LINX Cargo Care group eliminates upgrade costs with Oracle

LINX Cargo Care Group is a diversified logistics infrastructure and solutions provider in Australia and New Zealand. It operates four business units—C3, Autocare, LINX, and Geelong Port—with more than 100 years of experience in ports and logistics.

With the demerger from Asciano, the LINX Group needed to transition off the company’s legacy PeopleSoft applications, including finance, HR, and labor planning, onto new systems within a short timeframe to avoid significant upgrade costs. It also wanted to improve its ability to recruit and attract talent, such as financial accountants and interstate truck drivers, and enhance its competitive edge.

It wanted to eliminate millions of dollars in annual spend to upgrade legacy ERP and HR systems—including purchasing, ship planning, and payroll—and minimize disruptions to critical cargo care operations by migrating to an integrated system within a year after the spinoff.

Also, it sought to improve the ability to attract more talent in the ports and logistics industry, such as asset engineers and heavy vehicle operators, by using a single HR system to rapidly identify and hire the right candidates.

Finally, the company wanted to support the growth of the logistics business by gaining the flexibility to scale up and down as needed and increase agility.

LINX Cargo Care Group adopted the “transition-first, transform-later” approach, and gradually moved its legacy PeopleSoft applications to Oracle Cloud ERP and Oracle Cloud HCM. Its internal team also performed a data-cleansing process before the migration. LINX Cargo Care conducted pilot run, testing, and user training across all capital cities. It completed the entire migration in just eight months and met the tight timeline. 

“I would recommend Oracle Cloud because of our positive experience with PeopleSoft and its industry best practices. With Oracle, you’re going to get a very simple system with minimal upgrade costs, and that delivers far more value over time,” said Bob Shueh, chief financial officer.

The company avoided up to $8 million in upgrade costs over five years and ensured smooth logistics and supply chain operations by migrating from PeopleSoft to Oracle Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning and Oracle Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM) within the required timeframe.

LINX saved significant time to share month-end profit and loss report with up to 80 managers across different cost centers by using Oracle Planning and Budgeting—its robust reporting feature rapidly formats and shares the financial model instead of taking 2 minutes to delink each report and send multiple times to every manager in a month .

In addition, it halved administrative workload for HR staff members to enter information for up to 20 new hires each month by providing self-service capabilities to candidates via Oracle Talent Acquisition Cloud and enabling them to easily add or change personal details, such as qualifications and work experience.

Also, the company optimized project resource management by providing a granular breakdown of capital works, such as upgrading the electrical components for a container crane, and empowering managers to effectively manage budget from the resources pool with Oracle Project Financial Management rather than spreadsheets.

Oracle applications enabled the business to improve the visibility and accountability of its performance review process across all locations and allow all employees, including office and manual labor workers, to quickly view and provide feedback via Oracle Performance Management Cloud Service and Oracle Goals Management Cloud Service.

Oracle Cloud HCM allows managers to set the performance review cycle—monthly, quarterly, annually, or project evaluations—based on the needs of each business division.

Oracle applications help support future growth by letting HR and hiring managers to proactively identify and retain high-potential or at-risk talent and establish a succession plan with Oracle Talent Review and Succession Management Cloud Service.

In all, LINX expects to save up to approximately $480,000 in licensing and infrastructure hosting costs annually by migrating from on-premises solutions to a scalable Oracle Cloud to meet changing business demands.