DC Velocity - March 2017

24 DC VELOCITY MARCH 2017 www.dcvelocity.com newsworthy

Business software giant Oracle Corp., broadening its reach into the supply chain technology sector, said it has launched a suite of four cloud-based applications that the firm said could help companies automate their operations.

Redwood Shores, Calif.-based Oracle will expand its Internet of Things (IoT) portfolio by adding components for asset monitoring, production monitoring, fleet monitoring, and the connected worker, the company said. Together, the applications are designed to help users detect, analyze, and respond to signals from industrial platforms ranging from forklifts to factory equipment, trucks, and workers, Oracle said.

Oracle’s design placed an emphasis on simplified user interfaces and streamlined workflows to help customers justify their investments in IoT platforms, which have received a great deal of hype but are still an unknown quantity to many businesses, said Bhagat Nainani, Oracle’s group vice president of Io T applications development, in a phone interview.

Nainani said Oracle’s supply chain and transport custom-
ers have “found it hard to adopt our Io T cloud components
because they were uncertain how much investment was
needed up front and how it would pay off for them.” In
response, Oracle designed the new suite of tools to produce
quick results in applications that clients are already using,
Nainani said. The applications are in such areas as manu-
facturing, maintenance, customer service, and transporta-
tion management, he said.
The asset-monitoring unit tracks utilization and avail-
ability of items inside the facility, such as valves, elevators,
or forklifts, Nainani said. The production-monitoring unit
helps machines work together on the factory floor. The
fleet-monitoring unit tracks trucks, buses, or delivery vehi-
cles and reports on conditions such as temperature, presence
of load, and location. And the connected-worker unit helps
employees and managers stay in touch for jobs in hazardous
conditions, such as in construction or mining, he said.

All four components work in conjunction with Oracle’s Supply Chain Management Cloud platform or can be integrated with other common platforms such as TMS and ERP products from other vendors, he said.