Interested to hear a WMS customer success story? Register for a free live webcast with our guest speaker, Melissa Berninger, CFO and VP of Finance, at Allied International. Melissa will provide an overview of their WMS implementation story covering:

How do you reconcile the fact that while the overall warehouse volume is down you still need more workers in the warehouse to ship all the orders?

A WMS customer recently pointed out this seemingly perplexing fact in a customer conference. So what is going on?

Someone asked a question about BI Publisher and I sauntered over to "All Things BIP" i.e. Tim Dexter's excellent blog on BI Publisher. Here is a gem for all you WMS aficionados.

During my presentation prep I came across a reasonably useful presentation I squirreled away on my hard drive on label printing. A little high level but gives you some information about how to get BIP hooked up to you Zebra printers. Get it here.

Within the last few weeks, I have met with several logistics professionals, both Oracle as well as non-Oracle WMS customers. The discussion invariably turns out to be on topics that are on everybody's minds. Where is the economy heading and how companies are responding?

Greetings and a belated happy new year.

First a few announcements: Recently WMS 12.1.2 was released. Compared to earlier releases this was a minor release. However the notable features are:

a. Labor Reporting from Wave Planning Dashboard: You can get a labor estimate for waves prior to release. This will be a great tool to preview the impact of a wave on warehouse resources and fine tune your labor deployment prior to release

 The Manufacturing Operations Blog

 Warehouse Management

This post is late in coming. But better late than never. Like previous years, Oracle Open World turned out to be a whirlwind of endless presentations, demos and meetings. After its over you can look back and say "whew...did it really get over?". Here is a brief recap of the event:

Oracle Open World is just around the corner. If you have made plans to attend, please make sure to come visit us at our booth.

Members of both development and strategy team will be present at OpenWorld, so you can come with questions, leave with answers.

You can find us at:

Warehouse Management Systems Demo Grounds

Date & Time: Mon 10/12 - Wed 10/14 (all day)
Location: Exibition Hall, Moscone South S-023

Recalls happen on a daily basis in almost every industry. A quick glance at FDA's announcements we find the following major recalls in the past week:

Looking forward to connecting with broader manufacturing community at APICS 2009, Oct 4-6.
We’ll have a demo pod for Oracle MOC and some speaking slots so looks like an exciting event.
http://www.apics.org/education/conference/schedule/
My schedule – arriving on Sunday evening, leaving on Tuesday night.
Oracle is hosting a dinner for select customers on Monday evening.

Manufacturing companies, plant IT and manufacturing users, looking for relevant sessions at OOW?  Attached documents provides you all the details you need.
Focus On Manufacturing
http://www.oracle.com/ocom/groups/public/documents/webcontent/033958.pdf
Focus on EAM
http://www.oracle.com/ocom/groups/public/documents/webcontent/033957.pdf
For MOC,  specifically, we have two dedicated sessions and a dedicated demo pod.

It has been 2 months since WMS R12.1 has been launched. In the last one month since the release, I did 2 Adviser webcasts on Oracle WMS with one of the sessions specifically on Wave Planning and Distributed WMS deployment. The idea behind these live webcast was to discuss how you can benefit from R12.1, the distributed deployment of Oracle Warhouse Management System and advanced Wave Planning features.

The recorded sessions for these webcasts are now available:

Please join us for a webcast on Oracle Manufacturing Operations Center.
Date and Time: Thursday July 16, 9 am, Pacific Time
Please enroll using the following link
https://conference.oracle.com/imtapp/app/conf_enrollment.uix?mID=146477531
Conference Key is “advisor”, all lower case.
Title:   Introducing Oracle Manufacturing Operations Center in Release 12.1.
Abstract:
In the current economic environment, manufacturing customers are focused on cost cutting and are increasingly [...]13 Jul - 11:48am

• Warehouse Management

Here is a new short video of Mobile Speech Client developed by Voice Insight in use along with Oracle WMS. In the past I have blogged about the benefits of speech client and especially how it can helps you deploy voice technology using your existing hardware and minimal capex. It also scales very well i.e.

