About the Client
Colorcon is a global provider of pharmaceutical technologies, specialty excipients, film coating systems, and related materials used across healthcare and nutrition markets. The business runs a make-to-order demand model, which means planning must respond closely to actual order patterns rather than rely on a simple make-to-stock setup.
Its operating environment is highly complex, with roughly 700 raw materials supporting more than 5,000 formula or recipe combinations.
Business Challenges
- Colorcon needed to strengthen planning and production scheduling in its dry dispersions business while staying aligned with a longer-term Oracle cloud direction.
- Batch consolidation, equipment assignment, and production sequencing were handled manually by an experienced planning team working around Oracle EBS. The process consumed most of the working week and created dependency on individual knowledge that existed nowhere in the system.
- Product master data in Oracle had drifted from operational reality over years. Planners had been adjusting scheduling decisions from experience every cycle, without documentation, without the business knowing.
- The Oracle EBS environment had to be preserved. A direct migration carried re-engineering effort and risk that was not justified at this stage.
- The real challenge was to automate planning now, surface what the manual process had been absorbing, and keep the long-term Oracle cloud direction intact without forcing a transformation the business was not ready for.
What We Did
- We started by understanding the planning reality as it actually ran, not as it was documented. A Day in the Life of a Planner session put Colorcon’s own Monday morning process live on a modern planning system, using their actual orders and formulations, in front of the planning team.
- We proposed a hybrid path: Oracle EBS stays unchanged, Oracle Fusion Cloud runs as the planning layer on top, connected through the platform’s own public APIs which remain stable through every quarterly update.
- A custom equipment assignment algorithm was built inside Oracle Fusion’s extension framework. It evaluates formulation type, batch size, resource availability, cleaning status, and ship date priority across all open orders simultaneously. Logic built inside the platform travels with every upgrade.
- Master data synchronises between EBS and Fusion on a two-hour cycle. Records with missing or incorrect attributes are flagged and held at the integration layer rather than passed into scheduling decisions unchecked.
- Deployment was structured as global design first, then phased rollout across sites, so core planning processes could be standardised while local complexity was managed in a controlled way.
Value Delivered
- 70% of planning tasks previously handled manually were automated, shifting the planning team from schedule execution to higher-value decisions.
- When automated planning ran against the Oracle product master, it surfaced data that had been silently corrected by planners for years. More than 20% of product records carried incorrect attributes that had been absorbed manually every planning cycle without documentation. Once corrected, more than 20% of tasks the team had assumed required human judgment were automated.
- Oracle EBS remained untouched. The integration has held through every quarterly platform update since go-live.
- Colorcon now has a planning function built on systems rather than on people, and a product master that reflects how the operation runs today.
- The engagement created a foundation for further deployment. Colorcon is expanding the Oracle Fusion planning layer to additional geographies.
Your planning team is correcting data errors your system has never flagged. Book a 30-minute review and we will show you exactly where and what it costs.