Acuity Brands Lighting, the world's largest manufacturer of lighting fixtures, credits its long-standing relationship with Oracle Consulting as one of the compelling reasons the company has been so successful with its system implementation, upgrading, and maintenance decisions over the last eight years. The company first took advantage of Oracle's consulting services when it purchased Oracle Financials in 1999, and now the firm is looking to the future and Oracle Fusion, which Acuity believes will offer critical extensibility and functionality. Recent acquisitions of Siebel and PeopleSoft mean that the Oracle Consulting team is working to train customers to manage their own systems and to implement, maintain, and update their own software. However, the team will still provide traditional consulting services. Acuity's strategy mimics the same plans and goals by emphasizing a real understanding of Oracle functionality and becoming self-sufficient. Acuity made a decision in 2001 to purchase Oracle E-Business Suite, standardize on it, and convert all its businesses, platforms, and application suites to Oracle. Now, the firm is in an excellent position to benefit from the possibilities inherent in Oracle Fusion.

As Published In November 2006

Meeting Challenges Hand in Hand
By Jill Bentley

Acuity Brands Lighting handles relations with Oracle Consulting with ease.

Very few businesses can look back over eight years of system implementation, upgrades, and maintenance and feel confident that they made all the right decisions, but the Lighting division of Acuity Brands can do just that. Acuity Brands Lighting, in Atlanta, Georgia, is the world's largest manufacturer of lighting fixtures, and it operates the most advanced supply chain management and sales fulfillment processes in the industry. The company's relationship with Oracle began in 1999 when they purchased Oracle Financials.

"One of the compelling reasons for going with Oracle wasn't just the software; it was also the consulting services that we were going to get along with it," says Pat Quinn, Acuity Brands Lighting's vice president of information systems and technology.

Changing Times

In the past, when a company brought in consultants, the engagement was often very long-term, the consultants seemingly becoming fixtures at the customer site. For Oracle, that model has changed, partly as a result of financial considerations—after all, maintaining a team of consultants onsite is an expensive proposition. But it has also changed because the goal of Oracle's North America Consulting team has changed. While continuing to provide traditional consulting support, Oracle's consulting teams are now tasked with bringing the customer base to value as quickly and efficiently as possible: to get in, complete the assignment, and get out. And they do this by training customers to implement, maintain, and update their own software and manage their own systems.

Added to this, the recent Oracle acquisitions of PeopleSoft and Siebel have resulted in the broadening and diversification of Oracle's customer base. As a result, Oracle is focusing its development resources on initiatives such as Oracle Fusion and Applications Unlimited, and it's counting on Oracle Consulting to provide customers with the support they need to implement, update, and maintain the new technology.

Says Quinn, "Our strategy is to really own Oracle, to understand it functionally and technically, and to be somewhat self-sufficient." Clearly, the plans and goals of Acuity Brands Lighting match Oracle's new consulting model, and this has led to a strong relationship between the two companies. "From the beginning, we had in mind that Oracle Consulting would bring in a project team and we would learn from them what to do, how to set up and execute a project, and how to do it right so that over time, we could become independent," notes Quinn. "The plan worked so well with Oracle Financials that we moved forward, bought the HR piece, and deployed that, too."

Snapshot Acuity Brands Lighting www.acuitybrands.com Number of employees: Approximately 6,500 Annual revenue: Approximately US$1.8 billion Oracle products and services: Oracle E-Business Suite 11.5.10, Siebel CRM On Demand, Demantra Spectrum, Oracle Database, Oracle Real Application Clusters Other products and services: Red Hat Linux, Dell Power Edge 6850 for the Oracle RAC nodes, Dell Power Edge 2850s (dual processors) for concurrent management and applications servers, EMC DMX1000

Good Times

The company's experiences proved to be so positive, in fact, that in 2001 Acuity Brands' Lighting division brought in Oracle E-Business Suite 11i to enable every aspect of their order fulfillment requirements. Once again, Oracle Consulting was part of the process. Quinn explains, "It was going to be a big project. We were going to convert all of our legacy systems over to Oracle and we knew we wanted the consulting team to help us learn how to manage that type of project. So we used them for program management, project management, and for the technical skill set. They were heavily embedded in our projects."

Over the course of a couple of years, however, as Acuity Brands Lighting's own technical staff started to understand the process, they took the best parts of what they had learned and made them part of their own deployment process. "We started to utilize less and less of the program management, project management, and technical skills," Quinn says. "We found we were using much more functional consulting, to learn how best to use an application or how to change our processes to use Oracle right out of the box."

With Oracle's development efforts now aimed at supporting the burgeoning customer base that has resulted from recent acquisitions, two strategic initiatives are getting a lot of attention. The first of these is Oracle Fusion, which was originally conceived as a means of taking the best of the various software suites Oracle now owns and providing a path for future development and implementation. It consists of three parts: Oracle Fusion Architecture and Oracle Fusion Middleware, both of which have already been rolled out and successfully implemented in a number of different accounts, and Oracle Fusion Applications, which is slated for release in 2008. The second initiative is Applications Unlimited, which is Oracle's commitment to continue to support software lines other than Oracle E-Business Suite, for those customers who wish to continue down the path they started when they purchased software from companies that have since been acquired by Oracle.

Looking at Fusion

"Because we made a decision, about four years ago, to buy Oracle E-Business Suite, standardize on it, and convert all of our businesses, platforms, and application suites to Oracle, Applications Unlimited doesn't have as big an impact on us," says Quinn. But he's excited about the possibilities inherent in Oracle Fusion.

