Oracle In-Memory Performance-Driven Planning Overview

This chapter covers the following topics:

Introduction

Oracle Value Chain Planning applications deployed on Oracle Engineered Systems provides increased scalability and performance solutions. To further increase the levels of scalability and performance, the applications themselves must be engineered to take full advantage of the available technology. Oracle In-Memory Performance-Driven Planning (PDP) is part of the Oracle Value Chain Planning (VCP) suite of products and enables near real-time interactive planning, simulation, and analysis.

Oracle Value Chain Planning

VCP manages supply chain flows (outbound finished goods, inbound supplies, inter-facility and company shipments, service parts, and reverse logistics), performs mixed modes of manufacturing (discrete, configure-to-order, project, process, and lean), and operates across geographic areas (regional and global).

Oracle Value Chain Planning can simultaneously operate with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, both Oracle and non-Oracle. Companies can support the nuances of their global operations while reaping the efficiencies available by a single planning solution.

Oracle Value Chain Planning provides support for planning business functions such as demand planning, forecasting and consensus demand management, promotion planning and optimization, integrated business planning, network design, risk management and postponement, tactical supply and distribution planning, and event-driven simulation.

For more information, visit the Oracle Value Chain Planning page on the Oracle website.

Oracle In-Memory Performance-Driven Planning

Oracle In-Memory Performance-Driven Planning (PDP) is an engineered system product that includes features within the Value Chain Planning suite of products and optimizes them for Oracle Exadata hardware (and optionally Oracle Exalogic).

PDP provides out-of-box configuration and tuning for VCP products to run on Oracle Exa hardware. It enables you to fully leverage the Exa hardware and run VCP Applications extremely fast. In particular, PDP provides in-memory analytics in the Oracle Advanced Planning Command Center (APCC)

Oracle In-Memory Driven Planning takes advantage of the capabilities uniquely available in Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalytics. For example, Oracle In-Memory Planning enables Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC)support for VCP to use Oracle Exadata’s Active GridLink for Oracle RAC. This provides increased parallelism and scalability and enables faster performance for database intensive planning processes such as:

This results in shorter planning times for VCP products such as:

APCC provides embedded analytics as well as the analysis layer for all VCP products. Between the running of planning processes and the analysis, the plan output is archived and transformed into pre-aggregated business metrics for dashboards, reports, and ad-hoc queries. PDP significantly reduces run times of several key batch processes, and totally eliminates many batch processes altogether.

Note: Oracle In-Memory Performance-Driven Planning is a distinct and separately licensed product.

Important: Due to the large volume of consumption data required to generate a forecast and plan at a very granular level, the PDP module must be installed with and run on the Oracle Exadata database machine. For optimal performance, Oracle also recommends implementing the Oracle Exalogic server.

PDP Leverages the Oracle Exadata Engineered System

PDP leverages the following specific capabilities within the Exadata engineered system: