Ready to Go!

Continued

“It’s not just about speed in the midsize market; it’s also about relevance and quality during the implementation. With Oracle Business Accelerators, the risk goes down because there is a high level of consensus between what the customer wants and what the partner will implement. Our partners say they can get a fully functional conference-room pilot installed and up and running in as little as a few days,” Keever adds.

What’s important is that the software being installed isn’t a watered-down version of Oracle E-Business Suite. “We don’t have multiple code lines of Oracle E-Business Suite. It’s the exact same version that a company with revenues of $10 billion would install,” explains Keever. “With Oracle Business Accelerators and Oracle E-Business Suite, midsize companies can start benefiting from the same industrial-strength software that their largest competitors may already use.”

When Time Is of the Essence

Steve Kemper, chief financial officer for the Active Network, is currently seeing those benefits. Like JR286, the San Diego, California-based company also needed a speedy implementation, but for a different reason. The company provides technology and services that enable participation in activities and events—its software makes it easy for endurance event organizers to run races and softball leagues to keep track of rosters and standings, among other things. Its preparations for a 2009 initial public offering meant that whatever software it chose had to be up and running quickly. Because the Active Network has acquired many companies in the 10 years since it was founded and operates all over the world, from Canada to Australia to the U.K., its prior ERP system (a software package from Epicor) was no longer meeting its needs. It needed an ERP system that could handle sophisticated reporting across multiple entities and currencies.

After evaluating the software of one other vendor—SAP—Kemper purchased Oracle E-Business Suite along with Oracle Business Accelerators to jump-start the process. The Active Network, like other companies that use Oracle Business Accelerators, was able to use a setup tool to help Kemper select the exact business flows it needed and to find and harvest the corresponding business data. It was a good choice, Kemper says. He kicked off the implementation in May 2008 and went live on July 1, less than two months later.

The process, Kemper says, was even easier than he expected. “I was pleasantly surprised that I didn’t really have to suboptimize my chart of accounts or compromise on what I wanted to do. Oracle’s preconfigured system has matched probably 95 percent of what we needed,” he says. “We had to make very few trade-offs when we brought the system up. The numbering of departments and accounts and everything fit very closely to what I wanted.” For example, the company has a number of different products. With the software in place, he can now report on those products across multiple corporate entities and in multiple currencies.

And the five percent that didn’t work for his company? Kemper’s system integrator, C3 Business Solutions, was still able to give him what he needed, he explains, by helping implement customizations to meet specific requirements.

Today, Kemper has the same visibility into global operations that he does into his San Diego, California, operations, and he has more control over every aspect of those operations, he says. “We have operations in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.K. The software allowed us to use one single platform to drill into what’s going on there.”

No Stopgap Measures

Ten years ago, if a growing company was looking for a world-class ERP solution, it didn’t have many choices. Enterprise software was expensive and required so many resources to install and run it correctly that most growing businesses simply went with something inexpensive that could be installed in a hurry. The problem with this strategy is that inexpensive software usually doesn’t leave much room for growth, says Oracle’s Keever.

“There are still software companies out there that will hook customers with an inexpensive package. The problem is that if their business grows, they end up needing to buy a new package,” Keever says. “This turns a company upside down. Why should a company have to incur more costs just because they grow?”

For JR286’s Inofuentes, that isn’t just a rhetorical question. The real proof of concept came in the form of increased business from two of the company’s largest customers, one of which had not so long ago called JR286 its worst vendor. Together, in fact, the two retailers now account for 40 percent of JR286’s business. More important, says Inofuentes, is that his company finally has the capacity for unconstrained growth. Its software can scale as fast and as large as needed to keep pace with its continued growth.