Oracle Applications

Insights Library
- The ABCs of AIAWebinar on understand how Oracle's Application Integration Architecture can help you overcome many of the difficult integration issues that have plagued IT organizations for years and quickly make the transition to advanced service-oriented architecture.
- The ABCs of AIAWhte paper accompanying webinar
- Receivables - How to Win the Balancing Act!White Paper on best practices and tips on preparing for month-end. It will also provide a simple and time-effective process for closing Oracle Receivables and performing month-end reconciliation activities.
- Vanilla Implementation of OracleWhite Paper explaining what exactly is vanilla in terms of the Oracle E-Business Suite? What do people really mean when they say they want a "vanilla" implementation? Most importantly, is a vanilla implementation really possible, or even desirable?
- Release 12 Financials - Tales from the FrontWebinar - We've compiled our team's real-world experiences over multiple Release 12 implementations and upgrades into one compelling web briefing. We'll challenge your assumptions and ensure a more successful implementation as we explore technical considerations, functionality changes, project management best practices and more.
- Beyond Day One: Planning for Post-Implementation SuccessWebinar - highlights key considerations for creating a successful support and maintenance model that will help you seamlessly manage Day 2 and beyond. You'll learn the critical questions to ask while exploring models that have worked successfully for other organizations across a variety of industries and cultures. By thinking past Day 1, you can ensure that post- implementation support issues won't overshadow an otherwise successful implementation.
- Release 12 Upgrades - When is a Simple Upgrade Not so Simple?Webinar - Sometimes even a "basic" upgrade isn't as simple as it seems. Depending on your existing version and specific application footprint, you may face a complete architecture migration, changes to underlying table structures and/or modifications to your business processes as part of your Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 upgrade. Are you confident you know what to expect? This Web briefing will identify critical questions for consideration, highlight common pitfalls, present best practices, and more.

Executive View

Top Level Objectives

Today’s enterprise systems must be able to support rapidly changing business requirements in an increasingly competitive and complex marketplace with the lowest possible cost and risk. Executives are challenged to lower the cost of IT to improve profitability while also increasing the “speed” and quality of information to support critical business decisions. Enterprise systems must be able to efficiently and cost-effectively support a global business model and a landscape that is constantly changing due to acquisitions and evolving statutory requirements. Achieving agility to quickly react to changes in markets, support innovation, address ever-changing customer demands and to establish and maintain key competitive advantages is no longer an option; it’s a business imperative.

World-class enterprise software cannot adequately address these challenges right “out of the box.” How these software applications are installed, configured, implemented, and maintained plays a critical role in determining if your goals and objectives will be met. That’s why it is essential to partner with a company like Rolta TUSC that has the experience and thought leadership necessary to ensure maximum return on your ERP investment.

Whether your initiative involves a broad global ERP rollout, determining an effective global financial consolidation design, implementing an enterprise-wide master data management strategy, or selecting the right tools and approaches for reporting, our Applications teams have the experience you need. Our senior-level teams, an appropriate blend of both on-shore and off-shore staff, will allow our clients to avoid the risky trade-off between cost and quality. Our global delivery model will allow you to achieve the highest quality expectations at the lowest cost possible.

Solution - Innovation

Most ERP implementations focus on transaction capture and operational business processes; in most cases modeling them after the “way they have always been done.” Not enough consideration is given to the ultimate goal of turning transactional data into useful, insightful information to support key business decisions. At Rolta TUSC, we look beyond capturing data to understand how it will ultimately be transformed and used by every level of the organization. From operational staff that need detailed, real-time information to optimize production processes or address customer issues, to executives that need timely visibility to accurate, summarized, strategic information and KPIs to make prudent decisions affecting the success of the entire organization, our teams take a broad view to ensure that the business processes implemented at every level will meet your organizational needs.

We deliver added value to your business and ensure successful implementations and upgrades with an innovative approach that includes:

Our Apps*Plus toolset - This toolset enhances Oracle E-Business Suite standard functionality. Our growing collection of additional reports, Discoverer models, integration templates and toolkits multiplies the value of your ERP investment.
Global delivery teams - We don’t employ a typical off-shore model. Instead, we appropriately leverage Rolta TUSC expertise around the world in an on-shore and off-shore blended team approach. Our global delivery teams can effectively get the job done faster, in all corners of the world, exceeding quality standards while lowering overall implementation cost.
Ability to handle unexpected issues - Implementations rarely ever go exactly as planned. Despite careful and insightful planning, unforeseen challenges will be encountered. Rolta TUSC’s experienced project teams succeed because we clearly track and communicate issues as they are encountered and provide creative options and recommendations to address them based on our collective past experiences. Achieving ultimate success by persevering through challenges differentiates us from the rest and lowers the risk of failed system implementations.
Optimizing standard functionality - Our teams don’t simply configure applications from a script. We creatively adapt standard functionality to address specific and unique business requirements that leverage best practices available within Oracle applications. Our teams don’t operate in narrow silos. We collaborate across practices to ensure that the white space between applications is addressed to deliver broader end-to-end vision and value-added services.

