Ready to Go!

Continued

“We were a small company that now can execute and manage its business like a big guy,” Inofuentes says. “For example, we were able to set up a warehouse in China in 30 days. I went, signed the contract, and within a month, we were shipping products from 13 different factories from that warehouse.”

Oracle Warehouse Management is making this kind of efficiency possible and at the same time is boosting JR286’s customer satisfaction because customers no longer have to wait for products to ship from 13 different locations. Inofuentes reports that they did all this at a fraction of what they would have paid if they had gone with SAP, another vendor they considered. “Oracle was almost half the price of SAP,” he says. “And Oracle and DAZ Systems were able to commit to a 90-day time line. SAP wanted four or five months for implementation.”

Keever says Oracle can keep the scope and pricing down in part because of Oracle Business Accelerators and the Web portal. Customers and partners can log into the portal to view videos, download test scripts, and read implementation documentation.

“The partner who’s helping with the implementation can log in from the customer’s desktop. They both can see exactly what the applications do and can choose the business flows they need. The sales cycle becomes more of a science because they aren’t setting up 200 business flows, just the ones they really need,” says Keever. “Plus, it creates consensus among everyone involved in the bid and implementation process. There are fewer discrepancies between the customer saying, ‘I thought I was getting this,’ and the partner saying, ‘No, you’re getting that.’ Thanks to the Web portal, our partners can provide a confident bid that is consistent with the software that’s been discussed and based on the business flows that are being installed.”

Making a Big Jump

Oracle Business Accelerators also enable something that was rarely done in the past. They allow users to turn on their software in one fell swoop rather than engaging in a piecemeal installation. That’s the kind of implementation that was necessary at fabless complementary metal oxide semiconductor company Telegent Systems USA. Stephen Zadig, vice president of operations for Telegent—which sells single-chip mobile TV receivers that let people watch over-the-air and pay-per-view mobile TV on mobile handsets, portable devices, and consumer electronics—needed a 12-week implementation where he could turn on all of his software modules at once and immediately start using them. Zadig explains that he wanted to spend two cycles prior to closing the company’s fiscal year working out any problems so he could be prepared for the company’s audit. Adding more complexity to the process, Zadig also wanted to turn off QuickBooks and turn on the latest version of Oracle E-Business Suite—the newly released Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.

“We decided we were going to stretch our risk a little and go with a newly released software, says Zadig. “The idea was that we’re taking a little bit of pain up front, because we know that [Oracle E-Business Suite Release] 12 is a new release, and there are updates that are going to be happening more in real time. But ultimately, the newer version of the software would be a more stable platform for the next, say, five years,” he explains.

Today, Telegent can perform a year-end close in about seven days, says Zadig. In the past, that would have taken weeks to complete. And Zadig does it using software that was previously out of reach, he says. “If you looked 10 years ago at doing an Oracle implementation, you’d say, ‘Oh, gee, it’s going to cost you $1 million to get the Oracle software.’ Now, they’ve come up with financial models that allow our company to grow into its software in sort of a pay-as-you-go model. Oracle seems to understand what small businesses need.”

AMR Research’s Jacobson says this type of vendor/customer relationship is key to a successful implementation. “While it’s always easy to point to shortcomings of the actual implementation—scope creep, requirements constantly changing—the real pitfalls in an ERP implementation often come down to initial steps like vendor selection. Sometimes companies don’t look at the vendors that understand their industry or their company’s position,” he says. “The biggest thing we see is companies purchasing complex products that they’ll need to grow into over the course of a lengthy deployment cycle versus wisely buying software that can grow with their organizations over time.”