"Oracle has purchased some companies that we already invested in," explains Quinn. "We were looking very seriously at G-Log before Oracle bought G-Log. Oracle just purchased Demantra—we already use Demantra and have just finished integrating it with Oracle. It required a lot of data syncing." But now that Demantra is part of the Oracle suite of products, Acuity Brands Lighting is looking forward to the next release. "We assume they'll be much better integrated. We won't have to manage the data synchronization and integration ourselves."

But it's the future of Oracle Fusion that holds the real promise for Quinn and his team. "Where Oracle Fusion has a very positive impact is the greater extensibility that we see with services," he explains. "Once we have an order in-house, we want all of the financial transactions related to that order, including manufacturing and sourcing, to be standardized on Oracle. We would need a compelling reason to buy a third-party application if Oracle already offers that functionality."

Quinn is confident that Oracle Fusion will also provide Acuity Brands Lighting with options for handling other aspects of its business. "Outside the four walls, we're presenting information to our customers, our partners, our suppliers, and so on. We may want different ways to do that, different ways to go to market, different ways to deal with the sales forces. We may or may not want to use Oracle-specific applications. But Oracle Fusion gives us a way to really integrate well with Oracle on the back end, and that will have a significant impact on how we decide to do things in the future."

A Real Partnership

For More Information Oracle Consulting Oracle Applications Oracle Fusion

So has it all been smooth sailing? According to Quinn, the Acuity-Oracle partnership has been one of synergy and mutual support. "We were a very early subscriber to the Oracle direction with Linux, Intel, and Oracle9i RAC [Real Application Clusters]. We experienced all the growing pains of that technology and there were some trying times, but we haven't had any really bad experiences." In fact, Acuity Brands Lighting is now in the process of converting its manufacturing systems to Oracle. "We have to continue to work with Oracle because we're dependent upon the applications and the technology stack. We certainly used Oracle Consulting as a major avenue of contact within the company, but we don't want to be just a buyer—we want to be a partner as well," says Quinn. So while Acuity Brands Lighting is providing feedback and support of Oracle's development efforts, Oracle is keeping Acuity Brands Lighting informed and up-to-date.

"We've gained a lot from the experience," says Quinn. "More and more, we are convinced that we made the right decision when we chose Oracle."

Creating Business Value In June of 2005, Eileen McPartland took charge of Oracle's North American Consulting group. An industry veteran with more than 15 years of experience in consulting and building consulting teams, McPartland now leads a team of about 5,000 consultants. Oracle Consulting's primary goals are to help customers with their new implementations of Oracle products, work with customers who are upgrading, and provide ongoing service for their configured systems. In a recent interview with Profit, McPartland described her team's role as working with Oracle customers to help them define their business goals, optimize their investment, and plan for the future. Oracle Fusion, a suite of products encompassing Oracle Fusion Architecture, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle Fusion Applications, will play a major role in such a plan. "Oracle Consulting's mission is to enable our customers to realize significant business value from their Oracle investment," says McPartland. "Oracle Consulting is uniquely qualified for this as the premier services provider focused exclusively on the success of customers deploying Oracle technology and applications." This is what Oracle Consulting delivers through deep technology expertise and domain skills. The outcome is powerful: customers achieving measurable business results while minimizing the risk of deploying new products. "Our customer base falls into two groups: Those who want to purchase for the first time and those who want to expand their footprint and take advantage of Oracle's current suite of rich products," says McPartland. With the acquisitions of PeopleSoft, Siebel, and others, plus the announcement of Oracle Fusion—Oracle's vision for the next generation of enterprise technologies, applications, and services—many customers are asking what actions they should take regarding their future IT investments. To address this concern, McPartland and her team have developed a strategy they call the "Roadmap to Fusion," a collaborative program that harnesses the best minds across Oracle to take part in strategy sessions focused on solving customer-specific business problems and providing a customer-specific roadmap to next-generation technologies and applications. "Oracle Fusion Middleware is available today and already implemented at many sites," says McPartland. "It really comes into play when we do these strategy sessions because it's already possible to assist customers in integrating very diverse applications." But she points out that they don't start the process with the products or the technology. "We start by finding out why people are buying a product or why they are expanding the footprint. We're focusing on the business drivers, not the technology. For customers who are wondering what to do next, we'll use the program to help them decide. We help them understand what they should do next so that they have a strategic view." Through the program, customers learn how to take advantage of the benefits of Oracle Fusion Middleware now while getting a broader view of the benefits of eventually migrating to Oracle Fusion Applications, which is slated for release in 2008. "The most important message that I can give to our customers is that we're not asking them to make upgrades or investments in technology for the sake of the technology itself. Oracle is not forcing a company down one particular path," she explains. "Frequently we're finding that there are many things our customers can do while continuing to maintain the applications they have, and at the same time keeping an eye out for the benefits that can be realized through the Oracle Fusion Applications as they become available." A key element of customer success is Oracle's partner ecosystem. McPartland compares a successful project to a three-legged stool: one in which the customer, the partner, and Oracle are all engaged. The result of this collaboration, says McPartland, is consistently higher satisfaction among customers. "Oracle takes the lead from our customers," she explains. "Many customers request a combined-team approach and Oracle provides a meaningful part of that combined team but if a customer drives a solution from one provider, we will accommodate that need as well." As McPartland sums it up, "Whether deploying Oracle's rich, standards-based technology such as Oracle Fusion Middleware or Oracle Business Intelligence, or delivering enterprisewide business applications, Oracle Consulting delivers business results."