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TECHNOLOGY POWERED. BUSINESS DRIVEN.
E D I T O RI AL
Editor in Chief AARON [email protected]
Managing Editor JAN ROGE RS
Deputy Editor BLAIR CAMPBELL
Contributors DAVID BAUM, JEFF ERICKSON, MARGARET HA RRIST, BOBB IE HARTMAN,
ALAN JO CH, MONI CA MEHTA, KATE PAVAO, ROB PRESTON, TARA SWORDS,
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03CONTENTS
PROFITAUGUST 2015
VOLUME 20 > NUMBER 3
August 2015 UPFRONT
04 SUITE SPOT
For years, Oracle has championed
integrated applications — and the
cloud is no different.
06 OUTSIDE IN
CFOs should have much to say on
the matter of cloud computing.
FYI
09 COME TOGETHER
Travel goes social, crowdsourcing
the space program, and therobot hotel
INSIDE ORACLE
17 STRENGTH IN NUMBERS
The sum of individual excellence
is an NBA championship for the
Golden State Warriors.
18 FORWARD MOMENTUM
Oracle ERP Cloud solutions
help customers move at their
own pace.
21 VALUE-MINDED
Oracle Supply Chain
Management Cloud can
fex with an ever-changing
global market.
FEATURES
33 HYBRID VISION
Wilsonart integrates cloud and
on-premises Oracle solutions toachieve operational excellence.
40 LASER FOCUS
Laser Technology Inc. integrates
the cloud with an enterprise
resource planning core to respond
to market demand.
BIG IDEAS
48 CONNECTING FLIGHTS
Grupo Aeroméxico uses Oracle
Managed Cloud solutions to
streamline 26 companies.
51 EDUCATED DISRUPTION
Cloud ERP and other new
tools help emphasize
innovation in education.
56 THE EXPLORERS
Oracle’s R&D labs
prepare for the future of
enterprise technology.60 ON THE HORIZON
Progressive leaders are looking
for the next business functions
to move to the cloud.
COVER STORY
24 CHANGING GEARS
With a shift toward social, GM uses new
channels to talk with (not at) customers.
C O U R T E S Y O
F G M
COVER: BLAKE J. DISCHER
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04 EDITOR’S NOTE
TECHNOLOGY POWERED. BUSINESS DRIVEN.
Suite Spot When I joined Oracle in (gulp) 2000, everyone
here was talk ing about Oracle E-Business Suite 11i ,
an integrated assembly of enterprise applications
that, according to the marketing material of the time,
“eliminates the need for complex integration projects
and allows enterprise data to be consolidated in a
single database.” This was a differentiator for Oracle
even 15 years ago, in an era when the standard IT
strategy was to buy best-of-breed enterprise applica-
tions and fgure out later how to connect them.
In 2012, I was at a cloud computing event where
software as a service (SaaS) was being touted (right-
fully) as the next revolution in enterprise IT. At that
time — perhaps inuenced by my time working on
Oracle E-Business Suite — I had a critical question:
If business managers are going to start buying cloud
applications, but business processes span multiple
organizations (and therefore multiple SaaS applica-
tions), how are these cloud applications going to talk
to each other? I wasn’t given a satisfactory answer.
If you look at the stats outlined in the Data Watch
infographic at the end of this magazine issue (page
60), you’ll see that the cloud is in the enterprise to
stay. So this integration issue was one that had to besolved, and Oracle has addressed it in two ways:
Cloud integration service. Oracle has built
integrations into its portfolio of SaaS applications.
That can mean simply turning on new function-
ality in an existing cloud application (say, adding
talent management service to an existing Oracle
Human Capital Management Cloud instance) or
using preloaded connections available through
Oracle Integration Cloud Service to share data.
Platform as a service. As we were working on
this issue of Proft , Oracle announced more than a
dozen new products at the application platform layer,
some of them designed to connect SaaS applications
to new and existing enterprise systems. That can
mean sharing data between a legacy on-premises
system and a new cloud application or connecting
SaaS functionality from two different vendors.
Looking at the arc of Oracle’s application story
over the past 15 years, we’ve been consistent in
our approach. It’s a strategy that minimizes the
integration stress — and favors the business user.
Indeed, it’s a very suite spot to occupy.
Aaron Lazenby
Editor in Chief, Proft [email protected]
Looking at thearc of Oracle’sapplication storyover the past 15
years, we’ve beenconsistent in ourapproach. It’sa strategy that
minimizes theintegration stress—and favors thebusiness user.
B O B A D
L E R / G E T T Y I M A G E S
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• Platform as a Service
• Security
• Mobile
• Engineered Systems
• Big Data & Analytics
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THE RUNDOWN Destination: World Maker Faire New York GADGET Space: By the People, for the People
GREEN Future Forest TRAVEL Brave New Hotel ON TOPIC Beyond Disruption+
C O U R T E S Y O
F
T R I P T
R I B E
09FYI
PROFITAUGUST 2015
COME TOGETHER
NETWORK
Tired of traveling alone? Consider Trip Tribe, a
company that suggests vacations and adventures based
on your interests and then matches you with like-
minded travelers. “Trip Tribe was created to bring
people together on life-changing trips to incredible
places,” says founder Dave Aidekman.
The company uses a proprietary recommendation
algorithm to suggest trips that would be a good matchfor members based on age, relationship status, travel
style, and preferred destinations and activities. Trip
Tribe then uses that information to put together the
best group of people to share that experience.
“On any given trip, you’ll be traveling with
other people who travel like you,” says Aidekman.
“So a millennial in search of a trip with a lot of
nightlife won’t land on a trip with a group of
early-to-rise retirees.”
Organized trips include a mountain trek in
Morocco and the current most popular adventure,
a yoga retreat to Greece, complete with vineyardaccommodations. Aidekman says trips have led to
lifelong friendships, and have the potential to lead to
business partnerships. Networking on a catamaran in
Santorini — why not? More at triptribe.com. —MONICA MEHTA
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10 FYI
TECHNOLOGY POWERED. BUSINESS DRIVEN.
GADGET
SPACE: BY THE
PEOPLE, FORTHE PEOPLE
Could we use sunlight
rather than fuel to power space
exploration? In 2016, The
Planetary Society’s LightSail
project is out to prove the
viability of solar sailing, and is
already sending out test mis-
sions into space.
Renowned educator Bill
Nye the Science Guy is the
nonprot’s CEO. In May, he
launched a successful cam-
paign on Kickstarter, raising
more than US$1.2 million
on the crowdfunding site — much more than the original
US$200,000 goal.
According to David
Gallagher, director of com-
munications at Kickstarter, the
blockbuster campaign proves
the power of citizen science. In
fact, LightSail is one of more
than a dozen projects funded
on Kickstarter that havelaunched objects into space.
“Space exploration was
rst funded by governments,
and then by companies. With
Kickstarter projects like
LightSail, everyday people
can play a critical role in
helping mankind explore
space,” Gallagher tells Proft .
More at sail.planetary.org. —MARGARET HARRIST
THE RUNDOWN
DESTINATION: WORLD MAKER
FAIRE NEW YORK
I - H U A C
H E N ; C O U R T E S Y O
F
T H E
P L A N E T A R Y S
O C I E T Y
GETTING
CONNECTED:
It seems like everyone
is thinking about theInternet of Things
(IoT), so get ready to
immerse yourself in IoT
projects. “There were
many, many vendors
promoting their brand
of IoT hardware,” says
Vilrokx of the Bay Area
show. “There was also
a whole ecosystem
developing around
them, from tools that
let you visualize all
the data collected
by your ‘things’ to
remote configuration
and customization.”
But Vilrokx points
out that there is still
plenty of room for the
IoT to grow. “All these
‘things’ have to be
tethered to a phone or
other internet-capable
device,” he says. “They
cannot connect to the
internet directly.”
DRONE ON:
Building on the IoT
trend, makers continue
to launch fleets offlying drones. In the
Bay Area, for example,
one drone connected
to a Kinect sensor.
