Exelon replaces its customized on-prem financial systems with Oracle Cloud ERP
Electric utility taps the Fusion Cloud suite to reduce costs, speed up financial reporting, simplify regulatory compliance, and make better decisions.
United States | Utilities
“Our move to Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP is about more than new technology. It’s about how Exelon can support a safer, more efficient organization, keep costs down for our customers, and move quickly in our rapidly changing industry.”
Exelon is one of the largest utility companies in the United States, serving more than 10.7 million customers through a network of six regulated transmission and delivery utilities from Philadelphia to Chicago. Facing heightened regulatory scrutiny in a rapidly evolving energy sector, Exelon needed to modernize its aging, highly customized on-premises financial systems to improve efficiency and agility. By standardizing on Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP, Exelon automated some previously manual processes, lowered the technology costs associated with managing them, centralized its financial data, and established a stronger foundation for making data-driven decisions and rolling out AI capabilities.
Why Exelon chose Oracle
Exelon’s finance team faced mounting pressure to produce reports faster, support complex regulatory requirements across multiple jurisdictions, and reduce costs. Its on-premises PeopleSoft and Hyperion financial systems were heavily customized, costly to maintain, and difficult to adapt to changing market conditions. Exelon replaced those systems with Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications, taking advantage of the integrated platform’s regulatory compliance and real-time data analysis capabilities, as well as the cloud suite’s regular feature updates.
An early adopter of Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM) applications, in 2017, Exelon is now looking at whether to combine the HCM and Oracle Cloud ERP instances. “They talk the same language,” says Kevin Daughtry, IT director at Exelon. “They’re meant to work together.” Other factors in Exelon’s decision to move to Oracle Cloud ERP were its “cloud first” strategy and its already-close relationship with Oracle and systems integrator Deloitte.
“Our move to Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP is about more than new technology,” Daughtry says. “It’s about how Exelon can support a safer, more efficient organization, keep costs down for our customers, and move quickly in our rapidly changing industry.”
Results
By replacing multiple customized, on-premises applications with Oracle Cloud ERP, Exelon eliminated more than 80% of its legacy system integrations, thus streamlining operations, reducing IT support overhead, and lowering maintenance costs. Finance teams now work within a unified application environment, simplifying audit processes, enhancing data accuracy, and facilitating faster reporting across five regulatory jurisdictions, each with its own distinct requirements.
Regulatory teams benefit from more reliable, actionable financial insights when building complex rate cases, thanks to standardized project codes, reporting frameworks, and automated data flows. “We can make decisions quicker, give our regulators a better data set,” Daughtry says. The applications also enable swifter, more accurate responses to regulator inquiries, particularly important given that each regulatory jurisdiction has different timetables and requirements.
Oracle Cloud ERP will help finance staff forecast, track, and report project spending in near real time. Integrated systems simplify day-to-day financial processes—for example, easing expense report filing, helping staff achieve faster financial closes, and facilitating project planning. Field workers will benefit from automatically collected service usage data and updated compliance documentation, allowing them to spend less time on paperwork and more time focused on safe and efficient service delivery.
Looking ahead, Exelon wants to use Oracle Cloud ERP’s AI capabilities for expense matching, anomaly tracking, and predictive analytics, while the HR team is already looking at Oracle Cloud HCM’s AI-powered agents to support employees and streamline HR processes. “AI will take away a lot of that manual effort and free up our people to do more productive work,” Daughtry says.
Partners
Working with Oracle Consulting and systems integrator Deloitte helped Exelon follow best practices and rapidly resolve challenges. “We wanted both of them to have a seat at the table to review our strategies, our documents, understand where we're going, and help make sure that we were doing the right things,” Daughtry says.
About the customer
Exelon Corp. is one of the largest transmission and distribution utility companies in the US, serving more than 10.7 million customers in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic regions.