Oracle Led Business Transformation

Business Transformation is all about People, Process and Technology. 

Adopting a strategy-first approach is crucial when leading an Oracle-driven business transformation initiative. The process of transforming a business is complex, especially when integrating a suite of solutions like Oracle’s, which often affect multiple facets of the organization—from operations and finance to customer engagement.

A well-articulated strategy serves as a guiding light, ensuring alignment between the organization’s broader objectives and the specifics of the technological implementation. It helps decision-makers to prioritize investments, allocate resources effectively, and anticipate potential risks or roadblocks.

Without a clear strategy, organizations run the risk of misalignment, where the technology becomes a solution looking for a problem, rather than a tool to solve identified business challenges. A strategy-first approach ensures that technology serves the business goals, creating a symbiosis that is essential for achieving long-term success and return on investment.

For many companies, the decision to implement a new ERP system presents an opportunity to improve existing business processes across the organisation – For example Hiring processes within Human Resources or the Month End Close process within the Financials department.

One of the goals of any new ERP system is to improve efficiency so it makes perfect sense to look at each process impacted by the implementation and identify any bottlenecks that need to be resolved. You may find that some processes are not well documented so it is often helpful to illustrate the process in a flow chart. This is particularly useful later in the implementation when we look at ways to automate labour Business Processes with AI technologies like our WinfoBots Robotic Process Automation.

Our team of business experts have lots of experience working with Oracle modules (E-Business Suite and Oracle Cloud applications) and can provide guidance to your team on best practice within your vertical.

Or perhaps you have already implemented Oracle but have not achieved the efficiencies you were hoping for?

This is a good opportunity to analyse your existing processes and identify areas for improvement. This is an area we use technology to help us out. We plug in our WinfoData tool to your Oracle ERP system and produce a business flow illustration that highlights areas where certain process steps are taking longer than they should or even cases where your team is no following the agreed process or skipping steps altogether. This allows us to focus on processes that are having the biggest negative impact on your business and we can prioritise these in terms of our improvement initiative.

Business Transformation is all about People, Process and Technology.

Companies often focus their attention on the technology component during an ERP implementation and the Human and process elements can be overlooked. In our experience, if you don’t get buy-in from stakeholders within each of the business process areas, it is very difficult to maximise efficiencies – The technology component on its own is only an enables but it needs the team to make it happen.

So how do we achieve this buy in?

Firstly it is important for the leadership team to acknowledge that change can be challenging. Team members are used to doing things in a certain way and in many cases they may have been the architect of the current solution and may resist the proposed changes. It is important to start with the leadership team clearly articulating why certain things need to change and explain the benefits that will accrue to the organisation and the individual team members.

It starts with including all of the stakeholders from the initial brainstorming workshops right through to launching the new system. In this way all of the valuable insights from team members can be captured and most importantly the team members feel a sense of ownership for the new system. It is key to include the leadership team so they can share the individual goals for their department and everyone has a realistic roadmap of how this might be delivered as part of the implementation.

It is always challenging to keep ERP implementation programmes on track and as the Go-Live deadline looms, one phase of the project that often gets squeezed is “launch readiness”.

However this is a critical step in any implementation and helps ensure that the adoption of the new system across the organisation is a success.

In some way its the practical side of team buy-in. The team gets the opportunity to see how the new system is going to work and more importantly, iron out any creases before go-live.

Training is a a really important step in Launch Readiness. If it not clear how to use the new system or why it is being used in a particular way, individuals will often revert to the old way of doing things. Again this is an area that Winfo can help with. Sometimes a picture (or a video) is worth a thousand words and we can help produce on demand training that is available to users exactly when they need it. We can also help build certification programmes to help with quality assurance and gauge the competency within the team.

Documentation is also key. One thing for sure is that processes and people change all the time. So it is key that documentation is kept up to date. Our business process experts can help implement Wiki style documentation solutions that make sure your team stay on top of process changes and that’s new team members onboarding have clear documentation to follow.

User Acceptance Testing is where the rubber hits the road. End users need to be able to take an existing process like onboarding a new hire or supplier invoice matching and be able to complete this process in the new ERP system. Its a perfect opportunity to follow the on demand training and the documentation and check that it correctly articulates the correct steps that need to be followed to execute a process. 

To make your UAT even more efficient, we’re excited to introduce our WinfoTest accelerator. This tool not only automates test scripts but also significantly accelerates the testing timelines for both initial implementation and subsequent roll-outs to other entities and business units. By streamlining this crucial phase, WinfoTest plays a pivotal role in enhancing your overall launch readiness