Replenishment is an important driver in boosting fulfillment efficiency especially in those warehouses that fulfill a large number of orders with relatively small order quantities. In this type of scenario Warehouses can be divided into zones based on material characteristics and inventory sorting e.g. a warehouse can have a bulk area that is optimized for high density storage and a forward pick area optimized for high volume picking. The forward pick area can improve order fulfillment and enhance picking productivity by minimizing travel and material handling.

News Facts:

Want to learn more about the new 12.1 Oracle E-Business Suite? Come join us for our special webcast next Wednesday.

Details

*Date:* June 17, 2009
*Time:* 2:00 pm MDT
*Conference ID:* 145574018
*Conference Title:* What's New in Oracle E-Business Suite Warehouse

Registration link(requires MetaLink login)

Yesterday I blogged about the Oracle announcement for distributed WMS and advanced wave planning. This story received wide coverage in the press.

Nicholas Kolakowski’s piece appeared on eWeek yesterday morning:

Another day and another new development on the Oracle WMS front. Oracle just announced the general availability of two advanced features in Oracle WMS:

This release provides customers the flexibility to deploy Oracle Warehouse Management as a distributed solution. Now, customers can take advantage of the latest industry-leading warehouse management capabilities from Oracle without upgrading to the latest version of the Oracle E-Business Suite.

Here’s a recent podcast that tells you more about Oracle Mfg Operations Center and mentions the blog

 
 
Improving Shopfloor Data Collection with Oracle Manufacturing Operations Center
Posted: 18 May 2009 05:00 PM PDT
Successful factories around the world leverage information to drive their production and supply chains. New tools are available today to [...]

Case picking at high volume can be a big challenge for many warehouse managers. First, shipping label must be affixed to each case due to compliance needs. Second, each shipping label must match the record on ASN. Last but not least, operator needs to pick, label, and confirm one case at a time, which is a cumbersome process.

Continuing with our previous discussion on “Flexible Cartonization”, let’s talk about a new feature in release 12.1 called “Cluster Pick by Label”. Cluster pick by label is a feature that allows large warehouses to combine multiple orders and intelligently distribute it among multiple operators.

Let’s take the following scenario for example.

Many of you are already familiar with the concept of cartonization, but for completeness we will review the basic concepts before diving into the new features.

So, what is cartonization?

We are excited to share with you that Oracle announced the general availability of E-Business Suite Release 12.1 at OAUG Collaborate conference in Orlando.

In the last blog post we drilled deep into the GS1-128 labeling. In this post, we will go through the steps on how to setup WMS to enable GS1-128 printing.

1. LPN Setup: GS1-128 label requires an LPN to be generated as per SSCC standards. An SSCC-18 number is a unique 18-digit license plate number that is generated as per specific UCC standards. Therefore to generate GS1-128 label requires this 18 digit number to be generated.

GS1-128 (formally known as UCC/EAN-128) labels are the standards in today's consumer packaged goods, wholesale distribution and retail segments. It is therefore important to familiarize yourself with this label format and understand how to best use these in your WMS enabled warehouses.

Oracle’s 2nd Annual Manufacturing Summit at Pella

Be part of Oracle’s performance Driven Manufacturing and plan to, attend the 2nd Annual Oracle Manufacturing Summit at Pella. If you have experience applying application solution to manufacturing operations you should not miss this event!

27 – 28, April, 2009
Pella Corporation
102 Main Street
Pella, IA 50219

Learn from leading [...]

Spring Events Calendar
Free Event - Oracle’s Applications Unlimited Experts Live! Virtual Show - Wednesday March 11, 2009.
This action packed day kicks off in high gear with a compelling keynote from Ed Abbo, Oracle’s Senior Vice President of Applications Development. The remainder of the day is packed with live sessions as [...]

For the Big 3 and UAW to compete globally, they must change their monolithic manufacturing methods to adaptive manufacturing like Nissan who was the only auto manufacturer to make their 08 sales projection.   Why?  Nissan’s newest plants are able to adapt to market change by making 2-5 models across lines and adjust based on demand, [...]