“The camera was
positioned underneath
the drone, pointing
upward to the drone
flying overhead,” says
Vilrokx. “If the drone
would stray from view,
the Kinect would see
this and send a signal
to the drone to correct
its position.” Other
makers battled it out
in in-flight dogfights
known as the Game of
Drones. No word yet
on which Maker Faire
will be the first to see
a drone delivering a
pizza, but New York
City would seem like
the obvious choice.
KID POWER:
At Maker Faires
around the world,
children love makingart and construction
projects, gaping at
robots and art cars,
and seeing adults play
like little kids all over
the festival grounds.
Plus there’s so much
fire! But Vilrokx says
now a lot more high
school and college
students present their
own projects. And
they have skills. In the
Bay Area, for example,
one girl showed off a
cave-mapping robot
she started building
when she was just
8. “It wasn’t just
that kids build these
things; they gave
solid presentations
to a majority adult
audience, talking about
their builds and future
plans,” says Vilrokx.
LOW-TECH LOVE:
OK, it’s hard not to
get sucked in by a
fire-spewing metallicoctopus or robot
battles. But it’s not
all about high-tech
presentations at Maker
Faire, Xie says. Make
sure to leave time to
check out some ideas
around growing your
own food—or projects
made of more-
everyday materials,
such as Legos, fabric,
marshmallows, or duct
or masking tape.
These low-tech
projects remind
attendees that they
don’t need a 3-D
printer or the IoT to be
able to make things
they love—or to learn
important lessons
about the value of
multiple iterations.
Business travelers heading to New York City soon could be just in time for the World
Maker Faire New York, taking place September 26 and 27 at the New York Hall of
Science. This is just one of the fun festivals celebrating do-it-yourself artists and tech-
nologists taking place in communities around the globe each year.
What wi ll attendees see in New York City? We asked Oracle AppsLab’s Raymond
Xie and Mark Vilrokx, who attended Maker Faire Bay Area in May, for insight into
what types of projects attendees can expect — and for tips for getting the most out of
attending a Maker Faire. Xie’s overall advice for attendees? “Try to have fun like a
kid.” More at makerfaire.com. —KATE PAVAO
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12 FYI
TECHNOLOGY POWERED. BUSINESS DRIVEN.
TRAVEL
BRAVE NEW HOTEL
GREEN
FUTURE FOREST
C O U R T E S Y O F B I O C A R B O N E N G I N E E R I N G ; © H
U I S T E N B O S C H
Travelers staying in
Japan’s Henn na Hotel
now have a chance to
interact with a new
kind of employee.
The hotel, which
opened this July in
Nagasaki, is staffed
with humanoid and
other robots providing
front desk, porter, andcleaning services. The
robots are even programmed to converse with
guests “with a humanly kind of warmth, while
they work efficiently,” according to the official
hotel press release.
Martin Ford, author of Rise of the Robots:
Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (inter-
viewed on page 14), says a robot-staffed hotel is
probably more of a gimmick than a truly new
business model. “In Japan, people in general like
robots,” he says. “They are very trendy there.”
Even so, business travelers don’t have to look
too hard to see the ways technology is chang-
ing the hotel industry. An increasing number of
hotel chains let guests use smartphones to book
reservations, check in — and even open doors to
their rooms.
But want a robot to carry your luggage? You’ll
have to head to Henn na Hotel, where a single
room starts at ¥9,000 per night (about US$73).
More at h-n-h.jp/en. —KATE PAVAO
Every year, lumber, mining, agriculture, and urban engineer-
ing take down billions of trees. And manual planting can’t keep
pace with this rate of global deforestation. That’s why UK-based
startup BioCarbon Engineering plans to use robot drones to plant
1 billion trees a year.
“Deforestation occurs at an industrial rate,” explains former
NASA engineer and BioCarbon Engineering CEO Lauren
Fletcher. “Conventional reforestation techniques are slow, expen-
sive, and labor intensive. Our solution automates reforestation in
a way that is cheap and scalable.”
BioCarbon Engineering’s scientists and engineers developeda new system for faster reforestation called precision planting.
First, drones fly over selected areas, gathering detailed data about
the terrain. On the second trip, drones shoot pods containing
germinated seedlings and nutrients into the soil. They return
periodically to monitor overall ecosystem health and ensure
long-term viability.
Fletcher’s team has tested the process in the lab and will
conduct field tests over the next few months. “We are focused on
ecosystem restoration,” says Fletcher. “We will be working with
local ecologists and communities to ensure that our efforts meet
their needs from a biological and sustainability perspective.”
More at biocarbonengineering.com. —BOBBIE HARTMAN
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On the robot takeover: Robots
are already in factories
and warehouses. There’s acompany in San Francisco
working on a fast-food auto-
mation machine that can
crank out nearly 400 ham-
burgers an hour. But I think
the bigger story is how smart
software — and in particular
machine learning — is putting
white-collar jobs at risk, from
writing to e-discovery.
If you look at corporate
nance departments, the head
count for jobs such as nancial
planners, accountants, and
accounts payable and receiv-
able has collapsed by about
40 percent since 2004 for
companies earning the same
revenue, and it’s all because
smart software can automate
what those people are doing.
On breakthroughs: When
Microsoft developers launched
Kinect for video-game con-
sumers, they perhaps
inadvertently created a really
affordable technology that
people working in roboticsimmediately realized would
give robots 3-D vision.
More recently, researchers
at UC Berkeley programmed
a robot with deep learning
algorithms — the technology
driving machine learning
and pattern recognition — so
it could teach itself tasks that
require a great deal of dexter-
ity, like unscrewing the cap
on a bottle.
On cloud robotics: With thecloud, you can ofoad much
of the intelligence of a robot
into these massive computing
services. You already see this
with intelligent personal assis-
tants, such as Siri or Google
Now. You will be able to build
individual robots that are
cheaper because they don’t
need to have so much memory
and processing power, and
you can upgrade all the robotsat once in a central location.
On caution: I am not anti-
technology. I believe that
technology is primarily theforce that makes us better off.
But I think we need to recog-
nize how technology can dis-
rupt income and employment,
and the impact that will have
on consumer spending in
the economy.
On robot-proof jobs: You
can never say never, but in
general, workers should focus
on things that involve genuine
creativity and that are in no
way repetitive and formulaic.
Be exible. No one is
going to have a career that
lasts 30 years anymore. But
it’s not going to be enough
to say to someone, “This is
what you have to do as an
individual to stay ahead.”
We need to recognize that
automation — and job loss — is
going to be something that we
are going to have to deal with
as a society. —KATE PAVAO
ON TOPIC
BEYOND DISRUPTIONCan a robot do your job better than you can?
PERCENTAGE OF JOBS that are at high risk for automation in the next two decades
(Source: 2013 Oxford Martin School study)47
When you think about robot workers, you might pic-
ture the Jetsons’ maid, Rosie, or a big-eyed garbage
collector like WALL-E.
But Martin Ford, Silicon Valley entrepreneur and
author of Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat
of a Jobless Future (Basic Books, 2015), has a differ-
ent denition of the machines that are dramaticallydisrupting workforces around the globe.
“It means basically any kind of automation, and in
particular it includes software,” he explains. “A lot
of the automation we’re talking about is white-collar
automation, which is not mechanical robots at all.”
Here, he talks to Proft about new breakthroughs
in automation, what jobs are at risk, and the discus-
sions we all need to start having right now.
14 FYI
TECHNOLOGY POWERED. BUSINESS DRIVEN.
“THE BIGGER
STORY IS
HOW SMART
SOFTWARE—
AND INPARTICULAR
MACHINE
LEARNING—
IS PUTTING
WHITE-COLLAR
JOBS AT RISK,
FROM WRITING TO
E-DISCOVERY.”
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Chief financial officers
(CFOs) need to know
that the cloud is not a
trend. It’s here to stay,
and eventually all of your comput-
ing functionality may reside there.
Dan Fitzgerald, managing directorand Oracle Cloud ERP leader at
PwC, discusses how and why CFOs
should be taking advantage of this
technological transformation.
Why should CFOs move the
finance function to the cloud?
