Customer service is critical to Spirent Communications, which supplies sophisticated diagnostic tools and services for telecom network service and equipment providers. The firm points to its ability to function as a unified company to serve the unique regional requirements of customers, even though Spirent's 1,700 employees are dispersed in 30 countries in America, Europe and Asia. Read how the focused communication company depends on a tightly integrated mix of enterprise applications built mainly with JD Edwards enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, Oracle Database, and Siebel customer relations management (CRM) applications. Spirent used to struggle to integrate the platforms into a cohesive whole. However, now that all are available from Oracle, the firm spends less time on integration and more on achieving cost benefits from centralized marketing, financial, and human resource services. Another benefit is that Spirent can also focus on eliminating IT duplication. Spirent finance director Eric Hutchinson reports that integration has allowed his company to support fewer systems, so the firm can invest more dollars in taking care of customers and in product development.

As Published In August 2006

Need to Know
By Alan Joch

Spirent Eases Integration Tasks with Oracle, JD Edwards, and Siebel.

Stay close to your customers. It's a best practice that all successful companies strive to achieve. It's also something that's often easier said than done, especially if your company has thousands of global customers.

That's certainly the case for Spirent Communications, a Rockville, Maryland-based supplier of diagnostic tools and services for telecom network equipment and service providers and a five-year-old subsidiary of U.K.-based Spirent plc. Spirent's US$400 million in revenues comes largely from its ability to anticipate the communications industry's adoption of new networking technologies—such as IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), Wideband Code-Division Multiple Access (WCDMA), and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)—and then provide the right testing tools when customers need them. "As our customers develop next-generation products, they're using our equipment to test that they work," says Eric Hutchinson, Spirent's director of finance.

An additional challenge is making Spirent's 1,900 employees in 30 countries throughout Asia, Europe, and the Americas appear as a single, unified company. To do this, Spirent relies on a tightly integrated combination of applications built primarily with JD Edwards enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, Siebel customer relationship management (CRM) applications, and Oracle Database. Tying these platforms together into a cohesive whole used to be an integration nightmare. But now that they're all available from Oracle, Spirent can spend more time eliminating IT duplication and reaping the cost benefits of centralized financial, marketing, and human resources (HR) services.

Snapshot Spirent Communications, plc www.spirentcom.com Location: Rockville, Maryland Revenue: US$470 million, FY 2005 Employees: 1,900 Oracle products and services: Oracle9i Database Release 9.2; JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 8.11; Siebel Sales Force Automation, Call Center, Data Quality, eService; Oracle Premier Support

"Prior to Oracle offering these platforms under a single umbrella, there was too much duplication among the sites. But now our system enables us to support a shared-services model with central administration of core services, such as HR and finance, to reduce costly personnel and IT redundancies," Hutchinson explains. "We have a global financial organization as well as global human resources, corporate marketing, and IT organizations. We now support fewer systems, which in turn allows us to invest more of our dollars in product development and taking care of our customers."

Shared Services Benefits

Spirent Communications consists of three divisions—Broadband, Service Assurance, and Wireless and Positioning. Through these divisions, Spirent provides test and diagnostic systems. Its systems are involved in the conceptual stages of new technology development through the systems and services it provides to network equipment manufacturers (NEMs) such as Alcatel, Cisco, and Nortel to ensure conformance and performance of their products. In addition, service providers such as British Telecom, China Telecom, and Verizon use these same systems in their validation labs. "We're seen as the impartial, neutral arbiter of the equipment's performance capabilities," Hutchinson says. Once service providers roll out new services using the networking gear from the NEMs, Spirent's service management solutions improve customer satisfaction by rapidly resolving customer complaints.

In the past two years, Spirent has transformed itself into a focused communications company with shared services such as HR, finance, and IT. As it has grown, Spirent has been able to avoid a commensurate increase in IT costs and personnel. "We've been able to support the transformation because these divisions are using the same systems," Hutchinson says. The Wireless division runs Oracle's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 8.11 Manufacturing, Financial Management, and Human Resources Management modules, as well as Oracle's Siebel's CRM software.

"When our technology solution was rolled out to the Wireless division, the company spent relatively little implementing it because the infrastructure had already been built," Hutchinson says. "The Wireless division managers used about 85 percent of the existing architecture, adjusting for some differences in products and the way the division sells them. On the HR and finance sides, the systems are completely standard."

And rather than spending 18 months or so building those core systems from scratch, the Wireless division needed only about four months for implementation, he adds.

