Infosys-Oracle Blog

'Flexible and Extensible' is one of the key differentiator for Oracle in Enterprise Applications market space. Despite providing rich out-of-the box functionality and edge products, Oracle also offers variety of tools and methods to personalize or customize the vanilla solution to meet the industry specific unique business requirements. Admittedly, it is sometimes reasonable and worthwhile to customize the ERP to address the specific gaps and meet strategic objectives of the implementation, however these customizations come with their own cost - Increased TCO, Painful and expensive upgrades to newer versions, Ongoing maintenance challenges, No support from Oracle for customized application, need for scarce ERP technical resources to maintain custom code and many more.

With a mature ERP market, today CIOs, CTOs and ERP Program Managers understand the costs and impacts of highly customized ERP software. They all start out with the intent to standardize business processes and implement vanilla ERP, however mostly still end up with huge customized ERP. Many obvious reasons for customizations seem to be legitimate in short term. However, organizations negate here the key long term benefits and overall objectives of an ERP implementation, including Standardization, Adopting industry best practices, Extensibility of functionalities and common process definitions. Therefore, an organization needs to take decision on allowing any custom code development diligently and question it very strongly.  So, the puzzle is "What are the right keys to unlock the success to achieve lower TCO and become lean by minimizing the customizations in Oracle ERP implementation?"

For more on this space, remain tuned for my next blog in which I discuss the questions raised above and more...Do write back if you have any questions or feedback!

Posted by Nikhil Kumar at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Some of the key reasons causing User Adoption issues are:

• Most of the ERP programs are large business driven process transformation initiatives, which have an impact, direct or indirect, on the entire end user community. With the varied skill sets of end users, the conventional approach of system based training does not meet all the needs
• These implementations bring numerous changes in business processes across departments like Finance, HR, Manufacturing, Sales, Distribution and many more, with a focus on standardizing operations with industry best practices. It also provides integrated solution comprising multiple applications underneath, primarily geared towards breaking existing silos, providing end to end process solutions, and empowering users with latest web based tools and technologies, thus bringing in more accountability and higher expectations from end users. These result in significant changes to user day-to-day tasks and system interactions as compared to legacy applications that have been their tool for years
• Given a choice, no one likes Change, and with the complexity of an ERP, change brings more anxiety
• Traditionally, organizations have either underplayed end user training aspect or focused only on system based training approach during implementation, which lacks in business depth and does not have the flexibility to meet the varying needs of the end users
• Albeit ERP implementation methodologies have training as key activity and deliverable, it does not offer a robust framework for role based and process focused approach of training aligned with business needs and objective of overall implementation program
• To add to the woes, sometime training is not even a part of organization change management and communication strategy, and left to system integrators to provide basic system training to power users and SMEs

All this leads to an unprepared organization performing ad-hoc refresher trainings and one to one mentoring of users post go-live. User system adoption rate can be extremely low unless end user training is a focus area of implementation right from the word GO!!!

Training, as simple as it may sound, is a complex piece of the puzzle which has to be treated with as much vigor as the rest of the ERP program elements. It is as important as the development of a complex solution design for accounting process or the testing of application. Today, the organizations are outlining higher budgets towards training. Analysts and independent researchers point the budgets are even getting higher than traditional 4 to 5% to the range of 10-12% of their total ERP budget. However, if this budget is not executed effectively, with a robust training strategy geared towards user adoption and sustenance, then this small percentage has a capacity to turn down the other 90% into a written-off investment.

In my next blog, I'll continue to expand this much debated topic and move to strategies that can effectively mitigate issues arising because of the lack of end user training and adoption.

Please write back with comments to share your experiences on ERP training, innovative training practices, tools and frameworks.

Posted by Nikhil Kumar at 5:29 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 2 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Generally Utility industry  get mostly affected due to Natural Calamities as  they have huge number of Assets /Equipments installed in the field which are open to sky e.g. Transmission Towers, Transformers etc . Most of the Utility Organizations these days are looking for some sort of solution /help for Disaster Management from any ERP/Asset Maintenance system.