The CFO and finance function can
benefit greatly from a cloud imple-
mentation. Instead of spending
time compiling and managing data
simply to ensure its accuracy, the
finance function will be freed up for
more value-added tasks, such as
data analysis that leads to more-
intelligent business decisions andinput from the CFO. For companies
quickly evolving or changing, the
finance function gains the ability to
be more agile with a cloud solution,
with shorter implementation and
update times, systems that are
current and up to date, and quick
scalability. In terms of cost, which
is always top of mind for CFOs,cloud implementations typically
deliver full return on investment
within two years and may cost as
much as 50 percent less than
traditional on-premises solutions.
Savings will be accrued in multiple
areas: fewer IT staff members,
simpler upgrades and no cus-
tomizations, and no maintenance
fees on unimplemented enterprise
resource planning (ERP) modules.
What are some challenges CFOs
face in a cloud implementation?
The three areas CFOs worry most
about are customizations, security
concerns, and internal resistance.
The major drawback in shifting to
the cloud is that the customiza-
tions you’ve grown accustomed
to with on-premises ERP systems
are more limited with the cloud.
This may mean changing your
finance processes to an extent.The finance community also has
legitimate concerns over storing
financial data in the cloud where it
is ostensibly more vulnerable. The
fact is, whether your data resides
on the internet or offline on your
network, it’s never completely im-
mune to attack. But rest assured
that best-in-class cloud vendors
are employing a greater level of
security and spending more on
technology than you are. Finally, a
cloud solution will decrease the
number of IT staff you need from
an infrastructure and development
perspective, so be prepared to en-
counter some internal resistanceto your plans.
How can CFOs get started with
the cloud?
As you approach a cloud project,
it’s a good idea to try not to think
about the technology at all. Rather,
ask yourself exactly how you want
the finance function to look: what
kind of processes and people
would you have? What kind of
data would you want? How quicklywould you want to be able to
employ it, and what capacity would
it have? Set goals and objec-
tives that don’t factor in your own
system limitations. There’s an op-
portunity here to rethink how your
finance function operates, from a
people, process, and data perspec-
tive. While the new systems are
less dependent on the IT function,
they also allow the finance func-
tion to be more involved. Becauseof these inherent changes, CFOs
need to prepare for some resis-
tance and apply change manage-
ment processes accordingly. But
in the end, it will be worth it—
especially in terms of the enhanced
analytics and improved decision-
making that the cloud offers.
Moving Finance to the CloudCFOs may experience some pain transitioning to the cloud, but the gain will
be worth it.
S P O N S O R E D C O N T E N T
Dan Fitzgerald, Managing Director and Oracle
Cloud ERP Leader, PwC
For more information, visit www.pwc.com
PARTNER Q&A [
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18 INSIDE ORACLE
TECHNOLOGY POWERED. BUSINESS DRIVEN.
Oracle provides multiple options for customers to move ERP solutions to the cloud—at their own pace.
Rondy Ng has just one simple goal: to
provide the #1 enterprise resource planning
(ERP) cloud solution on the market. “I want to
make Oracle ERP Cloud the de facto choice for
enterprise-level customers,” says Ng, senior vicepresident of application development at Oracle.
Ng and his team are well on their way: in
June 2015, more than 1,000 customers had
signed up for Oracle Enterprise Resource
Planning Cloud (Oracle ERP Cloud), includ-
ing companies across 22 industries and 58
countries, an increase of more than ve times
over the prior year.
Here, Ng talks to Proftabout how Oracle ERP
Cloud helps customers
streamline their businesses,
and why Oracle’s offering just
keeps getting better.
PROFIT : What is driving the
move to ERP in the cloud?
NG: I have spoken to more
than a hundred CIOs and
CFOs over the past couple of years. There are
generally four main drivers we have observed for
adopting Oracle ERP Cloud.
First is operational efciency. Real savings come
from eliminating redundant systems, streamlining
business processes with standard best practices,
and even moving to the shared services model.
Second is supporting growth. Fast-growing
midsize businesses often nd existing ERP sys-
tems lack the workow automation, scalability,
and nance functions needed to support projected
growth. Expanding businesses need sophisticated
multicurrency, multilingual, multientity, localized
tax, payments, and other compliance capabili-
ties that only enterprise-grade ERPs can deliver.
Frankly, there were no such options until just two years ago when we came on the market.
The large multinational enterprises want
to expand into new lines of business and new
countries, and perform rapid M&A. In many
cases these expansion plans don’t have complex
requirements, but they do need a low-cost and fast
deployment model. Again, Oracle ERP Cloud is
starting to see excellent traction in these cases.
Third is digital evolution. ERP solutions
are no longer just for processing transactions.
Sophisticated, embedded, multidimensional
analytics are critical for decision-makers because
they receive real-time business insights any day
during the month, rather than just a post close
cycle consolidation view.
Fourth is mitigating risks with scarce skilled
IT resources. CIOs are concerned about theirdependency on the few skilled workers who truly
FORWARD MOMENTUMQ&A
B O B A D
L E R / G E T T Y I M A G E S
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19
PROFIT AUGUST 2015
understand their highly customized legacy systems.
PROFIT: Is IT still in charge of making the decision?
NG: I have denitely seen more involvement from
the line-of-business owners. They are involved
in initiating the research or putting the demand
to the IT organization. Business users, especiallysome of the younger workers, get excited about
our cloud solution and the technology it promises,
compared to the dated systems they use.
CIOs tell me that for an ERP system — even
for a subsidiary deployment — they are still ulti-
mately in charge of evaluating the solution and
making the decision to buy. It’s not like CRM
[customer relationship management] solutions,
where you see a lot of departmental purchases.
PROFIT: What is unique about the Oracle ERP
Cloud offering?
NG:Sometimes it gets lost that Oracle ERP Cloud
is based on the lessons and best practices from
more than 30 years of core subject matter exper-
tise in building and implementing the best ERP
on-premises systems. We bring a lot of intellectual
property to the table in Oracle ERP Cloud that
others cannot match.
Oracle Cloud Platform customers can integrate
and extend existing on-premises IT systems with
cloud services, so business transformation and
modernization can happen faster. With simpler
and cheaper IT, businesses can shift applications
to the cloud, innovate faster, and take advantage
of new markets. In this way, we really become anextension of our customers’ IT organization.
At Oracle, security is really the highest prior-
ity. We have 19 data centers across the globe, and
all employ a very strong governance model. At
the product level, we offer virtual tenancy, which
ensures complete data isolation. There is no way
a user with access to one environment can tamper
with anything outside of that virtual machine
boundary. In addition, all the data is encrypted
over the wire and encrypted in a backup, so the
database administrators can’t even see the data.
Another unique aspect is that Oracle ERP
Cloud has built-in features such as social collabo-
ration, contextual business intelligence, role-based
dashboards, and mobile applications, embedding
innovation and productivity into the user inter-
face. Real-time reporting and actionable insight
increase the effectiveness of decision-making and
drive innovation.
With the cloud model, we are able to provide
new functionality in two to three releases every
year, with generally hundreds of features each
time, which allows our cloud customers to get the
benet of seeing the new functionality right away.
Aaron Lazenby is editor in chief of Prot.
Rondy Ng, Senior Vice
President of Application
Development, Oracle
“ORACLE ERPCLOUD IS
BASED ONTHE LESSONSAND BESTPRACTICES FROM MORETHAN 30YEARS OFCORE SUBJECTMATTEREXPERTISE INBUILDING ANDIMPLEMENTING
THE BEST ERPON-PREMISESSYSTEMS.”
A selection of Oracle announcementsfrom the past quarter
ORACLEHEADLINES
J U L Y22 New Oracle Cloud Services
Help Retailers Turn Data
into Insight
09 Oracle VM VirtualBox 5.0
Released
J U N E29 Oracle Introduces Oracle
Commerce Cloud
23 Oracle Partners Pivot to the
Cloud
22 Oracle Extends
Cloud Portfolio
with New PaaS
Services
M A Y21 Oracle Celebrates
20 Years of Java
19 Oracle Enables Mobile
Content Delivery with
Documaker Mobile
12 Oracle Announces New
Mobile Capabilities to Oracle
Marketing Cloud
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21INSIDE ORACLE
PROFIT AUGUST 2015
VALUE-MINDEDOracle Supply Chain Management Cloud enables
innovation and value in an ever-changing global market.
