Accelerating Success
Continued
Towers Perrin: Realizing Best Practices
Towers Perrin adopted Oracle Projects and several other Oracle E-Business Suite modules in response to its strong growth and competitive industry. Towers Perrin helps organizations improve performance through effective financial, risk, and people management and provides solutions in the areas of human capital strategy, program design and management, risk and capital management, and other areas. With offices and alliance partner locations around the world, Towers Perrin is a great example of a consulting firm that is growing worldwide.
Towers Perrin recently replaced its custom solutions for project accounting with Oracle Projects functionality. That adoption led in turn to a need to integrate the new system with some of the Oracle Financials functions that the company already had in place. Business Technology Services (BizTech), an Oracle Accelerate solution provider, participated in the project by using Oracle Business Accelerators for Oracle E-Business Suite to help support the stress testing and regression testing processes of both the upgraded functionality and the new installation.
Yvonne Cook, director of corporate technology at Towers Perrin, has praise for BizTech’s use of Oracle Business Accelerators. Towers Perrin is a longtime Oracle customer and had already decided to use Oracle’s applications to upgrade its processes before managers at the company learned about Oracle Accelerate. However, Cook notes, “This was a large and complex project. BizTech’s use of Oracle Business Accelerators helped us ensure that we weren’t missing any of the components in the Oracle E-Business Suite as we configured the system and conducted regression testing. The total project time was reduced because of BizTech’s ability to use the stress testing and regression testing scripts that Oracle Business Accelerators provide.” Today, the system is being used by everyone in Towers Perrin’s 6,000-strong workforce.
Margot McDonnell, vice president of sales and Oracle partner manager at BizTech, praises the content that is included in the Oracle Business Accelerators and considers it a key component of their Oracle Accelerate solution. In a traditional installation, she says, it can take weeks to model a company’s processes. “With Oracle Accelerate, within a week you have a system pilot. The questionnaire contains relevant content that helps partners define project dependencies. Partners are product and industry experts, but there is a lot of security for both the client and the partner in knowing that the right questions are being asked. Utilizing the questionnaire, it automatically takes care of those dependencies so you know that if you’re setting up something in accounts payable, then something affected in general ledger has already been identified. It saves partners a tremendous amount of time. We can get to a conference room pilot within a week or two, where before it might take a month or two.”
McDonnell says of the Oracle Accelerate model, “Oracle Accelerate is not just a marketing concept. It really helps implementers and clients get a handle on processes and the scope and cost of a project. Using this, we can start educating a client at the demonstration level, which is a very powerful experience for us and for the client.”
For More Information
Oracle for Midsize Companies
Oracle Partners for Midsize Companies
Patricia Waddington is a freelance writer based in Northern California.