There are two things which can be done using an Enterprise Asset Management during Natural Calamities/Disaster

1)      Avoiding  Equipments/Assets  failures  as much as possible

2)      Better way to manage the Natural Calamities for quick recovery from Damages

Case 1:- Avoiding Equipments/Assets failures as much as possible

Most of the time we read in the news paper that there is blackouts due to tree fall on electric over head cables/ transformers, Pump house Motor Burnt due to short circuiting by rain water these are the few common causes of failures in utility industry which are known to maintenance staff and failure due to such reason could be avoided and eventually huge repair cost can be reduced.

Following are the few pain areas faced by Utility industry (having no Asset Maintenance Management system) to avoid the losses due to known causes of failure ,take a example of performing Preventive maintenance activity of Tree cutting well ahead of rainy season to avoid Power Failures and pain areas to execute it

1)      There is no automatic system generated reminders or Preventive maintenance jobs generation, outcome is high chances of slippage on Preventive work

2)      There is no readily available information on requirement of  spares parts ,equipments/tools ,Standard operating Procedure  to carry out the Preventive activities this leads to delay in work execution

3)      There is no proper  mechanism to note down the failures based on Key words , same failure may be written differently by different maintenance crews ,outcome is No proper logging  of  failures based on the keywords  which leads to improper failure Analysis, cause, frequency of failure etc and hence no Preventive measure 

4)      There is no quick way of finding the pending Preventive maintence  jobs bases on the Equipment ( Transformers, HT Cables etc) criticality, Area, Work Priority the outcome is Preventive work  review is not effective and may missed some high priority activities

5)      No mechanism to simulate the manpower requirement using resource loading which leads to uneven work load on the exiting manpower and hence Preventive work may remain pending

6)      Most of the Divisions work in isolation as there is no integrated system and they might have solution/best practices  to avoid failures and as a result only few divisions can get benefited and solution remains local , rest organization  may struggle to find the solution to avoid the failures

7)      No quick and accurate reports e.g. cost of PM maintenance Vs Cost of repairs during Natural Calamities for all avoidable failures e.g. Transformer Failure due to Tree fall as result difficult to convince top management and delay/no  fund approval for the PM activities

How Oracle Enterprise Asset Management System (eAM) helps to overcome above pain areas 

1)       In Oracle eAM preventive maintenance activities  can be defined  based on the OEM recommendation and using vast organization's maintenance  man-hours experience and linked to Assets/Equipments  .For these activities Preventive Maintenance (PM) are  defined  which generate Preventive jobs(Work Orders) automatically  based on  frequency  as per PM definition

2)      Each standard Preventive maintenance activity can have details like spares required, type of skilled manpower required(Resources), list of tools required  as an attachment  .All these details gets defaulted from Activity to the Preventive maintence jobs thus ease the work of maintence team they need not required to keep

3)      Using Failure analysis functionality each failure can be categories using ,Failure code, cause codes, resolution codes and all the failures can be analyzed using  these failure codes , Mean time between Failures (MTBF) and additional Failure why why analysis can be capture using Quality collection plan functionality

4)      Various reports can be generated from Oracle eAM for the better manning the work based on the type of Equipment ( Transformers, HT Cables etc) , its criticality, Area, Work Priority etc

5)      Using Schedule workbench functionality resource load based on Department, Area, Period can be simulated for the for routine and Preventive maintenance jobs  so better resource planning and utilization

6)      Oracle eAM is integrated system and  best practices can be shared across organization through  functionalities like Best Preventive maintenance Activities, procedures   and its frequency , standardized failure codes across the organization to analyses data at the organization level

7)      Quick and accurate reporting can be done based on various cost analysis based on the requirement as failure codes are associated with the jobs and each job incurred cost so generating cost analysis  reports based on the requirement is easy and quicker which helps to convince top management and faster funds approval for Preventive maintenance  activity

Cases2:- Better way to manage the Natural Calamities for quick recovery from Damages

In utility industry it is not possible to avoid all the failures during disaster and disaster comes without warring or we may not be able to capture the signals given by nature before such disaster but we can be prepared to manage it in proper way for faster recovery to minimize losses. For e.g. Transmission Towers which fall during cyclone due to various reasons and some time cannot be avoided, in such situation some alternative arrangement has to be made e.g. temporary installation of mobile tower to restore Power Transmission quickly.

