How to Start Cloud Transformation in Large Enterprises

Large organizations with operations spread across subsidiary companies at different locations often need help to achieve visibility over critical information and essential data. Managing resources and tracking data can become an arduous task when they have various business units working on diverse projects.

 
A leading company in Middle East’s cement industry faced a similar challenge when it became a part of a vast enterprise. It had four subsidiaries in different locations in the region, including Kuwait. Due to the ownership transfer, the company planned to migrate to Oracle Suites to comply with the parent group’s policies and SOPs.

As a result, it planned an organization-wide change to set up one system that was a single source of truth in terms of all its business data. Furthermore, the company also wanted to address its challenge of needing more control over its financial data due to using a niche, legacy application.

The on-premises application also pushed users to feed and edit data manually in the system, which made the job even more tedious for the core team to keep abreast of changes in vast amounts of information and take appropriate actions.

When is the Right Time to Initiate Oracle Cloud Migration?

Companies tend to outgrow their operational capabilities and facilities as the business expands. The need for change increases when the business grows physically, and the systems and software expand into multiple locations.

Regarding the company mentioned earlier, ownership transfer was the primary trigger for migrating to Oracle. However, the lack of control over various business operations, including financial transactions, made it even more critical for them to establish a system that can improve hierarchy structures for better reporting across the organization.

Here are some of the primary challenges that companies often face before planning their cloud migration journey:

Use of Niche, Legacy Software – Most companies from niche industries use software based on legacy applications dedicated to solve very unique requirements. Such software offers more core, industry-based applications, and minimal business operation-based features. This forces users to resort to other software that can cater to the rest of the business needs.

• In the case of the leading cement giant, Vurmak was the primary software used to carry out core operations such as developing ready-mix concrete recipes and keeping track of end-use-specific business operations. Thereby, teams had to depend on an external enterprise business management application like SAP Financials to manage the business’s financial operations.

 
Lack of Integration with Third-Party Systems – Niche business applications do not offer the flexibility of establishing integration with other third-party systems to fetch and process more organizational data. It can make data entry, processing, and reporting more cumbersome for teams at huge organizations.

• In the case of the client under discussion, the core team had to manually enter and edit financial data in the niche, legacy software. The group maintained financial data in spreadsheets that were difficult to read and analyze. It also hindered teams from saving time and reducing budget process cycle time and costs.

 
Disorganized Reporting of Data – Since most companies depend on legacy applications for different business needs, managing business operations, including sales, inventory management, and supply chain, becomes more difficult for core teams. Business transactions’ visibility becomes poor, ultimately hampers productivity, causing losses in multiple scenarios.

• The company’s teams-maintained data in sub-ledgers every month. The company teams manually performed various functions like managing orders, sales, financial reporting, and asset and inventory tracking.

Is There a Perfect Solution to These Challenges?

Even though the word ‘cloud migration’ has become a big buzzword for businesses, it takes work to implement in a real-life scenario. It is very difficult for huge organizations that create and process tons of data daily to migrate every bit of it to a new system.

Furthermore, most organizations, especially ones from niche industries like the cement industry, depend heavily on legacy systems and specific software. Migrating all the data from such applications is a highly complex task, and this remains one of the major roadblocks for them in their cloud migration journey.

Every company has a different DNA, so there is no one-fits-all solution to such challenges in the cloud transformation journey. Every organization has its own pace and maturity in identifying how to kickstart its expedition.

The cement giant reached out to Datavail, to find the most efficient ways to carry out this massive enterprise-wide migration to the cloud. We devised a plan to help the client ensure that they comply with the parent company’s policies and maintain all their data on a single cloud platform.

Here is how we helped our client to start their cloud migration journey:

• Replaced SAP Financials with Oracle Cloud – It was not easy to completely migrate from the niche industry software that our client was using since it performed specific operations that closely targeted end-user needs. However, Datavail migrated SAP Financials’ other business operations to the Oracle ERP Cloud Platform in phase 1 of the company’s cloud migration journey.
• Enabled the Use of Oracle Suite of Products – Oracle ERP Cloud Platform primarily eliminated the need for manual data editing, especially in financial management and reporting. It enabled core teams to use the cloud platform to effectively manage business financials and other areas such as value chains, supply chains, general ledgers, and human resources.
• Quicker Integration for data flow from Legacy Application – We planned phase one of the journey to implement Oracle Suites of applications in the system. It led to more rapid cleansing of data and its organization to flow from the old system to the new Cloud ERP application. We ensured that essential data was accessible to all teams during this operation.

Using Oracle ERP Cloud to Speed the Pace of Business

As an Oracle Cloud Implementation partner for our client, we helped them achieve substantial improvement in accuracy in reporting financial information across all the subsidiaries. During this, the client also accomplished innovative changes in business operations while reducing labor costs by nearly half. Datavail and the client continue to work closely together, refreshing and updating the client’s Oracle ERP system. For additional details on this case study, download the full case “Kuwait-Based Cement Giant Implemented Cloud Transformation Across All Its Subsidiaries”. Do you have improvements to make in Oracle ERP Cloud, but lack the personnel or time to execute? Contact our team to learn how we can help.