Matt Johnson, Senior Director, Supply Chain Collaboration Product Strategy 

Often in supply chain management, what you see is what you get, but Oracle Supply Chain Management Cloud offers more than meets the eye. How? Oracle SCM Cloud includes many easy ways to modify or extend its features to solve your unique business problems. You can start by changing labels, fields and layout using Page Composer. Then depending on the application, you can add attributes, validations and even whole new business objects using flexfields or Apps Composer.

At other times, instead of modifying your Oracle SCM Cloud apps themselves, you might extend their capabilities by connecting other things to them. Let’s say you want your customers to view your products on a custom mobile app that gets item attributes from Oracle Product Hub Cloud. Or maybe you want to automate a common sequence of tasks, such as collecting the latest data, running a supply plan and extracting updated planned order quantities. Finally, you might need to integrate Oracle SCM Cloud with an on-premise ERP solution.

Users have always been able to invoke Oracle SCM Cloud web services to do things like submitting sales orders or fetching item details. However, three recent developments now make SCM Cloud’s integration simpler and more powerful than ever:

1. RESTful web services model. When Oracle SCM Cloud was first released, all its web services were based upon Simple Object Asset Protocol (SOAP) specifications. While SOAP is well-established, Representational State Transfer (REST) is a newer web services model that has risen to prominence over the past few years. Everything from your web browser to your spreadsheet supports RESTful services out of the box, making it easier to connect desktop and mobile tools to enterprise applications. The Oracle SCM Cloud development team has switched all web services development to the REST model so customers can connect to their Cloud apps with less effort.
2. Lots of new web services. Oracle has evolved its application design and delivery practices to put web services at the heart of each product. As a result, dozens of new services are being published with each new release. For 18B, these include Meter Readings for Asset Management, Inventory Transfer Orders for Inventory Management, and Demand and Supply Plans for Supply Chain Planning, among many others.
3. New Oracle Cloud Platform for Oracle SaaS. This is a bundle of PaaS technologies specially tailored for Oracle SaaS customers. The Enterprise Edition includes Oracle Autonomous Integration Cloud and Data Integration Cloud, along with Visual Builder Cloud, Mobile Cloud, Developer Cloud, Identity Cloud and Autonomous Analytics Cloud. Basically, by licensing just one line item, you get a complete set of platform technologies to connect, extend, secure and analyze your supply chain.

So how will you make your Cloud your own? Considering Oracle SCM Cloud’s extensibility features, ever-growing library of REST services and Oracle Cloud Platform for Oracle SaaS, the sky’s the limit.