Following are the few pain areas faced by Utility industry having No ERP/ Maintenance Management system while Disaster management

1)      Non availability of critical alternative material /equipment  to restore the system on time leads to delays in restoration process and thus accumulating in losses

2)      No faster data available/visibility from other divisions on the availability of such material /equipment with them so delays in making material available to the required division /region

3)      Non availability of skilled manpower  on time 

4)      Non availability of critical documents like drawing /circuit diagrams /layout maps/Site access approach directions  on time

5)      Delay or Non availability of  historical data to tackle the problems faced in such situation in the past  ,standard operating procedures of special equipments, check lists, contact details of OEM, Contractors

How Oracle Enterprise Asset Management System (eAM) helps to overcome above pain areas 

1)      Oracle eAM is tightly integrated with Oracle inventory management system, by using Mim-Max planning critical spares can always be maintain at each stores, using other features like substitute items spares can be managed in case of emergency

2)      Oracle eAM has feature of standard activity to which required spares ,manpower, details tasks as operations and its sequence and dependencies can be created  also  SOP, drawings , check list can be attached  such activities can created for Disaster Managements

3)      Maintenance team can be prepared to manage disaster just by creating a works order from a disaster management activities and all the required skilled manpower, spares , drawing ,check lists would get defaulted to the WO form standard activity and by clicking just one button on work order system automatically show the on hand  quantities  of the all the material , even from the same work order the availability of spares in other divisions can be seen so in case any critical spare requirement it can be asked form other divisions

Oracle eAM maintain the historical data and it can be searched based on user requirements like key words, Assets , zone wise, type of problem etc and historical data can be referred as knowledge management

Posted by Abhijit Talokar at 5:54 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Financial Regulation is just around the corner, as we try to recover from a near financial collapse one thing is clear that regulation will be become tighter. This is quite similar to the efforts around accouting standards after the collapse of Enron, Worldcom, Tyco and other firms. The Sarbanes Oxley Act was passed in 2002 to address that issue. Most organizations undertook immedate measures to comply to these regulations. Each industry has had its challenges in adopting these.

Retailers in particular have a unique challenge in terms of their financial landscape. Most of their accounting data is spread across at least two sets of systems, Corporate Accounting has to reconcile expense/capital procurement through traditional Oracle/PeopleSoft based applications, and merchandise/trade procurement and liabilities through Oracle Retail/legacy applications. This dichotomy of systems meant that any product for Governance, Risk and Control needs to span across these two sets of systems.

Oracle's acquisition of Logical apps two years ago, created a strong software for GRC automation and intelligence. Compared to Oracle's internal controls manager which was the only application avaiable for implementing controls, GRC Manager gives a much wider array of automating the entier GRC needs of an organization.

Two things make this the right time for embarking on GRC automation, the need for regulation has never been higher and implementing such a product gives the entire top management a greater degree of confidence in managing governance, risk and controls. The ability to proactively identify conflits in segregation of duties and resolve them in real time is a very compelling reason for any organization on jump on the bandwagon.

Two, the product offering from Oracle has matured where it is creating the right solution for a Retail organization by automating across platforms and also integrating intelligence. With Oracle creating a holistic offering of products for retailers, the merchandising as well as the expense business operations can be supported on Oracle products.  This makes the integration of the Oracle GRC product that much easier.

 Oracle GRC might be the right product at the right time to hit the market and with R12 upgrades lot of organizations should evaluate this as part of their R12 strategy.

