his own.

Holding down what has variously been described as "one of the toughest jobs in software," and "the hardest job in Silicon Valley," Wookey must find a way to combine the best parts of three very different ERP platforms—Oracle's own, and of the acquisitions J.D. Edwards and PeopleSoft—into a wholly new software suite.

The resulting solution must be compelling enough for customers of all three vendors to want to upgrade to it. Get it wrong, and customer defections, a slumping stock price—and doubtless Wookey's own head on the block—will surely follow.

Manish Modi, Oracle's VP in charge of manufacturing and product life-cycle management development, doesn't doubt that the effort, dubbed Fusion, will be attractive to manufacturing companies. "We're trying to be a 'one-stop shop' for manufacturers, whether they are outsourcing their manufacturing, or manufacturing in-house," he says.

And that "one-stop shop" extends to a willing embrace of functional areas not normally regarded as core by ERP vendors. Traditionally, he observes, manufacturers have tended to use third-party manufacturing intelligence and MES systems, and have then integrated these back into the ERP platform. Citing a recent report from Boston-based AMR Research, which notes that the Oracle EBusiness Suite's manufacturing data model already eliminates the need for this in all but the most complex manufacturing scenarios, Modi says Oracle offers the promise of best-of-breed functionality with ERP levels of integration.

And Fusion, he adds, will extend this capability even further, leveraging its service-oriented architecture to create adaptive, flexible processes while enabling deeper business insight through a state-of-the-art business intelligence capability—itself obtained during the earlier acquisition and integration of Siebel Systems. And all underpinned by an enterprisewide data model that, as Modi puts it, offers "Information you can trust, information you can use—and information you can manage."