BY ALISON WEISS
Cloud presents an opportunity to bring new
thinking to enterprise supply chain management
(SCM), adding new exibility and functionality to
help managers weather a dynamic global climate.
And managers clearly welcome that help: a recent
Accenture report, Supply Chain Management in the
Cloud , shows demand for software-as-a-service
(SaaS) SCM applications will grow at a 19 percent
compound annual rate between 2014 and 2018.
Oracle Supply Chain Management Cloud
Release 11, targeted for availability before the end
of 2015, was designed with this demand in mind.
According to Rick Jewell, senior vice president of
supply chain applications at Oracle, most other“cloud” SCM applications are simply existing
legacy transactional applications that have been
migrated to a hosted infrastructure. But the
new Oracle solution has been designed from the
ground up for the modern digital value chain.
Oracle SCM Cloud Release 11 is a complete
suite of applications focused initially on high
technology and industrial manufacturing compa-
nies. The release features new functionality such as
Oracle Fusion Order Management Cloud Service,
a multichannel system that includes native pricing
and conguration capabilities. Oracle Sales Cloud
Service for High Tech and Manufacturing will
provide support for in-house and outsourced manu-
facturing, while a planning central cloud feature
will support multiplant demand and supply plan-
ning for the manufacturing enterprise. These new
products complement already available capabilities
such as Oracle Product Lifecycle Management
Managed Cloud Service, which features a new
innovation management module that uniquely
focuses on the “fuzzy front end” to ensure compa-
nies are designing and investing in products that
have the highest likelihood of customer acceptance.
In addition, all the modules within OracleSCM Cloud incorporate embedded analytics and
business intelligence to provide more visibility
into supply chains to better understand and
serve customers.
Now, enterprise supply chain managers can
segment customers to see unique requirements
and commonalities. They can then set up robust,
efcient supply chains to properly address the
needs of each segment.
Further, Oracle wants to provide SCM
customers with a exible path to the cloud. So
enterprise supply chain managers can phase in
any of the new solutions that are part of Oracle
SCM Cloud Release 11 by prioritizing those that
will provide the most value. Customers can also
elect to incorporate new cloud modules to coexist
with on-premises SCM systems.
“Today, every business is a digital business,”
says Jewell. “At Oracle, we want to provide the
broadest and deepest supply chain capabili-
ties in the cloud to transform supply chains into
dynamic, innovative, and customer-centric digital
value chains.”
Alison Weiss is a frequent contributor to Prot.
Rick Jewell, Senior Vice President of Supply Chain
Applications, Oracle
“TODAY, EVERYBUSINESSIS A DIGITALBUSINESS.AT ORACLE,
WE WANT TO
PROVIDE THE
BROADEST
AND DEEPEST
SUPPLY CHAIN
CAPABILITIES
IN THE CLOUD
TO TRANSFORM
SUPPLY CHAINS
INTO DYNAMIC,
INNOVATIVE, AND
CUSTOMER-
CENTRIC DIGITAL
VALUE CHAINS.”
B O B A D
L E R / G E T T Y I M A G E S
PERCENTAGE OF ANNUAL COMPOUND GROWTH RATE predicted in the demand for software-as-a-servicesupply chain management applications between 2014 and 2018. (Source: Accenture)19
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The newly formed Accenture
Oracle Business Group
helps customers embrace
the cloud to achieve their
digital transformation goals.Through the group, Accenture and
Oracle are developing and deliver-
ing industry-specific solutions built
on the Oracle Cloud to deliver busi-
ness value and innovation—with
speed, agility, and reduced risk.
Accenture Managing Director Brian
Sullivan discusses how the group
brings together Accenture’s and
Oracle’s leading technology, skills,
and experience to offer businessesthe ability to help customers move
to the cloud faster.
What was the impetus for forming
the group?
Our customers want to transform
themselves into integrated digital
enterprises, and are utilizing virtu-alized services to accelerate this
transformation. We want to help
business leaders quickly react to
changing economic conditions by
leveraging software that addresses
their specific business and indus-
try requirements. They demand se-
cure solutions that provide industry
and competitive differentiation.
They prefer a simplified consump-
tion model that can flex as their
business evolves. Finally, they wantto achieve their digital transforma-
tion at speed, low cost, and with a
managed risk profile. The Accen-
ture Oracle Business Group helps
address these needs and serves
as a catalyst for digital transforma-
tion for our customers.
How is this different from how
Accenture and Oracle are already
working together?
Oracle and Accenture have alreadyforged a successful relationship
working with customers who are
adopting cloud. We saw an op-
portunity to build on that success
and work together more closely.
We wanted to create new solu-
tions, and simplify and streamline
the buying process for Accen-
ture solutions based on Oracle
Cloud technologies. Customers
should find it easier to meet their
industry-specific needs arounddigital technology through this new
framework.
Are you focusing on any industries
in particular?
Our customers’ cloud solutions need
to support their business processes
and buttress the innovation that’sessential for succeeding in their
sector. With the Accenture Oracle
Business Group, they can leverage
next-generation cloud applications,
tailored for their industry, specifically
designed to address the challenges
of the fast-changing digital market-
place. Beginning with cloud solu-
tions for the government, financial
services, and hospitality industries,
the group’s prebuilt solutions, adapt-
ers, accelerators, and extensionshelp improve the range of business
processes and strategic capabilities
used in each sector, such as finan-
cial management, human resources,
and regulatory reporting. Additional
cloud solutions are in development
for a host of other industries, and
our accelerators, adapters, and the
Accenture Foundation Platform for
Oracle Cloud support the needs of
our customers in nearly any industry.
What are the group’s solutions?
The group’s solutions are built us-
ing Oracle’s software-as-a-service
and platform-as-a-service capabili-
ties delivered via the Accenture
Foundation Platform for Oracle, a
multicomponent development and
integration accelerator running
in Oracle Cloud. The group offers
preintegrated, enterprise-class
cloud solutions and a robust
service catalog to help simplifymigration to the cloud and acceler-
ate overall innovation. Many of our
A Catalyst for Digital Transformation Accenture and Oracle join forces to form a new group that helps customers
realize the benefits of the cloud faster and with reduced risk.
S P O N S O R E D C O N T E N T
Brian Sullivan, Managing Director, Accenture
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CHANGING
GEARSWith a shift toward social, GM uses new channels to talk with
(not at) customers.
BY ALAN JOCH | PHOTOGRAPHY BY BLAKE J. DISCHER
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Before dawn one day last February, an intriguing question poppedup on Twitter: “Can a Suburban handle a family of six with twodogs and a dad that makes Vines in a batman mask? The minivanisn’t cutting it ;).”
Some companies might have ignored this inscrutable tweet, posted by someone posing
in a Batman costume and using the Twitter name BatDad (@BatDadBlake). But General
Motors’ social marketing team saw a chance to strike gold. Well before normal business
hours that same day, team members responded with a 140-character summary of howa Chevrolet Suburban SUV might fit BatDad’s needs. That response fired up an ongo-
ing social media conversation that eventually convinced PR and marketing staffs within
GM’s Chevrolet division to locate a loaner vehicle for the Caped Consumer. And for the
next week, BatDad posted short videos of himself in fu ll costume, discussing his impres-
sions of the SU V.
“He loved the vehicle and bought a new ‘Batmobile’ two weeks later,” says Rebecca
Harris, global head of GM’s Social Center of Expertise (CoE).
For Chevrolet, this wasn’t just a one-off sale. By marshaling a team of social media
experts, the company had captured the kind of publicity that digitally minded enterprises
crave but can’t buy at any price — positive reviews that real people broadcast across social
media. “The benefit for us was not only selling the vehicle,” Harris says, “but also getting
2 million views of BatDad’s test drive and his impressions of the sales experience.” C
O U R T E S Y O F G M
25
PROFIT AUGUST 2015
David Mingle (left), Executive Director of GM’s Global Connected Customer Experience Program, withRebecca Harris, Global Head of the Social Center of Expertise
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In the Fast Lane
The promise of wins like these — whether to drive sales,
enhance customer service, or improve product designs — is
spurring industry leaders to bet big on social media for
customer experience (CX). Recent data makes it hard to do
otherwise: 52 percent of internet-connected adults now use two
or more social media sites, a sharp jump from 42 percent just
two years ago, according to Pew Research Center. Overall,
Pew reports, 71 percent of internet users visit Facebook. A daily
social habit is evident across all age groups and platforms, with
about half of Instagram users, 36 percent of Twitter followers,and 17 percent of Pinterest visitors checking in every day.
