Oracle Customer Success—Advantage Sales & Marketing LLC

Advantage Sales & Marketing Saves Millions in First Year with Automated, Streamlined Payroll and Human Resources Processes

Oracle Human Resources applications, hosted by Oracle Managed Cloud Services, delivered the platform ASM had been looking for to support our growing enterprise and remote workforce. The power of the Oracle applications, and using its expert IT management to optimize our investment, not only brought efficiency and state-of-the-art technology to ASM but also saved us millions in the first year.

— Ja’Nice Afanador, Vice President, Enterprise Business Solutions and Global Payroll Services, Advantage Sales & Marketing LLC

Founded in 1987, Advantage Sales and Marketing (ASM) is a premier sales and marketing agency committed to building brand value for its clients and customers. ASM’s customized sales and marketing solutions include headquarter sales as well as retail merchandising and marketing services. It specializes in client and customer events, publications, and assisted-selling services for the grocery, drugstore, club, convenience, natural-specialty, consumer-electronics, sporting-goods, and home-center industries. Headquartered in Irvine, California, ASM has over 70 offices in the United States and Canada with a workforce of approximately 40,000 associates.

Business Challenge

Enable ASM to rapidly onboard new acquisitions with a single, flexible solution
Ensure business agility to support creativity and strategy with flexible customization opportunities and third-party vendor relationships—all required to keep up with a fast-paced environment

Improve the ability to effectively and accurately process a large, complex payroll for approximately 35,000 to 40,000 associates
Automate associate transactions for human resources and payroll to reduce the administrative requirements of the remote workforce
Ensure high availability of human-capital applications and enable the growing company to focus on core competencies, as opposed to managing human-resources systems
Ensure control of the enterprise system by removing dependency on an ADP SAS payroll system and bringing systems in-house
Enable robust business intelligence to support vision, strategy, and company growth

Deployed Oracle Human Resources applications hosted by Oracle Managed Cloud Services, saving millions in the first year, thanks to automation and reduced enterprise-management complexity
Automated payroll and human resources processes, saving the growing sales and marketing company significant labor costs and ensuring accurate and on-time payroll for approximately 40,000 employees every other week

Streamlined payroll processing—which requires at least 1.5 million records per pay period as well as interfaces with third-party systems—for a complex, remote workforce
Gained the ability to quickly onboard employees from acquired companies in days instead of months and scale applications, thanks to Oracle Managed Cloud Services—supporting growth instead of inhibiting it
Ensured high availability of human resources applications without having to hire a large, in-house IT management team, allowing the teams to focus on business requirements
Provided employees—many of whom work remotely in retail operations—with greater convenience and flexibility, thanks to self-service human resources, enabling them to make changes to personal information, manage leave, and check paystubs from a web browser at their convenience
Improved ability to support a diverse workforce—which includes seasonal and part-time associates as well as corporate staff—and ramp up programs quickly to meet retailer’s rapidly changing requirements
Accelerated user adoption of and proficiency with the new system thanks to Oracle User Productivity Kit Standard—which offers proactive assistance to users, step-by-step directions, as well as tutorial videos
Ensured a higher level of security and availability with Oracle Managed Cloud Services’ best practices and code migration protocols
Enabled ASM to easily manage blended-rate payrolls, in which employees are paid various rates depending on the project, and accommodate late time cards with the new system that enables the company to rapidly recalculate past pay periods
Improved ability to quickly analyze the payroll and identify potential issues
Benefitted from single sign-on to make it easy for employees to rapidly log into applications
Ensured 99.999% up time availability of the company’s human-resources applications with Oracle Managed Cloud Services
Enabled ASM to effectively support a growing enterprise and system environment, including timely and seamless upgrades and patches, thanks to Oracle Managed Cloud Services

Oracle stood out from the crowd with its ability to create a single-source-of-truth environment that complements our growth strategy and the vision of our leaders. We knew that Oracle Managed Cloud Services would be a strong partner and offer the support and understanding we needed as we transitioned from our legacy environment, and it could ensure high availability for our human resources environment moving forward.

— Ja’Nice Afanador, Vice President, Enterprise Business Solutions and Global Payroll Services, Advantage Sales & Marketing LLC

Execution

ASM’s Oracle solutions were up and running within eight months of issuing the request for proposal. Oracle Managed Cloud Services helped in many ways with this large initiative, from initial planning, through go live, and for ongoing management. Oracle also worked with the ASM steering committee to educate internal stakeholders about cloud services and the transition process.