24x7 operations for a global company running Oracle E-Buisness Suite

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24 X 7 Operations for a Global
Company Running Oracle®
E-Business Suite
an eprentise white paper

24 X 7 Operations for a Global Company Running Oracle® E-Business Suite
Copyright © 2014 eprentise, LLC. All rights reserved. www.eprentise.com | Page 2
© 2014 eprentise, LLC. All rights reserved.
eprentise® is a registered trademark of eprentise, LLC.
FlexField Express and FlexField are registered trademarks of Sage Implementations, LLC.
Oracle, Oracle Applications, and E-Business Suite are registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation.
All other company or product names are used for identification only and may be trademarks of their respective owners.
Author: Helene Abrams
Published: October 22, 2012
www.eprentise.com

Expanding the functionality of enterprise operations to a global scale involves substantial changes to a
company’s management, culture, business operations, business processes, operational control, technical
support policies and capabilities, and information infrastructures. Changes of this nature are expensive,
time consuming, and require careful planning, but the benefits of configuring an enterprise resource
planning (ERP) system like Oracle® E-Business Suite (EBS) for 24×7 operational performance greatly
outweigh the costs of getting it up and running, not to mention the costs of the alternative—trying to
integrate and manage independent environments. This white paper outlines key concepts, considerations,
and strategies for going global successfully with a core focus on people, process, and technology.
Throughout the paper we discuss how Experian, an information services company, draws from these
concepts to manage its global strategy and utilizes features of EBS Release 12 (R12) to maximize
operational efficiency.
Incentives and drivers for getting to a single, global instance
Companies evolve. While everyone’s story is unique—growth from regional to national or international,
mergers and acquisitions, diversification of business lines and product offerings, multiple currencies, and
disparate regulatory environments—many of the business and regulatory drivers led companies to have
multiple EBS instances, usually having differing charts of accounts. Whatever the cause, the resultant
fragmented EBS environment can inhibit business agility and retard performance in an increasingly
globalized world. Even the most diverse company doesn’t need different processes and separate
resources for common functions, such as accounts payable or procurement. Redundant processes and
data have high costs in terms of both time and additional people resources. Moreover, operating,
maintaining, and harmonizing the array of instances and charts of accounts is itself a substantial drag on
profit and productivity. Also there are positives that add to the attractiveness of a globalized single EBS
instance. Placing several of the most significant drivers toward single instance globalization into a high
level list would look something like this:
 Consolidate repetitive data-centric processes to support migration to a shared services center or a
centralized data center
 Generate financial reports directly from the system of record
 Reduce operating and maintenance costs to improve the bottom line
 Create a single source of truth to improve business processes and business intelligence
 Enable revenue optimization whenever and wherever possible to improve the top line
 Capitalize on enterprise-wide synergies to leverage purchasing and to better understand customers
 Access new markets, and scale the business
The main idea is that by creating less complexity at the data level you create opportunities to do
better things with that data.
Growth opportunities, initiatives, and impacts on the EBS landscape
Experian, with a core business that revolves around information capture and data analysis in the consumer
and corporate credit reporting spaces, had more than one incentive to begin strategic planning for
globalizing operations. In 2007, the company was in full production with three regional instances of
Oracle EBS Release 11i (two in the UK and one in the US) that were disparate, almost by design. They were

configured for discrete geographic locations and with different applications, configuration data, and
business processes – they had different raisons d’être outside the scope of global expansion. According to
the company’s annual report that year, revenue was almost $3.5 billion and Experian employed over
13,000 people with offices in 36 countries.
The executive overview of the report is prescient regarding the current state and future possibilities for
the company, delivering a convincing analysis of the company’s growth opportunities based on the
quality of its economic position before we even see any financials. In a section focusing on growth drivers
for the company, the overview states that
Experian is well positioned to benefit from a number of key drivers of long-term growth, including:
 Global growth in consumer credit
 Increased use of the Internet by consumers and businesses to both research and buy products and
services
 Increase in multi-channel marketing (companies are using more channels to communicate with their
customers)
 Increase in demand from new vertical markets
 Increase in demand from new and emerging high growth geographies
In order for Experian to take advantage of its position, it was necessary for the company to catalyze a
period of quick evolution during which it could develop new business processes to take advantage of
modern technology available in E-Business Suite Release 12. It was clear that the company’s existing
business processes and information systems (and as an exponential consequence, the relationship
between them) would not be able to support the operational complexity that would accompany a fast-
paced global expansion.
Going global isn’t always (or ever) easy
Increasingly, companies are operating in a world without economically significant geographic boundaries.
That means the rules have changed. The ability to share information has become a type of modern capital
that enables companies to compete more effectively. Conversely, the inability to share data undermines
companies and makes them weak. While the roadmap to a global information platform is not easy and
involves many moving pieces, this paper focuses solely on the ERP systems that form the backbone of
operations, and specifically on Oracle E-Business Suite.
Critical to maximizing the efficiency of a global ERP strategy is the ability to standardize on data and on
business operations and processes—this includes foremost the ability to agree on a definition for those
standards. Additionally, changing business processes across the organization (processes that everyone in
the organization has become accustomed to) requires the ability to effectively manage change on a
variety of levels, and these levels – People, Process, and Technology – are the focus of our discussion.
Achieving a global EBS platform relies on the tremendous importance of accessing quality information, of
recognizing the role of technology in the successful integration of the enterprise, and of laying the
groundwork for different parts of the business to become integrated with core business processes and

