The storage company needs to make decisions fast, but with three legacy finance systems, it was hard to get a consistent, accurate view. It consolidated onto Oracle ERP Cloud to get a clear picture.
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Founded in 1970, Western Digital first made its mark as the world’s largest manufacturer of calculator chips. The company later moved into data storage, introducing a floppy disk controller to help drive the PC revolution. In the 1990s, Western Digital acquired SanDisk, maker of the first flash-based solid-state drive for IBM computers.
Today, that same innovative spirit guides Western Digital’s development of a range of products that meet the data storage requirements of everything from next-generation mobile devices to tomorrow’s autonomous cars.
If you’re trying to be agile and make decisions based on market changes, you can’t rely on data in Excel gathered manually across three separate ERP systems.Tina Mashiko, Vice President of Finance, Western Digital
In 2016, Western Digital’s leaders faced a huge challenge: the need to consolidate the financial applications of three merged, multibillion-dollar companies—Western Digital, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, and SanDisk—onto a single system.
Instead of choosing one of the on-premise ERP systems already in use, the company standardized on Oracle ERP Cloud. As a result, Western Digital was able to rationalize 3,000 application modules, many of them redundant. With the data consolidation, company decision-makers now receive a single report that shows, for example, total spend across departments as well as granular breakdowns for each one.
With more than 2,000 applications across the three companies, management selected out-of-the-box adapters from Oracle Integration to limit project cost, risk, and delivery time. Quickly connecting Oracle ERP with SaaS, including Workday and Salesforce, as well as on-premises analytics applications, helped the company automate the end-to-end process of collecting data from any business system for real-time operational reporting and faster analytics refresh times.
CIO Steve Phillpott notes that the regular, automatic updates to Oracle ERP Cloud let decision-makers take advantage of modern features much more quickly than with on-premise applications.
Oracle ERP Cloud
Western Digital slashed the time it takes to approve purchases, as it streamlined the process from about 16 layers to five or fewer.