Oracle has invested considerable effort in creating a new solution to the data integration and management challenges faced by today's consumer goods (CG) manufacturers. By adopting this new solution, consumer goods manufacturers could deliver significant improvements in capability, reliability and application implementation time.

• Oracle has worked with a customer focus group to develop Demand Signal Repository (DSR), a new standardized platform approach to address the wide range of requirements for capturing, managing and leveraging large volumes of demand-related data.
• The DSR platform forms a common data basis for all of Oracle's planning tools and information systems that are driven off demand-related data. It also provides standards-based interfaces to other external applications.
• Adoption of DSR could significantly simplify the information architecture in the area of demand data management for CG manufacturers, speed up the adoption of planning applications, and ensure consistent, reliable use of demand information across the business.

• CG manufacturers looking for a flexible platform through which to integrate all their available demand-related data should consider Oracle's DSR solution as an alternative to commissioning custom-made development of database-centric applications to significantly accelerate their time to value and provide a flexible basis for expansion. This recommendation applies to all CG manufacturers whether they are existing Oracle database and application users or not.
• Organizations considering adopting the DSR solution should favor application vendors that provide solutions compatible with the DSR data source.
• Users must consider that Oracle will need to expand the collection of predefined interfaces over time to integrate new data sources and applications. Further investment will also be required in the analytics suite to increase the inherent value of the solution and to reduce adoption times by providing more of a head start on reporting.

All CG manufacturers are striving to become more demand driven to reduce costs, improve execution and help drive innovation. For many years, however, manufacturers have struggled to integrate all the information sources available to build a complete picture of the overall consumer demand.

Typical approaches to understand this demand data have varied from:

• Major custom-made data warehouse developments
• Combining best-of-breed point applications
• Spreadsheet-based use of small data extracts
• Buying in a variety of data and services from syndicated data providers

In many cases, combinations of these approaches have been applied to attempt to meet the broad range of planning and information needs. However, combining these approaches is typically not scalable, is prone to human errors, places dependency on a few key resources, and requires considerable time and resources to create and maintain reliably.

There are many complications preventing manufacturers from getting to a consistent single version of the truth with their demand data. These challenges include:

• The wide variety of formats in which the data is held and transferred from different retailers
• The timeliness of the availability of the data (syndicated data is often weeks old)
• The varying granularity and volume of the data available (product sales by week versus point-of-sale [POS] transactions versus consumer loyalty data)
• Multiple hierarchies used by different organizations (even Nielsen and Information Resources Inc. [IRI] use different product hierarchies)
• Multiple coding systems that must be carefully mapped (manufacturers and retailers rarely use the same product codes)
• Cleansing and harmonizing the data often a manual process

As a result, where there have been pilots and incidents of best practice with specific retailers, these approaches are difficult to scale and repeat across the business. Initiatives such as Global Data Synchronization and the assorted data pools have helped to make product data more consistent in some areas; however, there is still a long way to go.

One of the major factors that has limited the successful adoption of category management across the CG industry has been this difficulty in coming to grips with all the data needed to build a clear picture of the demand. Recent developments in technology and the increasing adoption of more collaborative business approaches are beginning to change this.

Oracle has acquired a portfolio of valuable planning and information system applications during recent years, in addition to its core technology (Siebel, PeopleSoft, Demantra, JD Edwards, Hyperion, G-Log, Retek, ProfitLogic and Agile), covering critical CG applications such as:

• Demand management
• Sales and operations planning
• Distribution requirements planning
• Supply chain planning
• Trade promotion management
• Trade promotion optimization
• Product life cycle management
• Retail execution and monitoring

The DSR was designed to support the combined requirements of all these application areas, as well as other analytical and predictive applications such as category management.

DSR

To fully exploit the potential of an integrated suite of solutions, Oracle needed to combine the strengths of each of its best-of-breed applications. Rather than create an elaborate set of interfaces between each independent data store driving these point applications, Oracle decided to combine their strengths into one central information platform that would then service the data needed into each of these applications and more. The DSR also provides standards-based interfaces to other external applications through the use of service-oriented architecture (SOA) technology. No other major enterprise solution provider has delivered a solution to the demand data management problem in this way.

DSR is designed to address the inherent high latency of demand data by automatically centrally cleansing, harmonizing and aggregating the data to drive the applications and prebuilt dashboards and scorecards. This approach benefits users by delivering consistent information to all relevant applications on a more timely and responsive basis, with reduced manual effort and cost.