decision-making. Though IT is core to enabling globalized processing, it is the human component—
leadership, communication, and governance—that drives its success and delivers results. An organization
must view the globalization effort as an opportunity to put requirements from many different sources into
one pool of challenges from which will emerge standard programs and processes. The challenge for many
enterprises has been how to transform data overload that comes in many shapes and sizes into
information that serves as a strategic asset of the business. The role of technology in this context is to
deliver information within an increasingly complex ERP system on a much broader scale – with increased
quality, decreased downtime, and greater controls on access – to an audience with cross-functional, multi-
cultural, and multi-language communication challenges.
People
One of the challenges of globalization is how to effectively manage the company’s diversity. A successful
globalization program starts with the creation of a top-down alignment among the leadership team. It is
necessary to plan and drive a business change-management effort before starting to implement any new
technology changes. User behavior changes require a long lead time and extensive training. It is necessary
to articulate what will change and the impact of those changes before execution. The leadership team also
has to represent different cultural backgrounds and different prior experiences. Most importantly, a
globalization project involves changing the mindset of individuals who “own” their processes and their
data. Change, by its very nature, is disruptive and is perceived by many as risky or even threatening.
There are five critical success factors that minimize this disruption and mitigate the perceived risks in a
globalization project:
1. Leadership
2. Training
3. Communication
4. Cultural Diversity
5. Governance
Leadership
Caius Petronius Arbiter, an administrator at the time of Emperor Nero, who wrote c.60 AD, said, “We tend
to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of
progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.”
Globalization is not an end in itself. There must be a reason for change, a strategy and a set of objectives
to achieve, a vision, a picture of what the change will lead to and what benefits will accrue. People will
alter their mind-sets only if they see the point of the change and agree with it. The leadership team must
take the time to develop the vision, the overall purpose of the globalization effort, and each person’s
individual roles in achieving the target. The leadership team must explain the vision and what makes it
worth undertaking to all of the people involved in making the change happen. The leadership team needs
to set targets, measure performance, and provide financial and non-financial rewards to reinforce changes
in behavior, engage employees and stakeholders, and provide motivation.

Experian is structured into regional businesses, each of which has appointed a Corporate Responsibility (CR)
management champion. With regularly scheduled meetings chaired by the Company Secretary and led by
the Head of Global CR, these champions are charged to give strategic input and direction. They consider
risks and opportunities and ways in which Experian can embed social considerations into the everyday
decision-making processes.
There is resistance to making tough decisions to rationalize the business because each area is protecting
its own turf. The leadership team has to defuse that tendency. The following survey results by McKinsey
Research show that 70% of the companies who were successful in changing the business had a leadership
team that was able to engage the employees.
Training
A globalization effort is a catalyst that forces people to learn new, standardized processes to effect the
change. Everyone who is affected by the globalization change will need to be trained in the skills they will
need, and in new processes. Whether the change is new functionality or adherence to naming standards,
publishing a training manual alone is not enough to prepare the workforce to integrate changed practices
into daily operations. Training has to have a more personalized approach that seeks buy-in along with
providing information.
Communication
Lack of appropriate and sufficient internal communication is often the biggest obstacle to business
transformation. People frequently resist when they do not understand or are caught unaware. A
globalization initiative adds complexity to a communications strategy because of more complex, matrix
organizational structures, the need to communicate with stakeholders with teams that have different
cultures, languages, and reside in different time zones. Much of the communication is virtual by necessity,
and that brings in its own challenges. Finally, communication channels are overloaded with information
from both local sources and enterprise-level messages that it is difficult to prioritize and filter out key
messages.
It is critical that communication is clear, that requirements are gathered and considered for all locations,
and that all requirements be incorporated into a deliverable solution for every location involved. This

communication plan must be carried out early and consistently to ensure acceptance and rapid adoption
of the changing global landscape.
Curious?
For more information, please call eprentise at 1.888.943.5363 or visit www.eprentise.com.
About eprentise
eprentise provides transformation software products that allow growing companies to make their Oracle® E-Business
Suite (EBS) systems agile enough to support changing business requirements, avoid a reimplementation and lower the
total cost of ownership of enterprise resource planning (ERP). While enabling real-time access to complete, consistent
and correct data across the enterprise, eprentise software is able to consolidate multiple production instances, change
existing configurations such as charts of accounts and calendars, and merge, split or move sets of books, operating
units, legal entities, business groups and inventory organizations.

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