Advantage - Insight

Our deep understanding of Oracle E-Business Suite capabilities (as well as limitations) ensures that your key business requirements are addressed with creativity and innovation to support current and future needs. Senior-level consultants with extensive business background provide insight and vision, aligning delivered solutions with strategic direction. Rolta TUSC teams architect your E-Business Suite solution with a focus on maintaining the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) by minimizing customizations and preserving a clear upgrade path to future releases.

Benefit - Impact

Our project approach will ultimately deliver the most business and technology value for the lowest cost due to our global delivery teams and proprietary methodology. Through creative and insightful solution design, we enable you to support unique business processes that are integral to achieving a global competitive advantage. Our teams will ensure that you not only leverage standard Oracle applications functionality to the greatest extent possible, but that you use the right standard functionality among many options to appropriately support your business needs. Ultimately, implementation risk will be reduced through strict project governance, Rolta TUSC executive involvement and senior-level project team delivery.

Management View

Business Objectives

Oracle Applications can help you address critical business demands, market requirements, global business models and complex business reporting needs. With opportunities for business transformation, however, also come challenges. Implementing and upgrading Oracle applications is a time-intensive, complicated effort. Like most organizations today, your limited internal resources are probably consumed with maintaining existing systems and rarely possess the bandwidth or experience necessary to lead complex system integration projects. Adding to the challenge, your legacy systems have probably been customized over time and have significant integration points to other legacy and third-party systems, making the upgrade/conversion path less clear.

When it comes to implementing and upgrading applications, you simply can’t afford to encounter pitfalls that will consume time, money and critical resources or result in “opportunity cost” to the organization. You usually only have one chance to get it right. That’s where Rolta TUSC can help. With 16 years of experience implementing and upgrading Oracle Applications, we will help you achieve project success regardless of the size, complexity and business or technical area involved. Our teams will effectively bridge the gap between what you need to accomplish and how to best achieve those objectives using Oracle applications. Our services include:
Knowledge transfer - Through informal and formal sessions, we will communicate the information necessary for you to take true ownership of your applications environment.
Risk monitoring and change management - Our methodologies and project governance practices will ensure that all aspects of change management are thoroughly addressed throughout the project.
Strategic and tactical focus -Working with Rolta TUSC will help you address both your maintenance requirements and progress on strategic and tactical initiatives to address current challenges and open doors for transformational opportunities in the future.
Flexible delivery model - Whether we provide a senior-level, fully staffed team to lead your implementation from start to finish, or provide just a single subject-matter-expert to provide insightful advisory services, we will exceed your expectations and provide the value that you need to succeed. All of our consultants, even when working alone, are backed by the collective experience of our entire team through our extensive knowledge framework and collaboration methods.

Solution

Rolta TUSC can deliver the full spectrum of skills necessary to address any challenge that you encounter during the implementation or upgrade process. Our project managers follow Project Management Institute standards for project governance and bring many years of successful Oracle Applications experience to the project teams that they manage. Our functional leads, business analysts and other subject-matter experts average more than 10 years of experience with Oracle and typically come from a business background where they performed the actual business functions that they now support from an Oracle Applications perspective. Our best practices come from front-line experience understanding how businesses need to do business.

Rolta TUSC’s heritage stems from deep roots of technical development and database administration expertise. We literally wrote the books on Oracle technology. Our development staff builds on this history with specific and deep knowledge of how to deploy technology appropriately within an Applications environment. Our toolkits and templates provide a consistent starting point for all of our development, and we leverage Oracle’s recommended development approach (APIs, interface tables and all elements of the Integration Repository) to ensure that all customizations, extensions, integrations, workflow modifications and “personalizations” are deployed properly to preserve a clear upgrade path to future versions. Our DBAs utilize all of the most recent tools, techniques, and best practices to install, maintain and optimize the complex application suites on a wide array of technology platforms. Whether it is a fresh implementation or migration from a legacy system, a re-implementation of the E-Business Suite from a prior version, an upgrade to Release 12, staff augmentation for a specific key skill set or senior-level strategic advisory consulting, our Applications team will ensure that you transition from Point A to Point B successfully.

Many organizations can claim to configure Oracle applications, as the steps are clearly documented. However, the key to success lies in knowing how to choose from the myriad options available, which choices make sense for your particular business needs and why you would choose one path over another. It is the “why” that matters and Rolta TUSC consultants know how to ask the critical questions to develop the insights necessary to lead you to the right decisions. Our consultants have been on “the other side of the desk.” We have performed the business functions that we now assist you with today. So we are qualified to ask why you do the things you do today and to recommend better ways of doing them in the future to leverage the strengths of Oracle Applications. We also leverage the combined knowledge of our other practices at Rolta TUSC so our recommendations are never made in a vacuum. We understand the impact of transaction details captured on the analytical reporting needs for KPI-driven dashboards provided by our Business Intelligence practice. We know that Chart of Accounts design and General Ledger Set of Books and Legal Entity structures have a direct impact on the effectiveness of Enterprise Performance Management applications. In key phases of our projects, we enlist the insights and design expertise of these other practices within Rolta TUSC to ensure that our ERP designs incorporate the broad view of your requirements, not just the more narrow requirements of entering an invoice or processing a customer order.

