ORACLE recently added new capabilities to its Oracle Accelerate programme aimed at mid-sized companies and a new portal, http://midsize.oracle.com for its mid-sized customers and partners.

In the around three years since Oracle Accelerate was launched, Oracle has added over 7,000 mid-sized applications and 25,000 customers worldwide.

The new Oracle Accelerate portal includes a Partner Marketplace for customers to easily find the right combination of Oracle Applications and Oracle Accelerate Solutions.

“Unlike enterprise customers, small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) cannot afford full-blown Oracle solutions especially tailored to their needs, so Oracle Accelerate provides them with a choice of several industry-specific solutions for their specific industry,” said Jasbir Singh, Oracle Malaysia senior director of Applications Sales.

For example, besides basic enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications such as accounts payable, accounts receivable and general ledger; applications specific to a high-technology companies include original equipment manufacturer (OEM) complex equipment, OEM consumer electronics, outsourcing services and others.

Industries in Malaysia currently supported include the chemical, consumer goods, high technology and life sciences.

Oracle Accelerate combines Oracle Applications and  Business Accelerators with geography-specific deployment expertise to solve business problems in highly targeted and rapidly deployable packages.

New Oracle Accelerate solutions include Business Intelligence, Enterprise Performance Management and CRM (customer relationship management) On Demand.

Oracle also launched a new HP and Oracle Consulting Accelerate Solution for Industrial Manufacturing together with Hewlett-Packard.

Oracle Business Accelerators are rapid implementation tools, templates, templates and industry- and geography-specific best practice process flows provided by Oracle to partners to help dramatically reduce implementation time, complexity, cost and risk.

New features include Oracle's Dementra for advanced demand planning, Oracle's Agile product lifecycle management solutions, Oracle's Siebel CRM (customer relationship management) and Oracle Transportation Management.

Oracle Business Accelerators for Oracle E-Business Suite are available on Sun's 64-bit systems running Solaris 10 OS for eight industries in 20 countries, bringing the total to 280 Oracle Business Accelerators available in 35 countries.

“Oracle Business Accelerators reduces implementation time and resources by as much as 60% compared to traditional implementation,” said Jasbir.

Deployment options of Oracle Accelerate include hosting by Oracle On Demand, by a third-party or hosting on-premises by the customer itself, with customisable service packages to suit the unique needs of each customer.

Down the supply chain

Malaysian SMBs are moving down the supply chain and as they move further downstream, demand for information technology grows in terms of requirements for real-time information, real-time collaboration and vendor management.

As low value industries such as silicon sources, semiconductor fabrication and component manufacturing conducted in highly capital- and labour-intensive factories costing as much as RM1 billion each leave Malaysia for lower wage countries, leaving SMBs down the supply chain doing contract manufacturing, original design manufacturing (ODM) and OEM activities. Also, within their specific verticals, there are value-chains with levels of activities which may also be spread across different geographies.

For example, integrated circuit (IC) manufacture begins at the pinnacle of the value chain with highly knowledge-intensive activities such as the conceptual design of the functions and operation of the IC in the form of a circuit diagramme.

The next stage is to design the layout of the IC in the tiny chip of semiconductor material such as silicon or gallium arsenide, including the width and thickness of N-type and P- type semiconductor devices such as transistors, diodes, isolation regions, resistors, capacitors, contacts, metallised tracks and so on to cope with the currents, frequencies and other loads borne by the IC.

Next is to work out the number of steps required to build up the semiconductor chip and to design the masks which are to be used in the wafer fabrication process.

Then comes the wafer fabrication process – the most capital-expensive - whereby multiple ICs are constructed on blank discs of intrinsic (pure) semiconductor material using mostly Japan-built photo-lithographic steppers costing millions.

At the bottom of the semiconductor industry value chain is the packaging of the ICs or “silicon chips” into hermetically sealed epoxy or ceramic casings, with internal connection to metal leads to the outside world.

They are then tested, packed and shipped to market, with customers mostly comprising manufacturers down the supply chain, which use them as building blocks for their electronic equipment and consumer electronics products such as PC motherboards and mobile phones.

This downstream operation will have its own vertical value chain, with knowledge-intensive design at the top, which may be conducted in a different country from that of final assembly and Oracle Accelerate solutions are available to address and manage the different stages of these operations.

Further down the supply chain, inputs are of higher value hence are more costly as they get closer to the customer.

So they require Oracle Dementra's demand planning, advanced forecasting, demand modelling, real-time sales, operations planning, predictive trade planning, deduction and settlement management and trade promotion optimisation.

Further down the supply chain, their activities will also include configuration and packaging, distribution, channel partners, value-added resellers and retail, so ERP alone won't suffice.

As more operations down the supply chain progressively move to lower wage countries, what's left will be warehousing, logistics, delivery and distribution functions.

Author's note: Do read In Praise of Hard Industries - Why Manufacturing, Not the Information Economy is the Key to Future Prosperity by Eamonn Fingleton. http://www.unsustainable.org/index.asp?navID=6