A Complete Customer View

Continued

Regal Beloit’s new BI solution was completed in just 75 days, thanks in part to the fact that the BI applications can tap the platform’s prebuilt integration with most Oracle E-Business Suite modules. The solution has delivered value on many fronts, says Sree. The company is able to integrate acquired businesses into its data architecture more easily and faster than before. Sales has more insight into customers and has become more responsive to customer needs. Accuracy has improved in everything from sales budgeting and forecasting to order shipments and cash flow management. And business unit IT expenses have been reduced thanks to consolidated reporting applications.

What’s more, what had been a burden on IT—the backlog of user requests for reports—has been removed. “Users don’t have to come to IT to create dashboards anymore,” Sree says. “They create them themselves.” Going forward, Sree plans to implement more Oracle Business Intelligence Applications and continue integrating data from other sources.

But Oracle Fusion Middleware is about more than BI. It’s about refining business processes, reducing errors, and increasing visibility. And Eaton Steel is capitalizing on all fronts. In addition to its BI project, the company has tapped Oracle Application Server Integration B2B, Oracle BPEL Process Manager, and an Oracle application adapter for Oracle E-Business Suite to create EDI transactions with customers and suppliers. Regal Beloit also is examining how to extend its Oracle E-Business Suite customer relationship management module with Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle BPEL Process Manager, with the goal of enabling customers to submit and manage their own help desk tickets.

Because Eaton Steel already has a customer portal, the help desk ticket project has been put on hold until the economy improves, but the EDI effort has flourished. Eaton Steel sells steel to giant service centers that in turn sell to companies that use the steel in a variety of products. Those service centers want a snapshot of Eaton Steel’s inventory that they can share with their own salespeople and customers, providing a real-time view of the entire supply chain. Eaton Steel didn’t have a simple way to make this happen. Instead, staff had to write custom code to deliver inventory advice transmissions. The resulting manual workload was bogging down employees and resulting in too many errors. At the same time, Machak and the IT team were getting more requests from business partners who wanted to execute purchase orders, sales orders, and other transactions using EDI.

As Eaton Steel deployed key Oracle Fusion Middleware components, it started working through a list of EDI requests, automating transactions one by one. First it enabled sales orders via EDI for one of its service centers, which has allowed the salesperson managing that account to use Oracle E-Business Suite to quickly verify and book orders rather than spending time manually inputting data into the order management system.

EDI capacity for other business partners followed, and Machak says his team is poised to bring more suppliers into the loop. Several customers want to automate submission of sales orders, and they’ve been added to Eaton Steel’s to-do list of EDI projects. The result is that Eaton Steel and its suppliers are cutting significant time on all sorts of processes, from purchasing to accounts payable. “Our goal is to have all of our raw materials vendors submit their invoices electronically,” says Machak.

What Eaton Steel and Regal Beloit have accomplished with the aid of Oracle Fusion Middleware is what companies around the world are searching for in these lean economic times. It’s about liberating employees from manual tasks that don’t contribute to the bottom line. It’s about empowering them with information, not saddling them with it.

“We want people to be able to use information, not process information,” says Machak. “That way they can spend their time on the real value-add, which is dealing with customers.”

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