Oracle Customer Success—Asahi Refining USA

Asahi Refining Cuts Carbon Emissions with Oracle Cloud

Oracle Cloud supports our core business objectives. Oracle empowers us to minimize IT operations costs so we can focus on our core business resources—all while advancing environmental sustainability.

— Kevin Braddy, IT Director, Asahi Refining

Asahi Refining Avoids Up to 20 Tons of CO2 Emissions, Lowers Energy Costs, and Improves Employee Productivity with Cloud Solutions

Asahi Refining brings a unique combination of tradition and innovation to its role as a provider of precious metal assaying, refining, and bullion products. It also understands that smart business practices and environmental sustainability go hand in hand. The firm advanced both objectives when it embraced a “cloud-first” strategy and deployed Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Cloud.

Since deploying Oracle ERP Cloud, Asahi Refining accelerated financial and procurement processes, boosted employee productivity, cut data center operations costs, and avoided the release of millions of pounds of CO2 emissions. It also freed resources to focus on accelerating innovation across its core business objectives.

Business Challenge

Manage the company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) footprint with minimal IT resources to optimize focus on core mission of refining precious metals
Provide telecommuting opportunities for employees to optimize productivity, reduce carbon footprint, ensure convenience, and support business continuity during inclement weather

Replace a manually intensive legacy enterprise resource planning environment with a modern, integrated system to accelerate report creation, increase financial visibility, and boost efficiency of procurement processes

Reduced IT infrastructure costs, including energy use related to operating the firm’s IT estate, by migrating to Oracle ERP Cloud
Avoided 8 tons of CO2 emissions, minimized carbon footprint related to travel, and cut costs by 15% during the implementation by completing 80% of configuration remotely

Estimated that the company will avoid up to 20 tons of CO2 emissions over the period of the contract for Oracle Financials Cloud, assuming that it would have had to buy, install, operate, and maintain on-site servers to support an on-premises implementation
Continued to support carbon footprint reduction with remote, post-production managed services
Enabled employees to work from anywhere, further reducing carbon footprint and improving productivity and business continuity, especially during inclement weather
Enabled Asahi Refining to close month-end books in just three days, versus the seven days it took to complete in the previous legacy environment
Achieved a unified procurement process, saving hours of work previously needed to maintain a complex employee approval hierarchy in the homegrown purchasing system with Oracle Self-Service Procurement Cloud Service
Created seamless, ongoing integration between Oracle ERP Cloud applications and the company’s legacy metal system as well as its third-party payroll application using Oracle Java Cloud Service
Used Oracle Database Cloud Service to validate all data coming into Oracle ERP Cloud from the company’s legacy environment
Lowered total cost of ownership by providing subscription-based, self-service access to a reliable, scalable, and elastic cloud environment

Oracle ERP Cloud makes it easy to pursue a cloud-first strategy. We deployed in just 15 weeks and rapidly saw improvements to our core business processes, while cutting costs and reducing our environmental footprint.

— Kevin Braddy, IT Director, Asahi Refining

Execution

Asahi Refining worked with 6e Technologies to transition from its parent company’s legacy ERP system to Oracle Financials Cloud, Oracle Purchasing Cloud Service, and Oracle Self-Service Procurement Cloud Service in less than 15 weeks. To meet this aggressive timeline, 6e Technologies relied on its Rapid Implementation Methodology and its own project management expertise. The 6e team adopted a unique implementation approach, whereby it minimized on-site meetings and conducted the majority of its work offsite. This strategy minimized travel and the associated costs and environmental impact.

About Asahi Refining USA

Headquarters

Salt Lake City, Utah, United States

Employees

200

Asahi Refining USA

Asahi Refining combines nearly 200 years of industry experience and forward-looking innovation to sustain its role as a leading provider of precious metal assaying, refining, and bullion products. Asahi Holdings is a Tokyo, Japan-based precious metals recycling company (collection, recovery, refinement) founded in 1952. Asahi Holdings acquired Johnson Matthey’s (JM) North American precious metal refineries. Asahi Refining Salt Lake City is one of those refineries.

Partners

Asahi Holdings turned to Oracle specialized partner, 6e Technologies to scope the cloud migration project for its Salt Lake City-based Asahi Refining over a one-day workshop. 6e Technologies helped to identify project challenges and requirements and set very specific success criteria.

“6e Technologies’ experience with and knowledge of Oracle Cloud and on-premises solutions has been invaluable. The group has been a true partner to our organization, and that has made all the difference,” said Kevin Braddy.