Industry Talk

Regular Industry Development Updates, Opinions and Talking Points relating to Manufacturing, the Supply Chain and Logistics.

Is it Important to Integrate Oracle with Enterprise Labeling Applications?

Companies like Oracle have become the bedrock for organizations who are grappling with more complex supply chains. For every major area of discipline, Oracle SCM Cloud has an application designed to make life easier – procurement, PLM, supply chain planning, logistics, manufacturing, and more. The company was also recently named a leader in Garter’s Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) Magic Quadrant. In short, Oracle natively offers solutions for many challenges within the supply chain.

In addition to this focus on supply chain management, Oracle has spent considerable effort in more broadly becoming a top-tier cloud provider. Over the past year, Oracle has scaled up to cover 20 global regions, with a further 20 regions planned to go online by the end of 2020. The company has also introduced built-in analytics and anomaly detection meant to highlight outliers in incoming data, self-service machine learning capabilities for self-taught data scientists, and deep integration with Microsoft’s Azure cloud.

As a supply chain manager dealing with a complex global supply chain, these features make Oracle into a worthy choice. You absolutely rely on continuous global connectivity to communicate with your branches and vendors, for example. You’re always sensitive to delays and price changes, so an analytics tool that can sense these changes for you would be a game-changer. The only thing you need to make Oracle into a complete tool for supply chain management is an integration with your enterprise labeling software.

 

Can You Use Oracle Without Enterprise Labeling?

Enterprise labeling is one of the most important pieces of the puzzle when it comes so supply chain management (we admit a slight bias). Labels not only ensure that your product gets to the right location at the right time, they also ensure regulatory compliance, helping companies avoid millions of dollars’ worth of fines every year.

When using Oracle on its own, without Enterprise Labeling, the printing process is controlled mostly at the site level. There’s no centralized control over the labeling process, and the various plants and departments that assume control over labeling may pull data from a variety of disparate sources, including some that may be out of date or incorrect. This results in a higher potential for labeling errors and regulatory breaches.

 

The Benefits of Integration

By integrating Oracle with your Enterprise Labeling platform, you gain access to a number of abilities:

  • Pull data directly from Oracle, using the application as a single source of truth that always presents the most up-to-date labeling data to your printers.

  • Navigate the regulatory patchwork by using business logic that automatically generates a label template, barcode, shipping instructions, and warning pictograms using approved language based upon the origin and destination of your packages.

  • Use a browser-based label design tool on both desktop and mobile devices, and then print directly from within the Oracle E-Business Suite. The Enterprise Labeling application provides a print server that can automatically mediate between Oracle and the printers at your various remote offices, vendors, and partners.

 

To summarize, creating a label using just Oracle requires you to both find a lot of information within the Oracle database, and to know a lot of information about international shipping regulations. When you create a label using Enterprise Labeling software and Oracle, the software finds information within Oracle automatically, and then automatically assembles it according to rules that are programmed into the software itself. As a supply chain manager, you eliminate a large amount of effort, worry, and uncontrolled costs related to labels.

 

Loftware Provides the Oracle Integrations You need

When it comes to creating Oracle integrations, Loftware Spectrum has the connectivity you need. Loftware Spectrum integrates natively with the Oracle E-Business Suite in order to let users initiate printing directly from Oracle. Using its built-in label design, device management, and job status functionality, Loftware Spectrum users can incorporate data from Oracle directly into their labels without otherwise changing their workflows.

Administrators can create business rules for label generation directly in the Spectrum application. Once these rules are applied, Spectrum imports the relevant data from Oracle and then uses this data to identify the most appropriate label template. Finally, Spectrum generates the label and converts it into a format suitable for the target printing environment. Spectrum lets users view the status of print requests as they’re ongoing, providing a closed loop solution.

As the international supply chain becomes more complicated, label printing has become more complicated as well, requiring more long-distance communication, more manual processes, more regulatory knowledge and more risk of error. With Loftware and Oracle working together, you can dramatically minimize all of these stressors, condensing your workload to just two applications that quickly provide accurate, error-free labels. For more information, contact Loftware today!