In developing DSR, Oracle is showing thought leadership in how it is applying its broad technology capabilities to address a bottleneck that has held back many CG manufacturers in recent years (see Figure 1). It will provide an information platform for a wide variety of applications, not just Oracle planning and analytics applications, but over time it could enable other in-house application developments and other vendors' solutions.

The DSR is designed to capture data from a wide variety of external sources (see Table 1).

There is significant variety in the data types, granularity and timeliness of the assorted external data sources. Bringing this data together consistently and reliably is a challenge, and will require extensive mapping and matching to ensure data is aligned correctly (for example, mapping product codes and descriptions from various different external sources such as retailers). The DSR combines the use of flexible extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) type technology and predefined adapters to simplify this as much as possible.

The DSR uses these technology components to provide its functionality:

• To capture data
  • Oracle Warehouse Builder
• To manage data
  • Oracle Database 10g
• To analyze and integrate data
  • Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE)
  • Business Process Execution Language (BPEL)
• To connect with applications via standards-based integration
  • Oracle Internet Application Server
  • Oracle SOA Suite

The core of the data schema within the DSR database was based on the proven Oracle Retail database schema, but enhanced to incorporate the additional information requirements. DSR combines the Key Account Management dashboard with the Category Management dashboard and scorecarding capabilities to deliver a core reporting and analytics capability. Adoption of DSR would likely be structured in phases to deliver prioritized data feed integrations first, such as the key retail POS data feeds.

DSR Availability

Oracle is committed to launching DSR during 2008.

A subset of the DSR concept is already in live use at a small number of early-adopter organizations. Some early-adopter organizations have been involved in the Grocery Manufacturers Assn. (GMA) initiative "New ways of working together," where Oracle worked to enable alignment, shared measures and business planning, and consistent key performance indicators (KPIs) through the use of DSR technology. Early customers are providing feedback on early prototypes of the application. The initial focus is on external data feeds and retail-facing applications.

The first version of DSR has limited workflow capabilities; however, these are planned to be enhanced significantly in later versions through the rapid release schedule. DSR is designed to enable upward compatibility to later versions, as the capabilities expand. The second version is planned to provide capabilities to manage workflow across downstream transactions and provide real-time monitoring. Over time, the list of available adapters is expected to grow as Oracle and system integrators develop additional feeds.

Oracle is working with a third-party integration specialist consultancy to build a set of retail adapters for the initial release of DSR. This initial set of adapters includes an electronic data interchange (EDI) 852 adapter to support the most widely used retail data-sharing format as well as three to five retailer-specific adapters. In addition, Oracle's retail experience and capabilities are being leveraged by offering an adapter to directly load data from Oracle's Retail RMS module into DSR. As a result, the initial release of DSR will include the ability for CG companies to bypass the cost and complexity of EDI and load store-level sales and inventory information directly into DSR from many of the world's largest retailers that currently use Oracle Retail RMS.

CG companies without an effective integrated demand information management solution should consider evaluating DSR against their specific needs. DSR is best suited to midsize to large CG organizations with a wide variety of external sources that they are attempting to manage and that need to drive a multiplicity of planning and analytic applications.

One of the key strengths of DSR lies in its flexibility to map its core solution to a different set of data sources, and also the variety of applications that will be using the integrated cleansed data. Because of this factor, there will probably never be two identical implementations. Organizations considering adopting DSR will need to check when their selection of data sources will be supported by adapters and what aspects will have to be crafted using the available tools.

• CG companies without an effective integrated demand information management solution should consider evaluating DSR against their specific needs. DSR is best suited to midsize to large CG organizations that have a wide variety of external sources that they are attempting to manage and that need to drive a multiplicity of planning and analytic applications.
• CG manufacturers looking for a flexible platform through which to integrate all their available demand-related data should consider Oracle DSR as an alternative to commissioning custom-made development of database-centric applications to significantly accelerate their time to value and provide a flexible basis for future expansion. This recommendation applies to all CG manufacturers whether they are existing Oracle database and application users or not.
• Organizations considering adopting DSR should favor application vendors that provide solutions compatible with the DSR data source. Users need to consider that Oracle will need to expand the collection of predefined interfaces over time to increase the ability to integrate new data sources and new applications that use the data, to further speed up implementation. The priority and sequence of the additional adapters will be influenced by early customers as well as Oracle's DSR product road map.
• Users need to consider that Oracle will need to invest further in the report packs and analytics suite available from DSR, to increase the inherent value of the solution and to reduce adoption times by providing more of a head start on reporting. This should also make the solution easier for prospects to understand and easier to demonstrate in the sales process. Insight-driven application areas such as space and category management, assortment planning and promotion management could be facilitated by the integrated demand information becoming available and delivered through more-effective analytics.