Enterprises see the writing on the virtual wall. Dutch
airline KLM not only staffs a 150-person social team to help
locate lost luggage and address service complaints, according
to VentureBeat, but it also generates US$25 million in annual
revenue through social bookings. Early in 2015, Comcast
announced a tripling of its social care team to keep pace with
the rapid growth of outbound social communications.
But all the social numbers aren’t positive: More than 2 mil-
lion negative mentions are posted from the United States on
social media each day, according to VentureBeat. So waiting
on the social CX sidelines is just too risky. “Social media isstill a bit of the Wild West, but everyone knows they’ve got to
do it,” says David Mingle, executive director of GM’s Global
Connected Customer Experience Program. “The COI — cost
of ignoring — is too high.”
Spreading Expertise
Nevertheless, social CX is a multifaceted challenge, says Meg
Bear, group vice president of Oracle Social Cloud. Social
teams need the tools and expertise to engage target audiences
wherever they congregate in the social universe. And social
teams in large enterprises must extend their activities globally.
But before any company dives deeply into social, it must showthat it’s solving a real CX problem or creating real business
value. “If not, you’re probably not going to have sustained
budget, and you’re defnitely not going to see an actual business
impact,” Bear says.
GM’s executives have understood social’s risks and rewards
for years, which is why they have deployed an experienced
team to quickly engage BatDad and others who regularly com-
municate about the company or its products on social media.
GM’s Social CoE, now managed by Harris and Mingle, is
the core of the company’s social strategy. Created in 2013, the
center coordinates activities across business units and social
platforms, and encourages social media best practices amongGM’s employees worldwide. The CoE staff is multidisciplinary,
with some, like Harr is, coming from public relations, others
from marketing and customer care. “Thanks to the rules of the
road we’ve developed, each group understands its role and how
to work with other teams to improve customer experience,”
Harris says. “The CoE makes our social strategy much more a
part of the fabric of what we do every day.”
One of the CoE’s main goals is to build relationships with
current and potential customers. “It’s not about Likes. It’s all
about engagement,” Mingle says. “We must provide enough
value so people keep coming back and re-engaging with our
content, because we believe that engaged customers are more-loyal customers.”
The CoE, based at GM headquarters in Detroit, includes a
command center with a bank of monitors that team members
scan during product introductions and other GM promotional
initiatives. They also move into position to address any trend-
ing social media messages that threaten to cast a shadow on the
GM brand.
One such risk arose during baseball’s 2014 World Series,
when the unpredictability of a live presentation quickly turned
into a master class in how to get ahead of potentially damaging
social publicity. To promote the newly redesigned Colorado
pickup truck, a Chevrolet regional manager awarded one of the vehicles to the Series’ Most Valuable Player. Unfortunately, the
Chevy spokesperson struggled under the pressure of live televi-
sion and used the phrase “technology and stuff ” to describe the
truck’s new features.
“SOCIAL MEDIA IS STILL A BIT OF THE WILD WEST, BUT EVERYONE KNOWS THEY’VE GOT TO DO IT. THE COI—COSTOF IGNORING—IS TOO HIGH.”
—David Mingle, Executive Director of GM’s Global Connected Customer Experience Program
26
TECHNOLOGY POWERED. BUSINESS DRIVEN.
SNAPSHOT GENERAL MOTORS gm.com
Headquarters: Detroit, Michigan
Industry: Automotive
Employees: 212,000
Revenue: US$155.9 billion in 2014
Oracle products: Oracle SocialRelationship Management
Cloud Service, Siebel Customer
Relationship Management
REBECCA HARRIS
Global Head of the Social Center
of Expertise
Length of tenure: 25 years
Education: BA, Saginaw Valley
State University; MS
in administration, Central
Michigan University; PhD in
organization communications,Wayne State University
Personal mantra:
“It is important to stay curious
and calm so you can hit the
curveball when it is served up.
If you continue to askquestions, listen, and be aware
of what’s going on around
you, your team can build an
integrated foundation that
gives them the opportunity to
be creative and innovative to
serve customers faster and
more effectively. To do all this,
you need the right team. You
have to hire the right people,
people who are willing to think
differently, who can react to the
curveball calmly, and who havecan-do work ethics.”
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27
PROFIT AUGUST 2015
Rebecca Harris, global head of
the Social Center of Expertise
at GM, says GM’s social
strategy is now “much more a
part of the fabric of what we
do every day.”
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The hashtags #TechnologyAndStuff and #ChevyGuy
quickly began trending on Twitter, and much of the buzz was
negative from GM’s point of view. “We decided to get sassy
with it,” says Jamie Barbour, manager of Chevrolet’s digital
and social advertising, who oversees the Chevrolet social team.Team members gathered in the command center shortly after
midnight the very next day and didn’t get to sleep until after
midnight the following day. The group decided that humor
was the best response and soon tweeted, “Truck yeah the 2015
#ChevyColorado has awesome #TechnologyAndStuff!”
The strategy hit a chord with Twitter followers — the frst
tweet received 178,000 views, 1,530 retweets, and 1,486
favorites. Chevrolet executives estimate that all the social
conversations resulting from what could have been perceived
as a gaf fe earned the company more than US$5 mill ion
worth of free media exposure. In addition, the Chevrolet staff
worked with marketing and advertising departments to include#TechnologyAndStuff in promotions planned for the new
Colorado truck line in the following days.
“The CoE enabled us to reach across our silos,” Harris says,
“so within 24 hours we had a well-coordinated effort.”
It Takes a Social Village
If timely and highly targeted communications are the fuel of
social engagement, the tight integration of people and technol-
ogy is the engine of long-term success in social CX. GM’s social
teams work closely with people in marketing, advertising, sales,
and product development to coordinate social and more-tra-
ditional activities. Major sporting events and vehicle introduc-tions, in particular, turn up the heat on those efforts.
“Social is an area that encourages two-way conversations
instead of a platform for the brand to just push out information
that we want consumers to know,” Barbour says. For example,
GM organizes online chats for members of its social communi-
ties to speak with a product manager or an engineer to address
questions about vehicles. “These community members ask
challenging questions and tell us how we can make our vehicles
even better,” Barbour says. “We take those insights seriously
and incorporate many of them into new model designs.”
In a simi lar vein, GM is bringing its extensive dealer
network under its social umbrella. “When customers come incontact with a dealer, they usually think they’re talking to the
brand,” Mingle points out. “So the more we can integrate our
efforts with our dealers, the more seamless everything looks
and the better the experience is for customers.”
Integrated ToolsThe underlying technology of GM’s social programs is simi-
larly well integrated across social channels, business units, and
related enterprise applications. That means having sophisti-
cated tools for creating and distributing content, as well as for
monitoring public social conversations and gathering and ana-
lyzing data. But GM executives also insist that the company’s
social applications closely mesh with its core IT infrastructure.
“We have hundreds of employees worldwide that are on social,
and they all must be able to access the same knowledgebases and
related enterprise resources,” Mingle says. “Otherwise, we risk
creating poor customer experiences if, for example, a call center
agent comes up with a different answer than someone communi-cating via social.”
With those criteria in mind, the CoE staff piloted four
social marketing platforms in its evaluation two years ago
before deciding on Oracle Social Relationship Management
Cloud Service. “Our team relied heavily on feedback from the
people who were going to actually use any system we fnal ly
chose,” Harris says. Since its implementation, the Oracle
platform has let GM consolidate a hodgepodge of socia l tools
from various vendors into a single, centralized environment.
The cloud service helps the social team create timely content
and improve response time by monitoring various social
channels and automatically routing relevant messages to theproper person — according to brand and department.