Back-End Integration

Consolidation and productivity improvements are widely held objectives with no guarantees for success at large companies. For Spirent, the JD Edwards/Siebel/Oracle platform is the key building block to being a unified company to its customers and an integrated shared services operation behind the scenes.

Spirent has been using each of the products for at least five years and is now pleased to see them all under Oracle's technology tent. "With the acquisitions by Oracle, I'm feeling pretty good about life right now," Hutchinson says. That's because integrating these applications had previously required custom-written interfaces that Hutchinson calls "the most fragile part" of the overall system. "We spent as much if not more money on the integration as we did on the software itself," he notes.

Real Gains

Because Spirent is still rolling out the JD Edwards/Siebel/Oracle combination to additional corporate facilities, Hutchinson says it's too early to fully measure the return on investment. Nevertheless, he says, concrete benefits have already materialized.

"For the first time, we have orders being booked into one central database with all of our order history and all of our order transactions. That provides many benefits for reporting as well as providing a consistent approach to our markets in each location," Hutchinson observes.

Centrally storing order and product data in one database means better business analytics. "Not long ago, it took us ages to work out who our top-10 customers were," Hutchinson says. "Now our IT team is developing performance dashboards that will give us that information up-to-the-minute so we understand our business globally." Similarly, by consolidating HR systems for its 1,900 worldwide employees, Spirent is now seeing a consolidated view of its workforce and benefits programs. Savings from eliminating redundant systems is another plus. "We're currently setting up a more consolidated finance organization where we'll have one payroll organization for North America instead of four or five different payroll functions," Hutchinson says.

The IT department has realized efficiencies because fewer resources are needed to maintain a variety of legacy ERP and CRM applications, now that Spirent manages those areas centrally. In addition, Spirent's recent upgrade to JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 8.11 from JD Edwards EnterpriseOne XE enabled the company to move to Linux servers, which have proved a significant cost savings over its old Sun Solaris-based servers. Hutchinson estimates that eliminating Solaris service contracts alone cut IT expenses from US$250,000 a year to about US$10,000 a year for all of the servers that now run JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 8.11.

Hutchinson credits the expertise of Oracle's support services organization with smoothing the ongoing implementation and integration tasks. "Support from Oracle was a key concern for us, as PeopleSoft had just been purchased by Oracle when we made the decision to upgrade to JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 8.11," Hutchinson recalls. "The support has been the highest quality, and they've really held our hand through the implementation process and beyond."

Overcoming Roadblocks

Although Spirent is seeing success with its consolidation program, the company had to first overcome some tricky hurdles, both cultural and technical. Cultural change takes time. Hutchinson says that strong top-down leadership, beginning with CEO Anders Gustafsson, overcame the initial "not invented here" skepticism and aversion to change. "That enabled us to really roll out these projects quickly," Hutchinson adds.

Hutchinson believes that for initiatives like the company's shared-services strategy to be successful, the IT department can't "own" the systems that make centralization possible. "You have to have somebody outside IT who says, 'This is our system; we're going to drive it,' and the IT organization is the enabler," Hutchinson asserts.

Technology also played a role. "The systems must be adaptable enough to make people feel like they do own them and that the software can do those small things that the local sites want," Hutchinson says, such as allowing each division to specify longer or shorter lead times, depending on individual products. "Siebel and JD Edwards do those things very well."

Looking Forward

Hutchinson believes that the biggest savings will come in the years ahead, in particular through supply chain efficiencies. "When we have a single supply chain, we reduce our number of vendors and supply paths. We can also gather better performance information to use when we negotiate new contracts with our vendors. Those are big wins for us, and they're starting to happen now."

For More Information Oracle Business Integration Oracle Applications

Also on the to-do list is the complete rollout of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne's manufacturing and distributing modules, which are now running at the two U.S. manufacturing sites. So as Spirent presents a single face to customers, orders actually travel multiple routes to completion depending on which manufacturing site is most efficient for a particular order. "As far as most customers are concerned, when they place an order in Asia or in Europe, the products come from the local office in Hong Kong or Paris," Hutchinson explains. "There are obviously a lot of transactions behind the scenes to handle all the intercompany orders, shipping activities, and invoicing. We have to make sure we're addressing the needs of each region and that we've got all of our documentation. JD Edwards EnterpriseOne allows us to automate all of that, and that's a unique benefit to that product."

The success Spirent has experienced so far leaves Hutchinson feeling confident about the future, especially as he eyes Oracle Fusion—Oracle's next-generation platform. "Some of the biggest advantages for us will be no longer having to maintain the custom integration between our Oracle, JD Edwards, and Siebel solutions. I like what I see on the road map. Ultimately, it's great news for Spirent."