Nearly two years after Oracle's takeover of PeopleSoft and JD Edwards, the enterprise applications giant has integrated advanced network optimization and production scheduling functionality, acquired from JD Edwards, into the Oracle E-Business Suite of enterprise applications.

The two modules -- Oracle Strategic Network Optimization and Oracle Production Scheduling -- will be sold as extensions to Oracle's Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) suite. They are now available globally, said Nadeem Syed, Oracle's vice president for advanced planning products.

The addition of the planning tools, Syed said, is part of Oracle's strategy to continue to support and extend existing applications while creating a new enterprise suite -- dubbed Fusion Applications -- that will assimilate the best functionality from Oracle's existing application product families.

"We have said that we will insure customers' current investment and make sure they can gain value and evolve to the next generation of applications," Syed said. "By providing incremental value to customers, here we are doing just that."

The advanced planning and network optimization functionality being merged into the Oracle E-Business Suite was originally acquired by JD Edwards in 1999 with that company's $80 million purchase of Numetrix Ltd., which had specialized in supply chain optimization tools.

The Numetrix tools, Syed said, remain best in class. "Numetrix had a large installed base of customers with large, complex environments," Syed noted. "Theirs are still some of the best tools in these areas."

The Numetrix network optimization tools allow manufacturers to analyze and simulate supply chain risk by performing what-if analysis on different supply chain topology configurations. Manufacturers can use that analysis to develop long-term strategies.

Both the Strategic Network Optimization and Production Scheduling tools have been tightly integrated with E-Business Suite's transaction systems. That, Syed said, will enable customers to perform network optimization analysis more easily and more frequently.

"Historically, manufacturers might do this kind of analysis and planning once a year," Syed explained. "But with the dynamism of supply chains today, they need to reconfigure and plan continuously to make sure they are making the right, holistic decisions," he said.

While calling the integration of the Numetrix tools with E-Business Suite a positive step for Oracle, analysts said a small minority of manufacturers today are prepared to take advantage of the kind of closed-loop workflow enabled by that integration. Few manufacturers, for example, continuously optimize supply chain networks based on output from inventory planning applications, said Mark Hillman, a research director at AMR Research. In the future, however, more manufacturers are likely to begin doing so.

"Companies are being driven to leaner supply chains and, at the same time, they're doing more global sourcing," Hillman said. "They want to do away with disruptions by having a better handle on risk and volatility, so more are beginning to optimize networks whenever, say, they introduce a new product, not just every 18 months or two years."

Syed predicted that the Numetrix network optimization capabilities will be most useful for manufacturers in high tech and consumer goods. The new production scheduling capabilities, he said, should appeal to customers across discrete and process manufacturing verticals.

Until now, Syed said, Oracle's E-Business Suite and APS extensions lacked the kind of network optimization functionality provided by the Numetrix applications.

E-Business Suite has had its own production scheduling functionality, which, Syed said, will be replaced by the Numetrix production scheduling module. Users of the production scheduling module in the current E-Business Suite and APS can choose to remain on the existing module, which Oracle will continue to support, Syed said. Or existing customers can upgrade for free to the Numetrix-based production scheduling module.

In order to upgrade, customers need to be running version 11.5.10 of the current APS suite, Syed added.