500Number of employees from PR, sales, marketing, and
customer service who represent GM or its individual brands
on various social media sites each day
5,000Number of customers who engage with GM’s service
representatives via social media each month
28
TECHNOLOGY POWERED. BUSINESS DRIVEN.
THE ROI OF SOCIAL CX: ENCOURAGING SIGNS EMERGE
Executives from large organiza-
tions, GM included, acknowledge
that calculating the financial
ROI of social business initiatives
isn’t easy. With the help of Oracle
Social Relationship Management
Cloud Service, however, GM ana-
lyzed social’s role in generatingsales leads and found direct links
between social customer experi-
ence (CX) and financial returns.
For example, when someone
tweets an interest in buying a new
vehicle or mentions that he or she
has a lease coming to an end, GM’s
social staff responds. So far in
2015, GM has responded to more
than 15,000 such tweets, all of
which the sales staff determined
were viable leads via Twitter. The
team followed up with offers to
provide additional information. Five
thousand people took GM up on the
offers, which opened up direct con-
versations between the company
and consumers.
From these engagements, about
35 percent of the potential custom-
ers considered GM’s invitation to
test drive a vehicle at a local deal-
ership. About 65 of those peopleactually got behind the wheel.
The bottom line: GM sold at least
22 vehicles to consumers who took
one of those test drives.
“If we weren’t listening to cus-
tomers, these sales may never have
happened,” says Rebecca Harris,
global head of the Social Center of
Expertise at GM.
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“Our platform helps companies communicate on multiplesocial networks and get value out of that participation,” says
Oracle’s Meg Bear. “First and foremost, that means helping
users understand what their customers care about.” Oracle’s
social listening tools derive meaning from the great mass of
public discussion by taking in that unstructured data and
identify ing common themes, Bear explains. Many customers
may just be interested in a topic related to their brand, and
some percentage of discussion participants may be detractors
of that brand. “You need to understand how to neutralize
that threat by addressing any confusion or correcting any
misinformation,” she says.
Oracle Social Relationship Management Cloud Serviceis also closely integrated with Oracle’s Siebel Customer
Relationship Management (Siebel CRM), which GM uses to
keep a record of ongoing interactions with each customer or sales
lead. This integration enables, for example, a social customer-
care agent for the Chevrolet brand to open a formal case le
using Siebel CRM and use it to access any related call center
communications or information in GM knowledgebases that are
pertinent to the topic. In addition to helping customer advis-
ers provide high levels of service, the Oracle solutions help GM
comply with auto industry regulations, such as those spelled out
in the US government’s Transportation Recall Enhancement,
Accountability, and Documentation (TREAD) Act.In addition, Oracle Social Relationship Management Cloud
Service allows for sophisticated data collection and analysis tounderstand customer sentiment. The social team can monitor
trends over time — by week, month, or quarter, for example — or in real time, as with audience reactions during a vehicle
launch. “By constantly seeing what’s trending, we can adjust
our social messages accordingly,” Harris says.
In the future, Harris plans to expand the use of the plat-
form’s predictive modeling capabilities by linking its analyses to
information in an enterprise data warehouse.
GM CEO Mary Barra and the entire executive team “are
very committed to customer experience, and they have given
us a lot of latitude in this space to do good work,” Harris says.
“Having a social marketing platform that we’ve deployed ona global basis means we can provide all of our people with the
right resources to be even more successful taking care of cus-
tomers and providing world-class service.”
Alan Joch is a business and technology writer who specializes in enter-
pri se applicat ions, cloud computing , mobile computing , and the web.
Scan to learn more about the Oracle solutions featured in this story.
ACTION ITEM
29
PROFIT AUGUST 2015
“Social is an area that
encourages two-way
conversations,” says Jamie
Barbour, manager
of Chevrolet’s digital and
social advertising.
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The partnership between KPMG
and Oracle is a natural one be-
cause Oracle has made a deep
commitment to investing in the
industries we serve. The unique
breadth of Oracle’s cloud prod-
uct offerings and market-leading
applications gives us the ability
to provide a holistic cloud-based
solution to our clients, which
ultimately reduces implementa-
tion and ongoing maintenancerisk, and increases the value of
a cloud-based platform adop-
tion investment. Additionally,
our close partnership allows us
to provide our clients with an
optimized and simplified way to
adopt cloud technologies and
help them achieve real busi-
ness value.
What are KPMG’s offerings in
this space?
KPMG’s Powered Enterprise
solution offers our clients the
benefits of a transformative
migration to the Oracle Cloud
application platform, with the
timeliness that comes from us-
ing a prebuilt solution based on
leading practices to optimize the
entire business function, not just
the application.By adopting Oracle Cloud
Applications using our KPMG
Powered Enterprise solution,
clients can benefit from
•Higher certainty of outcome:
From day one you know what
the prebuilt system will entail
and how it will integrate with
your requirements.
•Lower risk: The core system
has been successfully tested
and deployed, unlike implemen-
tations started from scratch.
• Faster process: Adapting a
small portion of the system is
faster and less disruptive to
the business.
• Experience and insight: Our
systems combine the tried and
tested insight from KPMG’s
finance, technology, tax, and
audit practices with the technol-ogy expertise of Oracle.
• Lower cost: You benefit from
cost savings, both at implemen-
tation and in the longer term.
PARTNER Q&A [
For more information, visit www.kpmg.com
Software as a service
(SaaS) can help you build
the finance organization
of tomorrow. As you move
forward, consider five key value
opportunities:
1. Marketplace advantage. Will
SaaS-enabled finance enable youto better predict trends? Nimbly
respond to change? Tap analytics
that answer key questions better
and faster than competitors?
2. Increasing productivity.
How can SaaS improve access
to accurate, reliable financial
information and enable better
decisions about the business?
Examine the benefits of using the
cloud to automate transactional
processes, improve the strategic
contribution of the finance
function, optimize reporting, and
streamline compliance.
3. Enabling human resources
(collaboration). Social, mobile,
and analytical technologies are
revolutionizing communications.Think about how the modernization
of your financial systems can position
your organization as an employer
of choice, support high-potential
employees, and build leaders.
4. Improving business efficiency
and quality. Through automation,
consolidation, and analytics,
a SaaS model can improve
the overall performance of
finance, while simplifying the
complexity and inefficiency of
legacy on-premises systems.
In your organization, can
SaaS applications eliminate
fragmented or aging systems?
Reduce headcount and overall
transactions?
5. Reducing total cost ofownership. Similarly, consider the
potential of SaaS applications
to lower the overall cost of your
finance infrastructure. A cloud
model reduces the need for IT
support—while streamlining the IT
portfolio of hardware and software.
SaaS can also help control capital
outlays for ERP upgrades and re-
implementations, while reducing
costs associated with traditional
software licensing.
Five key value opportunities
Some or all of the services described herein may not be permissible for KPMG audit clients and their affiliates.
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HYBRID VISIONWilsonart integrates cloud and on-premises Oracle solutions to achieve operational excellence.
BY ALISON WEISS | PHOTOGRAPHY BY PAUL S. HOWELL
32
TECHNOLOGY POWERED. BUSINESS DRIVEN.
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Jay Krishnamurthy,
CIO, Wilsonart
From the outside, it looks like an ordinary
ranch-style brick home. But step inside the
Ralph Sr. and Sunny Wilson House, located
in Temple, Texas, and you’ll encounter an extraor-
dinary visual experience. The kitchen sports bright
coral laminate counters and turquoise-and-yellowlaminate cupboards. The living room is decorated
with white laminate-paneled walls, accented with
vivid red, black, and turquoise geometric shapes.
The house is a stunning example of midcentury
modern design, but it’s also a testament to the vision
of Ralph Wilson Sr., who in 1956 founded Ralph
Wilson Plastics Company to manufacture and selllaminate materials. When Wilson designed and
33
PROFIT AUGUST 2015
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SNAPSHOT WILSONART wilsonart.com
Location:
Austin, Texas
Industry:
Engineered surfaces/
manufacturing
Employees:
More than 4,500
Oracle products:
Oracle Business
Intelligence Applications,
Oracle Data Warehouse
solutions, Oracle Hyperion
Financial Management,
Oracle Sales Cloud
JAY KRISHNAMURTHY
CIO
Length of tenure:
Two years
Education:
MS in industrial
and manufacturing
engineering, Wichita
State University; BS in
mechanical engineering,
National Institute of
Engineering, Mysore, India
Personal quote/mantra:
“In order to function
effectively, knowledge is
not the main factor, but
clarity of perception.”
