In its first major release since its acquisition of
Agile Software two years ago, Oracle
rolled out an upgrade that builds on the PLM platform's already strong
analytics and useability capabilities along with enhancements that allow for
more flexible and tighter integration with enterprise applications, including
the Oracle business software suite.
One of the more prominent enhancements to Oracle's
Agile 9.3 is in the area of risk analytics, a feature set that has always
been strong in the Agile PLM suite. Borrowing from the standard Oracle business
intelligence model, this version now adds out-of-the-box analytics and
dashboards for monitoring product risk, supplier risk, product quality and
compliance. "Financial situations across globe, market consolidation and
demand and pricing pressures are creating more requirements for companies to
look at different risk factors," says Hardeep Gulati, Oracle's vice
president of PLM and PIM product strategy. "We're providing a view so companies
can look at new products and their existing products across a portfolio and
profile quality and expertise around suppliers so they can ultimately make
better decisions."
For example, the product risk module lets companies
track supplier performance changes, component shortages and price reductions while
the part risk capabilities help categorize and identify newly introduced
parts, parts that are lacking product record information (things like price,
compliance and specifications) and any parts that are at risk for obsolescence.
Other dashboard analytics can help detect which products are most impacted by
quality issues as well as prioritizing customer complaints by urgency and
severity. The product design volatility analysis functions earmark the products
and product lines that have the most late-stage changes during the product
release cycle, including a notation on the severity of those changes and the
operational impact, according to Oracle officials.
In the area of integration, Oracle has continued with
its promise to expand the Agile platform as an enterprise PLM backbone, Gulati
says. Agile 9.3 supports service-oriented architecture (SOA), allowing
companies to tap modularized Web services, event management and extensible
scripting to integrate various components and CAD objects. The platform also
now integrates Product Master Data Management functions to improve data quality
and governance across heterogeneous systems and it leverages Oracle's
Application Integration Architecture to support out-of-the-box open
standards-based integration to other enterprise systems, including Oracle and SAP.
The third focus of the new release is on user
productivity as Oracle builds on Agile's existing ease-of-use advantages by
leveraging Web 2.0 functionality. Agile 9.3 sports new UI controls such as
in-line table editing, context-aware pop-ups and new drag-and-drop capabilities
along with enhanced personalization features such as personalized context help
through the Oracle User Productivity Kit. Based on these enhancements, Gulati says
users can expect to see as much as a 70-percent reduction in clicks when working with
the system.
Tweet This
2 
