Doing More with Less

Continued

Barrett says that Oracle E-Business Suite software was easy to install using an outside consultant. Ongoing technical support is handled internally with a little help from Blue Gecko, a third-party DBA support team, he says.

"Blue Gecko helps apply patches. And it's nice having access to folks who know a little more about the database side of things," he says. "We're a small operation—we had three people before the implementation and only one during the implementation. Now we have two, so it's nice having a backup system there." And Oracle is there for the company too, says Barrett.

"It's not uncommon for Oracle to come visit us. We're not exactly a huge shop. But it's not just a phone call; it's people coming onsite, looking at our situation and talking to us."

Turning On the Power

Sashi Kumar, chief information officer for Su-Kam Power Systems, based in Haryana, India, says that he felt the same way about the challenges facing his company. Before they started working with Oracle, he didn't know how his four-person IT staff was going to be able to upgrade its infrastructure so that the company, which is India's biggest manufacturer of power inverters and power supply products, could continue to grow.

Su-Kam, like Sage and Life Data Labs, was chugging along with pieced-together software programs and manual processes for its financial and inventory management as well as customer service and ordering. The company's first challenge was figuring out what they could use to replace each. This is where Oracle Business Accelerators made a huge impact, helping Kumar identify key business flows and figure out which software modules would work best and what implementation strategy to employ.

"Oracle helped us create a document that detailed what we really needed and how the organization would benefit from each product," says Kumar. "This was very beneficial because today it is very difficult for any IT head or CIO to get budget approval, so having a document that showed exactly what we needed and why was important."

Where Small Is Big

Software aside, one of the most surprising aspects of Sage's implementation, according to Barrett, was the personal attention his company received. When Barrett was considering upgrading to Oracle Discoverer as well as the latest version of Oracle Database (Oracle Database 10g), he wasn't sure that the company's hardware could handle it and scale effectively. He posed the question to Oracle's developers and within hours had his answer. Postimplementation attention didn't wane, he says. Even after the software was installed, Barrett was able to go to Oracle's support team with a list of questions and get answers quickly. And Barrett could ask about more than just the IT side of things.

Case in point: the company offers its customers a lifetime warranty on fly rods. If they break a piece off, they can send them back for repair. Merging warranty processes into the company's order system wasn't easy. At first, Sage simply made modifications, but they didn't allow true integration with the Oracle system. Oracle was able to go in and suggest a better way to manage customer needs, says Barrett.

"When asked about how we could improve the warranty process, the folks from Oracle suggested that we explore several different solutions. They suggested we use the Order Management module with Assemble-to-Order and set up some limited number of warranty SKUs [stock keeping units] that would have alternate BOMs [bills of material], which would allow us to keep a similar business process while utilizing the full capabilities of Oracle E-Business Suite. The continual follow-up and interaction that we've had from Oracle folks in the area, in our region, has been definitely beyond what I would expect from a company of Oracle's size," Barrett says. "They're great resources for us to interact with, and they provide us with good insight. They care about what we're doing; they care about us as a customer."