Tag: Procurement

Oracle Has Moved the SCM Redwood Deadline. Here’s Why You Still Need to Act Now

~ K8 Mead ~ Leave a comment

For many Oracle Fusion SCM customers, Tuesday’s announcement will have come as welcome news. The mandatory Redwood adoption deadline has moved from before 27A to before 27B, giving organisations approximately another three months to complete their transition. Oracle’s latest guidance now places mandatory adoption before 27B for most SCM products, rather than before 27A.

If you’ve been worried about fitting testing, change management, personalisation reviews and training into an already busy roadmap, that extra quarter will undoubtedly help. But if you’re interpreting this as an opportunity to pause your Redwood programme, I think that would be a mistake. The deadline has moved. The amount of work required has not.

The reality is that many customers have been asking for more time. Across Procurement, Inventory, Manufacturing, Order Management and other SCM modules, Redwood adoption isn’t simply a technical upgrade. It requires organisations to review processes, retrain users, validate extensions, revisit personalisations and test end-to-end business flows.

The additional quarter gives customers breathing space to do those activities properly rather than rushing to meet an arbitrary date. That’s a positive outcome. It also allows Oracle to continue delivering the final Redwood experiences and setup pages that are still being completed across parts of the SCM portfolio. Oracle’s recent communications highlight continued delivery of Redwood functionality alongside a growing catalogue of Redwood-only features and AI capabilities.

What the extension does not change is Oracle’s strategic direction. Classic remains on the retirement path. Redwood remains the future. A year ago, many conversations about Redwood in Supply Chain focused on colours, layouts and navigation. Today that feels increasingly outdated.

Almost every release introduces new capabilities that are built specifically for Redwood pages. Across Procurement and SCM, Oracle is investing heavily in AI Agents, Agentic Apps, enhanced analytics, intelligent search experiences and workflow automation that simply do not exist in classic pages.

Examples include:

  • Autonomous supplier research
  • Purchase order advisory agents
  • Sourcing Command Centre Agentic Apps
  • AI-assisted contract capabilities
  • Redwood-only procurement administration pages
  • Enhanced receiving approvals and workflows

These aren’t cosmetic improvements. They fundamentally change how users interact with Oracle Fusion SCM. The risk of delaying Redwood adoption is no longer just missing a compliance deadline. It’s falling behind on innovation.

Whenever I talk to customers about Redwood, I often hear concerns about profile options, configuration settings or deployment approaches. Those things matter. But they are rarely the hardest part. The bigger challenge is behavioural change.

Many organisations successfully enable Redwood but continue allowing users to navigate through familiar legacy pathways. Users naturally revert to what they know, training materials remain based on old screenshots, and business processes continue reflecting classic ways of working. The result is that Redwood becomes technically deployed but operationally underused. That’s important because many new capabilities assume users are operating within Redwood experiences. If users never fully transition, organisations struggle to realise the value Oracle is delivering.

One of the reasons Redwood projects are frequently underestimated is because the technical enablement is usually only a small part of the overall effort. The work that catches organisations out tends to include:

  • Reviewing existing Page Composer personalisations
  • Assessing extensions and integrations
  • Updating training materials
  • Revising support documentation
  • Testing business-critical scenarios
  • Running end-to-end process validation across multiple modules
  • Preparing suppliers and external users for interface changes
  • Supporting adoption after go-live

These activities take time. More importantly, they require availability from business users who are typically balancing day jobs alongside project responsibilities. An additional quarter definitely helps. It should not be wasted.

Interestingly, the organisations that benefit most from this timeline change probably won’t be the ones that slow down. They will be the ones that use the additional time strategically. Instead of rushing towards a deadline, they can:

  • Perform more comprehensive testing
  • Complete personalisation assessments properly
  • Validate role-based access thoroughly
  • Deliver stronger training and communications
  • Run pilots with business users
  • Resolve adoption challenges before they impact operations

Those activities reduce risk significantly more than simply delaying action for another three months.

Although Oracle has moved the mandatory deadline to before 27B, my recommendation remains largely unchanged. Plan for 27A. Deliver by 27A if possible. Use the additional quarter as contingency rather than scheduling your entire programme around it. Projects rarely run exactly to plan. Key resources become unavailable. Testing uncovers unexpected issues. New quarterly updates introduce further considerations. Competing priorities emerge. Organisations that reach readiness by 27A will have flexibility. Organisations that wait until the final possible moment may find themselves under pressure once again.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that Redwood was never supposed to be a simple compliance activity. Oracle’s long-term investment in user experience, automation, AI Agents and Agentic Apps is increasingly centred around Redwood. Every quarterly update widens the gap between what is available in Redwood and what remains available in classic experiences.

Yes, customers have gained another quarter. That is undoubtedly helpful. But the organisations that see the greatest benefit won’t be those that use the time to delay. They will be the ones that use the time to prepare properly, drive adoption effectively and put themselves in the best position to take advantage of everything Oracle is building next. The clock hasn’t stopped. Oracle has simply given you three more months to get it right.

Please note that all screenshots are the property of Oracle and are used in accordance with Oracle’s Copyright Guidelines.

Turning on AI in Fusion Procurement

~ K8 Mead ~ Leave a comment

While many organisations are still working out where AI can genuinely improve business processes, Oracle has been steadily embedding generative AI into Oracle Fusion Cloud Procurement. Some of these capabilities are already well established. Both the Procurement Policy Advisor and Supplier Portal Advisor have been available for around a year and are being used by many organisations to improve self-service, increase process efficiency and reduce support overhead. More recently, Oracle has introduced agentic applications such as the new Sourcing Command Centre, released in Oracle Fusion Cloud Procurement 26B, which moves beyond answering questions to actively identifying issues and recommending actions.

