Taylor fine-tunes finance, supply chains using Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications

Taylor is a 10,000-employee, privately held company that grew from its roots as a wedding invitation printer to become a diversified global company running printing, marketing, packaging, and fulfillment businesses. As a company built on 50 years of acquisitions, it inherited a vast array of decentralized technologies. Company leaders wanted a centralized view of customer, supplier, and financial data across operating units. Taylor implemented Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP, EPM, SCM, and CPQ to gain that single integrated source for financial and operating data. Using Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications, for example, the company integrated new scanning technology to gain timely supply chain insights and reduced the time finance needs to run procure-to-pay and record-to-report processes.

Taylor implemented Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications as part of a broad effort to help fuel growth and improve operations in the diverse businesses it has brought together. “To acquire growth, you need to efficiently use and invest in the tools that will help you drive that growth, versus having just pure acquisition without the integration, where you’re layering pieces on and not improving the overall solution,” says William Longwell, Taylor vice president of enterprise transformation.

With Oracle Fusion Cloud applications, Taylor began a mission to consolidate and standardize data and processes to make more timely and informed financial, customer, and supplier decisions, automate time-consuming manual processes, and lower the technology cost that came with managing outdated, on-premises systems.

Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications helped Taylor check off its goals of standardizing and simplifying its operations across finance and supply chain. For instance, the company benefited from Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP’s procure-to-pay capabilities, which helped automate steps including requisitioning, purchasing, receiving, and payment processing. The application helped Taylor reduce purchase order cycle time by standardizing how business units generate purchase orders for products it needs on a regular schedule. With the visibility Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP provides, the company’s procurement organization went from 144,000 open PO lines on average to 10,000. Instead of having open POs dating back a few years, the organization now stays current. Taylor is also using Oracle Cloud ERP’s intelligent document recognition for scanning payable invoices.

Additionally, Oracle Cloud ERP’s record-to-report features helped the company standardize how Taylor business units turn transactional data into financial statements, returning valuable hours to Taylor’s finance organization. While Taylor is in the early phases of unlocking the full potential of Oracle Fusion Cloud EPM, the platform already gives Taylor visibility to analyze performance across the company and create better sales and cash flow forecasts. “When looking at so many different systems and applications, we spent an inordinate amount of time bringing together data to present versus being able to act upon the data,” Longwell says. “Oracle EPM has helped us move fast and spend our time decision-making, not data building.”

But the most transformational effect on the business came from Oracle Fusion Cloud SCM, Longwell says. Oracle Cloud SCM helped Taylor eliminate manual steps by automating a range of processes, including procurement and logistics. To improve supply chain processes, the company implemented FlexiPro scanners to move inventory through production and warehouse, as well as receipts. The integrated FlexiPro and Oracle SCM solution captures real-time data about inventory and shipments and replaces manual data entry with scanning so businesses can reduce errors and better organize warehouse and supply chain processes, such as receiving and storing inventory in the optimal location.