Yesterday, Oracle took a big step toward integrating its Demantra applications more tightly with JD Edwards EnterpriseOne. The software giant announced an integration between EnterpriseOne and Demantra Trade Promotions Management. The new offering will make it easier for consumer goods companies and retailers to manage trade promotions and forecast their impact on demand levels.

The latest announcement marks the second time that Oracle has forged links between EnterpriseOne and Demantra. Last year, the company shipped an integration between EnterpriseOne and Demantra Demand Management. That offering tied the demand forecasting tools in Demantra to the Material Requirements Planning (MRP) and financial modules in EnterpriseOne. While the Demand Management integration was a welcome offering, it did not deliver everything that Oracle’s retail and consumer goods customers needed. With their heavy reliance on promotions to move products, these companies require additional tools to predict how promotions will affect demand forecasts.

That is where the new offering — which goes by the long-winded name “JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Trade Promotion Management Powered by Oracle Demantra” — comes into play. The product establishes bi-directional data exchanges from EnterpriseOne’s Advanced Pricing, Sales Order Management, MRP, and Accounts Receivable/Payable modules to Demantra’s Predictive Trade Planning, Promotion Optimization, and Deductions and Settlement Management modules.

The Demantra modules do more than forecast the effects of promotions on demand. They can also analyze a nearly infinite number of promotion scenarios and recommend the best promotions to run based on the user’s objectives. Once the promotions are in place, the Deduction and Settlement module tracks and resolves deductions and other settlement methods used in the consumer goods industry. This information flows back into EnterpriseOne’s financial modules. Oracle has posted a data sheet to its web site that does a nice job of explaining the high-level linkages between the two products.

The new EnterpriseOne-Demantra integration is just part of a larger Oracle plan to integrate JD Edwards software with multiple applications in its portfolio and thereby extend their capabilities. As many of you know, we’ve been writing a series of articles about Oracle’s plans for transforming EnterpriseOne and World through such integrations. If you have not read this series, you can start by reading the first article in the series or by clicking on the links at the end of this article.

Integration between JD Edwards EnterpriseOne and Demantra Trade Promotion Management is available immediately. It requires the use of EnterpriseOne 8.12 and Oracle Demantra 7.2. I’m checking with Oracle to see if it has plans to “back cast” support to earlier releases and will report back with anything I learn on that front.

Related Articles

The Transformation of JD Edwards Applications II: Part One
The Transformation of JD Edwards Applications II: Part Two
The Transformation of JD Edwards Applications II: Part Three

Advertisement