A major oil and gas company sought to integrate their numerous subsidiaries’ array of autonomous legacy ERP systems in order to enable shared services.
Our Clients Needs:
Rapid growth through acquisitions without IT centralization resulted in our client’s subsidiaries running on a disconnected assortment of ERP systems. Functional decentralization resulted in personnel redundancies, and a lack of data consolidation prevented the parent company from leveraging consolidated purchasing power and other shared services benefits.
Preferring to avoid the expense and operational disruption of a wholesale move to a centralized system, they needed a way to integrate these systems at the back end while leaving them all in place.
Our Solution:
The client wanted to first consolidate their accounts payable, so they created an Oracle EBS instance for that function only.
We used several Oracle technologies to pull AP information from their legacy ERPs into EBS, accomplishing the transfer whenever possible through automated straight-through processing. The client’s centralized AP staff then had to deal only with any exceptions that arose. In order to provide a single place from which the client could diagnose and resolve them, we surfaced all exceptions in Oracle WebCenter, to be dealt with there by the end user.
Business Impact:
Our integration enabled the client to consolidate their accounts payable, equipping them to employ a shared services model and to achieve more consistent AP processing. The consolidation of a previously redundant function also allowed for a significant bottom-line savings through headcount reduction. At the same time, because we left their original ERPs in place, there was very little disruption in day-to-day operations.
To provide flexibility and scalability in exception handling, we built in broad end-user autonomy, allowing them to address exceptions in the shared environment, if possible, before tracing them back to the original ERPs.
With their accounts payable function consolidated, our client is leaner and more efficient. And with their shared services EBS reference implementation in place, they have a blueprint for future integration. Incrementally improved and poised for further streamlining, they are correspondingly better adapted and more finely tuned for competitive advantage.
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