Posted by Venu Kotamraju at 11:27 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

In today's competitive marketplace, companies need to quickly adapt and evolve to changing business needs. Therefore, to build, deploy, and sell more complete solutions we can now leverage Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA). AIA is a complete integration solution for orchestrating agile, user-centric business processes across enterprise applications. It enables you to simplify cross business process-based integrations across Oracle, third-party and custom applications using a standards-based, pre built integration solution. AIA framework offers many prebuilt components which help in accelerating development, deployment, reusability and configurability of business processes.

One of the prebuilt solutions facilitating rapid integration development is AIA Foundation Pack. It provides a jumpstart for developers to develop their own integrations using Oracle's enterprise objects, services and programming methodology. It comprises of the following components implementing SOA:

• Reference Process Model:  Provides application independent business process models that act as a blueprint for driving top-down business process mappings from roles, tasks and activity levels down to the system level.

• SOA Governance and Lifecycle Management Tools: Business process change control tools that help users to manage, maintain and optimize their integration from design - to - run-time

• Predefined Reference Architecture and Methodology :Oracle's documented approach to implementing a proven service-oriented architecture (SOA).

It is a complete, open and prebuilt integration solution that allows users to integrate and consolidate applications and middleware technologies on a standardized integration backbone.

Another component of AIA Framework accelerating delivery and time to market is pre-integrated service packs- PIPS. Process Integration Packs(PIPs) are an out of box collection of services to manage key business processes like order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, etc. enabling greater efficiencies, an increased competitive edge and lower total cost of ownership. It provides customers with pre- integrated business process for the rapid implementation without risk.

AIA also offers testing tools like Composite Application Validation System (CAVS), which not only help during testing but also allows developers to mitigate development issues by identifying integration gaps prior to System Integration testing phase, thereby reducing risks involved. It enables users to test integration web services without having to deploy participating applications.

The AIA Error Handling Framework comprises of prebuilt solution for managing errors across the Integration Layer. It can internally handle any error rising in AIA Layer and also route the error back to correct application with appropriate error details. This helps in quick resolution of exceptions with less downtime and IT can meet the stricter service level agreements that businesses need to compete in the global marketplace.

With all the above rich features under its umbrella, AIA provides a smart integration mechanism to automate and accelerate development and delivery of business processes across various applications running at multiple platforms seamlessly.

Do feel free to send in your comments.

Posted by Harsha Agarwal at 5:45 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Globalization has become inevitable in the current economic scenario. Banks need to expand their horizons and establish footprints in multiple geographies to cope up with the changes in the market and retain a competitive edge.  This trend has been compelling banks to revisit their Business Models and strategies to sustain growth and profitability.

Such Industry/ market factors and Management's vision play a crucial role in the determination of the Bank's organic and inorganic growth strategies, that in-turn necessitate changes to the business model and the systems supporting the same.

Think Globally -Need for Centralization or Consolidation of functions /processes

Banks need to think and act globally to remain competitive: They need to lower cost and improve performance by business consolidation, realize economies of scale, establish shared service center etc

What is Accounting Center of Excellence (ACE)?

Centralizing and consolidating accounting functions like invoicing, collections, period close at a central place on behalf of global entities within a banking organization is Accounting center of excellence. It is different from Shared Service center in the sense that it would be a cost center which would drive the common accounting and finance activities for all the entities within an organization

Objectives of ACE

a)      Meet diverse accounting and functional requirements from a global center

b)      Simplify financial operations

c)      Streamline Financial close processes

d)     Lower the cost of accounting and finance functions

e)      Streamline MIS and reporting

Activities in Accounting Centre of Excellence ACE

a)      Establish global accounting policies and processes

b)      Maintain global masters

c)      Simplify accounting operations by using common software and configurations

d)     Establish global reporting standards and processes

e)      Streamline period close process and reconciliation

How oracle R12 functionalities facilitate to establish ACE?

Multi org Access Control (MOAC) and Operating Units (OUs) security: The data segregation by operating units is a powerful security in eBusiness suite by creating a tight relationship between the functions a user can perform and the data that a user can process.

But in R12 this functionality is enhanced so that a single responsibility can be associated with multiple OUs. With MOAC, you can not only segregate your data by OU for security and local compliance but also enable certain users to work across multiple OU's using a single responsibility.

