Zebra Technologies

Continued

The key to success lay in the realization that many of the processes managed by ERP applications are more about efficiency than competitive advantage. Keeping the software vanilla meant that the IT staff was freed from tedious maintenance chores on custom code—and that much of the support could be done by Oracle, leaving Zebra free to dedicate resources to IT innovation.

“We made a conscious decision to use resources on things that really help the business rather than using resources on the maintenance and support of what has already been implemented,” says O’Shea.

How successful has Zebra been at avoiding software customization in the ERP implementation? “We don’t even have an approval process in place for customization requests. We haven’t had a request yet, but we think you have to go to the board of directors to get approval for a customization,” says O’Shea. “If you go live with native products, 99 percent of the time you will be fine.”

Aiding in the success of the multiple implementations, Zebra has used the Oracle Support organization to ensure that all necessary resources throughout Oracle are queued up and moving in the same direction. “We’re impressed with the knowledge of the support teams,” says O’Shea. “They’re able to quickly rally the resources we need from across Oracle to ensure our go-lives are smooth.” Adds O’Shea, “Don Brown, our Oracle customer service manager, proactively brings us ideas and shares best practices to help things continue moving along a successful path. With his help, we’ve been able to ensure that projects rolled out on time with no schedule slips.”

The second big critical success factor had to do with linking new ERP modules with the legacy systems that would run concurrently until the ERP migration was complete. Manually mapping individual integration components would consume costly IT staff time for a short-term need, and the IT group did not want to take on the overhead of a middleware group. Instead, Zebra decided to let Oracle do the heavy integration work by leveraging Oracle Application Integration Architecture Foundation Pack.

“Integration and reporting is always the longest straw in a project,” says Hand. “This gave us the capability to remove the large risk of extending the project timeline, delaying benefits and creating more complexity.”

Oracle Application Integration Architecture Foundation Pack delivers a SOA-based programming model that utilizes the best practices and methodologies Oracle has developed in the creation of Oracle Application Integration Architecture’s process integration packs (PIPs). “Oracle originally focused on building the PIPs, but customers started asking us how we did certain things, or chose one approach,” says Oracle’s Lazares. “Certain customers, such as those with many disparate systems, must have more than the prebuilt process integration packs, and the Oracle Application Integration Architecture Foundation Pack gives them control of their own destiny by handing them our foundational programming approach.”

It also proved a fiscally smart move for Zebra, as the company purposely planned its three-year deployment to take advantage of the products coming from Oracle’s middleware framework. “Using Oracle Application Integration Architecture Foundation Pack saved a lot of time,” says Hand. “If we had taken the traditional route, we would have had to learn the components of middleware and do the mappings ourselves. I think it saved us about 60 percent of our time and costs, doing the integration work in about two months rather than four to six.”

Zebra was also able to do the work with a very lean team, because the company hired a small group of people who were deeply versed in Oracle and Siebel implementations. “We only have two people working on the service-oriented architecture, with a little offshore help when needed,” says Hand.