The result is not simply faster access to information. These capabilities are designed to reduce administrative effort, improve compliance, support better decision-making and help procurement teams focus on higher-value activities. Three innovations illustrate how Oracle is approaching AI in procurement today: Procurement Policy Advisor, Supplier Portal Advisor and Sourcing Command Centre.

One of the biggest frustrations for employees raising requisitions is finding the information they need. Questions about purchasing policies, approved suppliers, spending limits or equipment refresh cycles often result in searches through intranet pages, policy documents or calls to the procurement team. Oracle’s Procurement Policy Advisor addresses this challenge by providing answers directly within the Self Service Procurement experience. Users can ask questions in plain English and receive immediate responses based on their organisation’s procurement policies and supporting documentation. The capability is designed to provide seamless access to procurement policies while employees are ordering the products and services they need.

Whether an employee wants to know when they are eligible for a replacement laptop or which products can be ordered through approved catalogues, the information is available without leaving the requisition process. Importantly, responses are grounded in approved source documents, allowing users to see exactly where the information has come from. This helps build confidence in the accuracy of the advice while supporting consistent policy compliance across the organisation.

For procurement teams, the benefits are equally significant. By reducing repetitive policy queries and making guidance available at the point of need, organisations can improve the user experience while reducing demand on internal support teams. Oracle specifically highlights streamlined access to policy documents and improved compliance as key outcomes of the solution. As one of Oracle’s earlier procurement AI capabilities, Procurement Policy Advisor is already a proven and mature use case, giving organisations a practical way to deliver the benefits of AI without changing core procurement processes.

Suppliers often need support with routine activities such as invoice submission, payment enquiries or updating organisation details. While these requests may seem straightforward, they can consume significant amounts of time for procurement and accounts payable teams.

Supplier Portal Advisor extends Oracle’s AI capabilities to the supplier community by providing a self-service assistant within the Supplier Portal. Oracle describes it as a chat-based experience that answers policy, process and how-to questions directly within the application using an organisation’s own supplier support content. Rather than searching through documentation or contacting support teams, suppliers can receive immediate guidance within the portal. Organisations can tailor the advisor using their own supplier-facing documentation, policies, invoicing instructions and onboarding guidance, ensuring answers reflect their specific ways of working. This creates a more consistent experience for suppliers while reducing the number of routine enquiries that procurement and finance teams need to manage.

The value becomes particularly apparent for organisations with large supplier populations, where even a small reduction in support requests can deliver meaningful efficiency gains. Suppliers are able to resolve questions themselves, while procurement teams can focus their time on supplier relationships, sourcing activities and strategic initiatives rather than handling repetitive enquiries.

Like Procurement Policy Advisor, Supplier Portal Advisor is no longer a new concept. It has been available since 2025 and is already helping organisations extend AI-driven self-service beyond employees and into their wider supplier ecosystem.

While answering questions is valuable, Oracle’s Sourcing Command Centre takes AI a significant step further by helping sourcing teams identify risks, prioritise activities and take action more quickly. Unlike the Policy Advisor and Supplier Portal Advisor, which are now established capabilities, Sourcing Command Centre is a new addition introduced as part of Oracle Fusion Cloud Procurement 26B. Oracle positions it as an AI-powered agentic command centre where specialist sourcing agents continuously analyse negotiations, supplier participation and award readiness to identify risks, opportunities and recommended actions.

Organisations interested in adopting Sourcing Command Centre should also be aware that it sits within Oracle’s broader Agentic Applications strategy. Customers will need to license the Agentic Applications Platform before they can take advantage of the capability, making it important to understand both the business case and licensing implications as part of any evaluation.

Managing multiple sourcing events often requires buyers to monitor negotiations, track supplier participation, review timelines and assess award options across numerous screens and reports. Important issues can be overlooked simply because of the volume of information involved. Sourcing Command Centre brings these activities together into a single workspace. AI-generated summaries highlight negotiations that require attention and prioritise actions based on sourcing data and business rules. Oracle states that the solution surfaces negotiations needing immediate intervention, including events with low supplier participation, negotiations approaching close dates and sourcing activities awaiting award decisions.

Rather than simply identifying issues, the solution enables users to act directly from the workspace. Recommended actions can include extending negotiations, updating schedules, resuming paused events and communicating with suppliers without navigating elsewhere in the application. The Command Centre can also assist with award decisions by analysing supplier responses and recommending award scenarios. This enables sourcing teams to evaluate options more efficiently while maintaining visibility of how recommendations have been generated. Oracle highlights AI-recommended award actions, negotiation-specific analysis and the ability to apply recommended awards directly from the workspace.

For organisations looking to increase procurement productivity and accelerate sourcing cycles, this represents a significant shift. Rather than AI acting solely as an information assistant, it becomes an active participant in managing procurement processes and helping users drive outcomes.

Although these capabilities address different aspects of the procurement lifecycle, they share a common theme. The Procurement Policy Advisor and Supplier Portal Advisor focus on providing accurate, contextual answers based on an organisation’s own policies and documentation. Both have now matured into established capabilities that are delivering value in real-world implementations. Sourcing Command Centre builds on that foundation by helping procurement professionals identify priorities and take action. It represents Oracle’s next step towards agentic applications that can not only answer questions but also recommend and execute tasks within defined business controls.

Together, these innovations demonstrate Oracle’s practical approach to AI in Fusion Applications. Rather than replacing procurement professionals, they are designed to remove friction, surface relevant information at the right time and support more informed decision-making. For organisations using Oracle Fusion Procurement, AI is no longer an experimental technology. It is becoming an increasingly practical part of day-to-day procurement operations, helping employees, suppliers and sourcing teams work more efficiently while maintaining visibility, governance and control.

Please note all screenshots are the property of Oracle and are used according to their Copyright Guidelines