The Six Five team dives into the Oracle LIVE Analytics and AI Event.
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Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: We need to move to the next awesome topic. And that was Oracle Live analytics and AI event. And as you know, Oracle has a monthly event around its fusion apps. It constant updates to its SAS application for its customers. And this month was about analytics and AI.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, we can hit this one pretty quick, Pat, because we can point our customers, customers. We can point our beautiful audience and friends out there to a pod that we actually did with two of the most senior execs in this business from Oracle. TK [Anon] and Steve Miranda. But we talked to them ahead of the event. So what actually came out of the event and this event was really not just, I wouldn’t just call it analytics and AI, but it was really about building on the analytics cloud, the autonomous data warehouse, to be able to implement AI and analytics to drive supply chain.
And it was a very timely announcement because if you’re not familiar, Oracle Fusion has what’s called their SCM solution or their supply chain and manufacturing solution. And of course, if you’ve been under a rock, maybe you aren’t aware that we’re having a little problem on a global basis and this isn’t just chips, by the way. We talk a lot about chips because we’re in tech. But it’s everything it’s gasoline, it’s fabric, it’s clothing, it’s paint, it’s ladders, it’s lumbered whatever it is, we can’t get it.
And there we are heading into the holidays and for many companies, retailers, they have bare shelves. And of course this is driving inflation. This is not the Six Five economics edition, but let’s just say, when you don’t have enough materials and you don’t have enough inventory and you have people that want stuff, what it does is it drives prices up like crazy and it causes a lot of issues. And by the way, this causes problems for companies to be able to function and operate and plan.
So right now, the ability to take data analytics, both internal to the company, external analytics that are available for things like market demand that are being created every day through research, and being able to apply those so that you know. Pat, you and I have talked about this quite a bit and not to get a little off topic, but the companies that have done the best through the supply chain shortage, especially in the chip space where the companies that understood what was going to happen to their demand and were able to identify early that the disruption of COVID wasn’t actually going to be a disruption. In fact, it could have been an accelerant to their businesses.
Automotive companies immediately cut supply or cut forecasts and cut off their basically their arms. And it’s still not in many cases, recovered from it. Whereas other companies had a better understanding for instance, one company that did extraordinarily well, it was Dell, another Lenovo that had their eyes on their long-term supply chain. Understood the demand for PCs that going to be caused by this actual pandemic. And then we’re able to get out in front of it and their interruptions were less, they weren’t nonexistent, but they were less.
Analytics and technology like what is being built here in fusion cloud supply chain and manufacturing can help your company. Again, being very clear what’s being announced is that there are an opportunities to utilize technology, to get your arms around more quickly, the risks of global events, natural disasters, updates to trade agreements, changes in global policy, macroeconomics, and be able to utilize that, to understand what kind of supply you need.
You have better visibility into how is your supply chain performing to understand the process in how it’s working towards your business goals. And then of course, to be able to detect in advance more proactively where a disruption might be. Laughingly, I heard a great story a few weeks back when I was doing some research about, I used the word paint earlier, Pat, and the fact of the matter is one time it was, they couldn’t get the cans to put the paint in. So you could get all the paint you needed, but you couldn’t get a can to put the paint in to actually be able to sell the paint. And then there was another point where they could get all the cans and then they couldn’t get the resin required, because, it’s a chemical compound that it’s chemicals that ends up making the final product.
So when you have a supply chain, what people need to visualize, is like a chain link, right? And that the fact is that oftentimes to get to a final product it could be a small number five or six. It could be 500 or 600. The substrates for semiconductors are extraordinarily complex and the materials all the way back to raw materials, there’s a ton of different component that go into making this happen. Then of course there’s labor impacts, which is a whole nother thing that’s going on.
This was the focus of this week’s Oracle Live event it’s that there are technologies available, there’s investments the company can make. Oracle has been working very hard and building upon that fusion platform to be able to get deeper. And by the way, I really was impressed that they’re this market opportunity to enhance this in a regular cadence, because right now this is something I believe companies need very badly. And so it was a good announcement Pat, a good opportunity by the way, check out our conversation with TK and Steve, because those guys did a great job of explaining what they’re doing.
Patrick Moorhead: My favorite part of the event was not actually the event itself. Although-
Daniel Newman: Our podcast?
Patrick Moorhead: …I did enjoy that. Well, I like that too. But I liked a demo video that they did, which essentially showed a scooter maker. It looked like a general manager or maybe a product manager that said, “Hey, all the data suggests that they are not going to have enough supply to be able to hit demand.” And it wasn’t something that came through some phone call or some spreadsheet, it was real time. And then they get the supply chain folks, they get the product management, they get engineering on the phone and the system auto magically knows that there are certain parts of the scooter that can be borrowed from scooters that aren’t selling as well. And literally on the Zoom call and using Slack by the way, which I thought was or what looked like Slack, sorry, it wasn’t Slack.
They came together and ultimately reconfigured a product to be able to pull more parts off of other scooters that weren’t selling as well. And my background is, product management and product marketing and strategy. But that definitely hearkens back to my product management days in general management days, where these were real life conversations you would have. And the only way you would know you were heading in the wrong direction, it was too late to really do much about it, right? You would stock out, you would sell out and then you’d have to wait one or two months to make something happening. This is all about prediction that something is going to happen, that really is the true power of what I think Oracle is bringing to supply chain management. And it was pretty cool. Watch the video, we’ll put it in the show notes.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