Approach

All of our delivery teams identify quick wins and “low hanging fruit” to rapidly deliver real business value. We work from a long-term roadmap and complete projects in a phased approach whenever possible to build on success over time. Our solution designs always consider a 360-degree view and your ultimate information needs for effective reporting and insightful KPI-centric analysis capabilities. When we complete projects, our knowledge transfer process prepares your teams to take ownership and effectively support the applications going forward.

Business Value

The ultimate goal of an applications project should be to improve business performance in measurable ways. We won’t deploy applications and technology just for the sake of deploying them. Our teams will focus on achieving measurable goals, such as more accurate manufacturing planning and forecasting, visibility to overall “spends” in your procurement process, shorter accounting close cycles, and other key business improvements. We will help evolve your architecture and solution design to support greater agility, allowing you to take advantage of new opportunities and best-of-breed systems as they become available. Our overall goal is to help you transform your transactional data into meaningful information as quickly and efficiently as possible through the use of Oracle applications technology.

Technical View

Technical Issues

You are constantly under pressure to do more with less, deliver more business improvements with fewer staff, modernize your technical architecture with reduced budgets and provide guidance on the proper long-term strategy with more confusing and conflicting options than ever. The speed of change is increasing and it’s hard to keep up with it. As systems become more agile and loosely coupled, there are more integration points to manage.

As technology capabilities improve and evolve, so does the complexity. Expert-level knowledge and experience is a requirement, not a “nice-to-have.” For years, companies had to choose between custom solutions that met unique business goals and standard off-the-shelf solutions that required significant business process change. Pursuing a Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) strategy is a common direction to lower total costs and simplify maintenance over time, but at what cost? It is critical to still maintain a competitive advantage and support complex business requirements. These are two difficult goals when attempting to use “out-of-the-box” functionality.

Most organizations that pursue a COTS strategy have insufficient staff experience in the new applications and foundational technology to effectively lead the effort. All of this must be done while improving service levels, reducing staff and lowering overall costs. Rolta TUSC has the “real world” business and technical experience necessary to lead you in the appropriate use of Oracle’s “off-the-shelf” business applications and underlying technology to address all of the various challenges you need to overcome today. Employing our various assessment capabilities and approaches, we will identify a clear roadmap of current and future projects prioritized to maximize business value at the lowest cost and implementation risk possible.

Solution Components

Our teams leverage unique implementation and upgrade methodologies and proprietary Apps*Plus toolkits to maximize the value of your Oracle Applications investment. Whether it is Oracle’s Application Integration Architecture (AIA), the Integrated SOA Gateway or our proprietary iPerspective™ product coupled with our EBS iPerspective™ toolkit, our teams will deploy the appropriate integration methods, aligned with current and future technical architecture capabilities to maximize future system agility. A keen focus on project oversight, all the way to the executive-level at Rolta TUSC, will ensure that all of our client project teams achieve success. We foster a true partnership and earn preferred status through delivery excellence.

Implementation

Rolta TUSC’s reputation for delivery excellence stems from our ability to deploy the right senior-level teams comprised of the right resources to achieve project success. Our project managers focus on strict project governance, using PMI standards and our detailed implementation and upgrade methodologies. These methodologies are based on the best of Oracle’s Application Implementation Methodology (AIM), PMI standards and approaches and proprietary field-tested Rolta TUSC methods and toolkits.

Our delivery teams take advantage of our Apps*Plus toolkit, which add significant value to the standard functionality of the E-Business Suite in many functional and technical areas. Our methodologies facilitate visionary solution design, progressing towards multiple Conference Room Pilots (CRPs) focusing on all dimensions of end-to-end business processes. We conduct thorough knowledge transfer and end-user training throughout the project lifecycle.

How Does it Fit and Why is it Different?

Your implementation will never go exactly as planned. Too many unknown variables exist at the beginning of a project and despite the best-laid plans, challenges will be encountered. Your implementation success will depend on anticipating as many of these potential challenges as possible and addressing them quickly, creatively and appropriately. At Rolta TUSC, we take the time to understand your specific business processes. Why do you do the things you do today? What can’t you do today that could provide a critical competitive advantage to your business? How is your industry changing and what can you do now to stay ahead of the changes?

Just as race-car drivers always look ahead beyond the curve, our solution designers and implementation teams look beyond the current “as is” processes to ensure that your future business needs will be able to be met by the solution designs proposed. Rolta TUSC’s teams collaborate across practices to ensure that all dimensions are considered, including technology, ERP, EPM, master data management considerations, business intelligence and more.