Wilsonart CIO Jay Krishnamurthy (left)
chats with CFO Jeff Lee.
TECHNOLOGY POWERED. BUSINESS DRIVEN.
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35
PROFIT AUGUST 2015
built the house in 1959, it served as his private home, as well
as a place to showcase creative and innovative ways to use his
company’s products.
Today, Ralph Wilson Plastics has evolved into Wilsonart — a
leading global provider of decorative and engineered surfaces.
Headquartered in Austin, Texas, the company has expandedbeyond Wilson’s innovative and creative laminate roots, with
solid-surface products in a rainbow of colors and a variety of
textures and patterns. Its newest offering is Wilsonart Quartz,
a luxurious, modern stone surface for interiors.
Indeed, that willingness on the part of Wilsonart executives
to harness new opportunities led to radical changes at the com-
pany in 2013, when Wilsonart and a host of afliated brands
were brought together as an independent company. Today,
Wilsonart encompasses global brands including Wilsonart,
Arborite, Ralph Wilson, Resopal, Polyrey, and Durcon.
Following the 2013 consolidation, executives determined
that they needed to rapidly standardize and automate disparatedata and reporting processes among business units in order for
the newly minted company to thrive. “At Wilsonart, we needed
to focus on growth and improving our operational efciency,”
says Wilsonart CEO Timothy J. O’Brien.
The immediate adoption of an on-premises analytics, nan-
cial consolidation, and reporting platform was the rst order of
business. At the same time, the sales side of the organization had
decided to streamline its sales management process by adopting
a cloud-based solution that had integration capabilities with on-
premises applications. Jay Krishnamurthy, CIO at Wilsonart,
acknowledges that managing two major initiatives in parallel
was an ambitious effort: the adoption of a new cloud-basedcustomer relationship management (CRM) tool and a powerful
nancial planning, consolidations, and analytics platform, along
with a hybrid cloud/on-premises integration effort.
“We’re a forward-thinking, collaborative executive team,”
he says. “We realized that with these tools and integrated
systems, we would be able to transform data and processes into
meaningful information, automate reporting, and take actions
that would enable and improve both commercial and opera-
tional excellence at a global level.”
With these clear goals in mind, Wilsonart proceeded with
the best applications for business analytics, nancial report-
ing, and sales management — choosing Oracle solutions in allcases. The cloud-based CRM solution was then integrated to
on-premises applications using Oracle Java Cloud Service and
XML. The resulting hybrid cloud solution now gives decision-
makers access to more-complete information to improve sales
and operational performance.
A Clear View of the BusinessThe Wilsonart brand has enjoyed strong and positive recogni-
tion in the consumer marketplace and among architectural
and construction rms for decades. Today, much of Wilsonart’s
business volume comes from supplying engineered surfaces to
ofces, hotels, restaurants, hospitals, schools, and retail estab-
lishments. To meet global demand, the company employs more
than 4,500 people, has 12 manufacturing facilities around the
world and an extensive distribution network, and manages 20
warehouses in the United States alone.
Collaboration across the entire company makes it all work.
“As an independent company, our senior leadership needs
to work in a cross-functional fashion,” says Tim Atkinson,Wilsonart vice president of sales, Americas, who has been
with the company since 1977. “I can’t sell by myself, without
Manufacturing producing and shipping our products,” he
continues. “We are all working together to achieve oversight of
the business.”
In 2013 and prior years, getting a consolidated view of
Wilsonart’s global businesses was cumbersome and required
manual heavy li fting. The disparate back-end enterprise
resource planning (ERP) systems in use made it dif cult to
extract data in a streamlined and consistent manner, making
the nancial close process also very manual. Additionally, due
to disparate sets of data in the different ERP systems, most ofthe global metrics had to be prepared manually.
“When we tried to analyze information from multiple busi-
ness units in Thailand, China, the Americas, the UK, France,
Germany, and Eastern Europe, we couldn’t do an apples-to-
apples comparison,” observes Wilsonart CFO Jeff Lee. “All the
data and reporting were unique to a particular business unit, so
there was no harmonization or consistency.”
Hybrid Cloud/On-Premises Options
While the company could have embarked on a multiyear,
multimillion-dollar upgrade project to get every business unit
on the same ERP platform, the executive team wanted tomove very quickly to create faster, more consistent, and more
“WE’RE A FORWARD-THINKING, COLLABORATIVEEXECUTIVE TEAM. WE REALIZED THAT WITHTHESE TOOLS AND INTEGRATED SYSTEMS, WE WOULD BE
ABLE TO TRANSFORM DATA AND PROCESSES INTO MEANINGFUL
INFORMATION, AUTOMATE REPORTING, AND TAKE ACTIONSTHAT WOULD ENABLE AND IMPROVE BOTH COMMERCIAL ANDOPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE AT A GLOBAL LEVEL.”
—Jay Krishnamurthy, CIO, Wilsonart
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accurate nancial close and reporting processes to improve
productivity across the organization.
The executive decision-makers decided to create a robust
on-premises nancial planning, analytics, and reporting
platform by selecting best-in-class, full-featured applications —
including Oracle Data Warehouse solutions, Oracle Business
Intelligence Applications, and Oracle Hyperion Financial
Management. The new system went live in early 2015 and
includes structures and processes to integrate all the back-end
ERP systems with an Oracle Data Warehouse instance outt-ted with Oracle Business Intelligence Applications.
Now data is automatically pulled from the eight different
ERP systems into the data warehouse, and Oracle Business
Intelligence Applications are used for data modeling and
analytics. Then, the system automatically feeds the informa-
tion into Oracle Hyperion Financial Management, where the
nancial reporting and consolidation processes are now more
standardized and streamlined.
“As a new company bringing different operations together,
we didn’t have the luxury of the time that it would have
required to implement these processes and tools in sequence.
With creative implementation teams and techniques, it tooka year to implement new systems that we needed to run our
global business,” says Krishnamurthy. “A lot can happen when
you get the right people in the room and can make the right
decisions to transform nancial processes and reporting.”
Speed was also a factor when it came to improving
Wilsonart’s sales automation system. The company’s legacy
CRM system was functional, but it wasn’t available on
demand. At the end of each day, salespeople had to plug in, go
online, synchronize any changes they made during the day,
and view any changes made by others to the master database.
Synchronization wasn’t an issue if two salespeople needed to
update information, but it was another matter entirely if 25people needed to synchronize their data. Then performance
became agonizingly slow. Moving to an on-demand cloud solu-
tion has alleviated the need to wait to synchronize information,
because data is now always current and accessible.
“We already used cloud-based applications for expense
reports and performance evaluations, so a cloud-based sales
management solution made sense to us,” says Atkinson. “We
took a year to evaluate options and chose Oracle Sales Cloud
because we could go live on it quickly, it would provide excel-
lent performance, it was mobile-compatible, and it could help
us achieve commercial excellence.”
Beyond the desired on-demand and mobile functionality,Oracle Sales Cloud held further promise to open up additional
selling opportunities — if it could be integrated with Wilsonart’s
nancial management and reporting platforms. Fortunately,
Oracle is committed to enabling hybrid integration between
its on-premises and cloud products, so this functionality was in
place. It reects market demand: according to a 2013 report by
Dynamic Markets, 47 percent of senior decision-makers sur-
veyed indicate that they adopt cloud applications to get accessto more-appropriate software for their departments, and a full
81 percent believe it’s important for cloud applications to be
fully integrated with other software in the organization.
To that end, Krishnamurthy and his team took the time to
understand key business drivers and map integration touch-
points between the back-end ERP systems, the new analytics
platform, and Oracle Sales Cloud. Then, they used Oracle Java
Cloud Service and integrations using XML to make the neces-
sary connections and produce outputs the business could use to
take necessary actions.