Sub ledger Accounting (SLA) enables parallel accounting with advanced journal line / account derivation rules that can be set up to comply with local and regulatory requirements but still using global masters. All accounting rules and policies can now be centralized and maintained in SLA engine

Ledger Sets are used to consolidate and manage ledgers, including period end processes, opening and closing of periods and running reports. A user can have access to multiple ledgers using a single responsibility to efficiently perform period end adjustments and period close processes like Revaluation, Consolidation etc

Legal Entities may share bank accounts over various operating units even though they may be governed by different tax jurisdictions.

Customer and supplier bank accounts are now in the TCA and can be shared.

Posted by Sachin Chitlange at 3:27 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

With ever increasing frauds being detected, a Governance, Risk and Compliance solution is no more a nice to have but an absolute necessity to address the challenges. Companies are now realizing the benefits of an investment which has the potential to yield phenomenal gains in the long run.

Before even delving into an IT solution, it is imperative to understand the needs around Governance, Risk and Compliance. A good starting point is to have your auditor look at your risk mechanism, governance issues, control mechanism. A strong foundation needs to be in place before we can think of an IT enabled solution.

Once we have built the foundation around segregation of duties, key data to be tracked, mitigating controls, the next step is to look at the OTC products available in the market and come up with a solution which works best for you. It may not be a 100% fit but 80% fitment is good enough to start with.

Though on financial terms, the investment may not result in immediate gains but in the long run it gives you a peace of mind which unfortunately is not quantifiable. Also the amount of time and money which goes in meeting these needs is huge if we do not have a workable solution in place.

Posted by Sandeep Chatterjee at 6:05 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Today most or nearly all of the organizations with a vision to stay ahead of the competition have industry specific ERP suite implemented. ERP packages and the best practices which packages bring in lead to an increased level of operational efficiency; this increased operational efficiency forms the very basis of a level playing field for various players in the industry, where each player is able to run on similar operational efficiency.

In my opinion amongst various players in an industry who have vision to be ahead of the rest and are able to extract operational efficiency from their respective ERP packages- it would be very difficult to establish a clear differentiation between them.

Question which then demands an answer is how to then bring in differentiators which would add that extra mile between a leader and competition. Let me restrict thoughts in this post on how to incubate differentiations via finance organization and not touch upon differentiation generating opportunities in procurement, sourcing and/or marketing and sales organization.

If we look at parameters with which a finance organization can be evaluated we can probably list down parameters such as - number of FTEs, finance cost, DSO, stringent control, lesser number of errors in invoices etc. We can also add planning horizon, granularity at which planning is done and ability to churn the data out for analysis as unique parameters.

Enterprise performance management has been repeatedly used as a proactive approach which for sure can deliver on the promises made around increased efficiency in finance organization. A EPM suite which would let the finance organization to exercise control on parameters listed above yet ensuring that there exists a tight integration between financial and operational planning models, increases accuracy of forecasts and improves planning horizons can be the right tool to accelerate the growth of organizations on move. Thus in world where we a level playing field of ERP enabled organizations right EPM suite would keep the leader ahead of rest of the pack.

Posted by Sameer Dwivedi at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Growing globally, organically or inorganically is the ultimate goal of any organization to adhere to the basic principle i.e. enhancing the enterprise value by satisfying all stakeholders.

One of the difficulties in operating globally is that different localizations, such as statutory and currency, complicate business operations since the business must comply both with global and local policies. Back office ERP systems are supposed to provide support to meet global challenges. However, complexities that result from global operations are still a major hassle, and there comes a decision point when a business must evaluate its current systems and determine if changes / upgrade to the current systems would be required.

Smart business owners know, that by planting the right seeds at right time, their companies can harvest a bumper crop later. By investing up front to upgrade their ERP applications to oracle R12, entities can mitigate various challenges today.

Posted by Sachin Chitlange at 8:03 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )

Posted by Anjani Devi Badri at 8:07 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 ) | TrackBacks ( 0 )