Is your company trying to become more demand-driven? Oracle® Demand Signal Repository leverages external demand data to lower out-of-stocks at the store shelf and improve execution of promotions and new product introductions. The result is a more demand-driven enterprise with increased revenue and reduced costs due to better demand planning, more accurate retail execution, and a more streamlined IT environment.

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Leverage downstream data to drive profitable growth while reducing IT complexity and cost

Consumer goods and high technology companies that sell consumer products have historically based their demand knowledge on little more than their own shipment records, augmented with aggregate syndicated data. However, today many leading retailers share store-level point of sale (POS) and inventory data directly with their suppliers. Due to the rapid expansion of the number and formats of retailer data sources, it has become more expensive to implement them as one off projects. In addition, line-of-business executives are unable to access concise and accurate demand insights across customers.

Oracle Demand Signal Repository is the first application designed to manage downstream demand data sources with the scalability, extensibility and performance today’s leading consumer goods and high technology consumer products companies require. Oracle Demand Signal Repository converts disparate sets of downstream data into retail customer, shopper, and consumer insights to enable improved decision making and execution across the enterprise. This results in a positive effect on retailer and OEM/supplier interaction as it shifts the focus from finding common ground to pursuing joint value creation activities.

Demand Signal Repository Features:

• Dedicated application to capture and manage large volumes of external demand data
• Scalable, extensible data model based on the Oracle Data Warehouse for Retail
• Robust library of facts, measures and attributes to capture manufacturer, competitor and retailer information
• Data captured, stored and analyzed at the day, store, and SKU level
• Retail data can be viewed in either retailer or manufacturer hierarchies and calendars
• Pre-built category management reporting templates
• Pre-built scorecard dashboards based on GS1 Trading Partner Performance Management standards
• Ad hoc query and analysis capabilities for users to create their own reports and dashboards
• Proactive detection and alerts based on user-defined goals and thresholds
• Pre-built integration of cleansed, harmonized data to Oracle Demantra
• Standards-based integration of cleansed, harmonized data to non-Demantra applications
• Pre-built adapter for integration with Oracle Retail Merchandising System

Key Benefits:

• Reduce demand latency to better sense, shape and respond to demand
• Improve the consistency and accuracy of external demand data to more effectively leverage demand data across functions, teams and applications
• Reduce the cost and complexity of cleansing and managing disparate sets of external demand data

Capture and manage large volumes of disparate external demand data

Oracle Demand Signal Repository is a centralized, dedicated application designed to capture, cleanse, and harmonize large volumes of complex, disparate external demand data. The foundation of the Demand Signal Repository is an extensible, retail-oriented data model that captures and manages retail point of sale and inventory information at the day, store, and SKU level, or even at lower levels (for example, inventory and sell through information from individual inventory locations within a store).

Oracle Demand Signal Repository provides the capability to capture and manage thousands of measures and attributes corresponding to individual item, retailer, and store demographic information. In addition, Oracle Demand Signal Repository maintains a unique set of item, geographic, organizational and calendar hierarchies for each individual retailer. This enables Oracle Demand Signal Repository to transform data from external sources that can be analyzed and reported in the manufacturer’s or individual retailer’s hierarchy and calendar. The application is also designed to capture and manage competitor data. Therefore, if competitor data is available, a manufacturer can capture and analyze competitor data as well as the manufacturer’s own data.

Analyze and take action based on real-time insights

Oracle Demand Signal Repository includes the best-in-class analytical capabilities of Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) to help business users develop and act on insights generated by timely, granular external demand data. This includes the ability to personalize the analysis as well as automatically output the analysis to Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint for executive briefings.
Using Oracle Demand Signal Repository, companies can get a near real time picture of retail store level sales and inventory management trends and can identify potential problems as well as areas of opportunity.

Flexible analysis and alerting

All parts of the organization can take advantage of Oracle Demand Signal Repository by choosing the views, measures, data granularity, and hierarchies that best address their needs. In addition, Oracle Demand Signal Repository provides targeted alerts to enable exception-based processes and workflow. For example, key account team members can receive alerts when sales performance of a new product in a specific territory drops below weekly or even daily targets. Alerts (iBots) can be set-up to notify stakeholders via their preferred medium – sales field representatives can receive a text message on their cell phone, Distribution center managers can get a PDF attachment via email, and sales management can receive a report as a spreadsheet.

Pre-built dashboards and reports to start quickly

Oracle Demand Signal Repository includes a set of pre-packaged reports and dashboards designed to support category management and trading partner scorecard capabilities that accelerate time to value. The category management reports enable category and brand managers to view key performance indicators and intelligence needed to establish and execute a sound category performance plan – for example, category coverage, category penetration, and retail financial analysis.

Oracle Demand Signal Repository also includes pre-seeded scorecard analytics that provide a graphical interface for monitoring results versus goals on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis related to key operational and financial KPIs within a trading partner relationship.

Oracle Demand Signal Repository also provides true ad hoc query and reporting capabilities to enable creation of individual analyses. Even the most casual user can create and customize reports through a logical view of the complete library of available measures, facts, attributes and hierarchies, expressed in user-friendly terms and an accessed via a simple and intuitive interface.

Integrate clean, harmonized demand data to other applications

Oracle Demand Signal Repository provides clean, harmonized demand and inventory data to complementary applications like demand planning, trade promotion analysis and optimization, sales and operations planning, retail execution, and product lifecycle management via web services. This web services-based approach enables Oracle Demand Signal Repository to support systemic operational improvements in a wide variety of functional areas through integration with other applications – even in highly heterogeneous application environments.

Oracle Demand Signal Repository offers pre-built integration with the Oracle Demantra solution, enabling companies to quickly leverage Demantra’s best-in-class functionality for demand sensing and shaping. A combined Oracle Demand Signal Repository and Demantra solution leverages a wide variety of external data to more accurately predict demand for products. It can also shape demand through the right mix of promotions, while enhancing sales and operations planning (S&OP) to meet operating constraints and budgets more profitably.

Summary

Consumer goods and high tech consumer product companies are aggressively competing to convert increasingly large, complex, and disparate sets of downstream data into insights that enable improved decision making and execution across the enterprise. Oracle Demand Signal Repository is the first application offered by a major software vendor that supports both the current requirements and future vision of leading consumer goods companies. It provides a scalable, enterprise strength solution that is pre-built to provide best-in-class demand intelligence capabilities as well as standards-based integration to complementary Oracle and non-Oracle applications.

Oracle Value Chain Planning — A Complete Solution

Oracle’s Value Chain Planning solution enables companies to efficiently design, plan, and service their value chains. Its componentized architecture enables you to start with any product and expand to other areas at any point in time. For example, you can decide to start with improvements to your demand management process because you have a forecast accuracy problem, and then implement constrained supply planning or a sales and operations planning process. The Oracle Value Chain Planning architecture leverages the scalability and security of Oracle’s RDBMS and Fusion Middleware technology and can be deployed as a single instance with Oracle E-Business Suite, or integrated with other systems. Whether you implement one module or the entire product solution, Oracle’s Value Chain Planning solution enables you to share unified supply chain planning information across the enterprise so you can make smarter decisions faster, with better information.