Quick, Consistent, Accurate InformationToday, Wilsonart’s entire organization is reaping the benets
of their new nancial consolidation, data warehousing, and
analytics platform, and its integration with Oracle Sales Cloud.
“Using Oracle Sales Cloud has helped us grow, and the busi-
ness analytics and Oracle Hyperion consolidation tools have
improved our nancial reporting and operational efciency,”
observes O’Brien. “The tools are critical as we expand
Wilsonart as a global leader in engineered surfaces.”
The new business intelligence and nancial consolidation
platform went live in January 2015, and Lee and his staff have
been able to load two years of history into Oracle Hyperion
Financial Management —
so it is much easier to compare 2015
INTEGRATION NATION
Many organizations want to reap
the rewards of integrating cloud
and on-premises applications
across the enterprise, and now
that integration is easier than ever.
The new Oracle Integration Cloud
Service solution facilitates secure
hybrid on-premises and cloud inte-
gration, as well as SaaS (software-
as-a-service)–to–SaaS integration.
An alternative to depending
on highly advanced integration
platforms that require specialized
developers, Oracle Integration Cloud
Service provides a simple, powerful
integration platform in the cloud
that doesn’t require users to install
and manage middleware or write any
code. Customers can connect to all
the Oracle SaaS applications they
are subscribed to by using prebuilt
adapters that provide simplified
native integration between SaaSapplications. It’s also easy to config-
ure connectivity to other SaaS and
on-premises applications through
Oracle’s suite of application-
specific adapters or by using web
service integration capabilities. And
availability isn’t a concern because
Oracle Integration Cloud Service
provides a reliable, available, and
high-performance platform for
managing the execution of mission-
critical integrations.
Oracle Integration Cloud Service
also offers a variety of integra-
tions prebuilt by Oracle and Oracle
partners so that customers don’t
have to start from scratch. Design
functionality is accessible via a
web browser, so it makes it easy for
users to simply point and click to
create integrations to innovate at a
more rapid pace.
36
TECHNOLOGY POWERED. BUSINESS DRIVEN.
81Percentage of senior decision-makers who believe it is important
that cloud applications be fully integrated with other software in
the organization
(Source: Cloud for Business Managers: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly , Dynamic Markets)
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versus 2014 results in a consistent way, and look at trends.
They spend more time on business analysis now, as a result of
automation and productivity increases, rather than on gather-
ing data manually.
“We have 12 manufacturing sites around the world, and con-
solidating nancial results in an accurate manner is extremely
important for the nance team,” Lee says. “Having a nancialconsolidation and reporting platform also provides transparency,
so we can trust that we have the right information.”
On the sales side, integration between the nancial led-
gers, reporting systems, and Oracle Sales Cloud has denitely
helped in the selling process. In the past, the previous CRM
system did a good job tracking contacts with architects and
designers, along with the types of engineered surfaces that
could meet the needs of their projects. However, with the inte -
grated systems, the sales force can use Oracle Sales Cloud to
quickly access information about customers, products bought,
and channels sold in. They can also clearly see how many times
providing sample products has turned into actual sales, and view who actually purchases engineered surface materials that
are supplied to projects to construct new ofce
buildings or restaurants — data that was not
readily available before.
In addition, since Oracle Sales Cloud is being
used by more than 175 team members in the
Americas and more than 120 team members in
Europe, the commercial selling process is more
streamlined and consistent. Now all users haveaccess to the same cloud-based tool and all the
detailed sales information that is logged in dur-
ing the sales process.
Atkinson notes that Oracle Sales Cloud also
gives Wilsonart reporting tools. “We can easily
track how many calls are made each day by
each rep. And because of the integrations, we
can access analytics to have a clear v iew of the
sales pipeline and can see how each individual
territory is doing against quota or against last
year’s results,” he explains. “We’ve seen signi-
cant performance improvement, because when you’re publishing reports about your sales force,
salespeople are competitive and want to win.”
While Wilsonart is seeing positive results
from its successful hybrid on-premises/cloud
infrastructure, Krishnamurthy can see that
many organizations are moving toward complete cloud. But
for now he and the rest of the Wilsonart executive team are
steadfast in their resolve to always select the best application to
meet the needs of the business — whether cloud, on premises, or
an integrated hybrid.
“We feel like the opportunities to further digitize our busi-
ness will continue to add tremendous value, and give us a com-petitive edge,” says Krishnamurthy. “Our future is absolutely
stunning and bright at Wilsonart.”
Alison Weiss is a frequent contributor to Prot.
Scan to learn more about the Oracle solutions featured in this story.
ACTION ITEM
“USING ORACLE SALES CLOUD HAS HELPED USGROW, AND THE BUSINESS ANALYTICS AND ORACLEHYPERION CONSOLIDATION TOOLS HAVE IMPROVED OURFINANCIAL REPORTING AND OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY. THE
TOOLS ARE CRITICAL AS WE EXPAND WILSONART AS A GLOBALLEADER IN ENGINEERED SURFACES.” —Timothy J. O’Brien, CEO, Wilsonart
The kitchen at the Wilson
House is a striking exampleof midcentury design—and of
Wilsonart’s use of synthetic
building materials.
37
PROFIT AUGUST 2015
C O U R T
E S Y O F W I L S O N A R T
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T he cloud is playing an increas-
ingly important role as a
competitive advantage for
businesses, as it gives com-
panies flexible access to IT services.
But not all clouds are created equal.
To be effective, the cloud—whether
public or private—needs to be built
on the right infrastructure in order to
meet the rigorous demands of the
business. And it needs to do so as
affordably as possible.
With that in mind, Intel
has been designing the
Intel® Xeon®processor
family for use in the cloud
infrastructure. These pro-
cessors provide high levels
of performance for a range
of workloads and improved
security to protect sensitive
business assets—ulti-
mately providing a founda-
tion for an agile, scalable
cloud. As a result, many
cloud service providers and
individual companies are
using Intel® Cloud Technol-
ogy with the latest Intel® Xeon® processors as a key element
in their cloud infrastructures.
Oracle’s approach to the cloud
provides a clear case in point. Many
of the company’s engineered systems
are based on Intel® Xeon® proces-
sors, in keeping with Oracle’s focus
on providing standard, cost-effective
platforms that deliver performance
and reliability. Some of these
engineered systems include Oracle
Exadata Database Machine, OracleExalytics, Oracle Exalogic Elastic
Cloud, Oracle Private Cloud Appliance,
and Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance.
“We use these Intel-based sys-
tems as a foundation for many of
our private cloud implementations
and public cloud offerings and in our
x86 servers,” says Sandra Cheevers,
senior principal product director at
Oracle. Oracle recently announced
a number of additions to its Oracle
Cloud Services platform and infra-
structure offerings—including Oracle
Database Cloud Exadata Service and
Oracle Big Data Cloud Service—that
draw on these engineered systems.
Oracle’s extensive use of Intel-
based systems underscores a funda-
mental reality: Intel technology can
deliver high levels of performance
and throughput, reliably and with
a relatively low total cost of owner-
ship. And that in turn can help cloud
service providers and companies op-
erating their own private clouds usetechnology to drive business benefits
such as increased agility, reduced
costs, and an improved ability to
develop insights and drive innovation
—and ultimately, enable them to use
IT as a vital business asset, today
and tomorrow.
Delivering Performance
for the Cloud
Today, the cloud is an area of strate-
gic focus for Intel, and the company
designs processors with the demands
of cloud computing in mind.
The company’s Intel® Cloud
Technology features both the
Intel® Xeon®processor E5 v3
and the Intel® Xeon® proces-
sor E7 v3 families. These Intel®
Xeon® processors enable cloud
infrastructures to handle de-
manding, transaction-intensive
workloads, from analytics and
high-performance computing
to a range of business-critical
applications.
For it’s part, the Intel®
Xeon® processor E5 v3 family
is designed to be a versatile
data center “workhorse.” It in-
cludes foundational technology
that delivers exceptional overall per-
formance and processing efficiency.
Its high throughput is particularly
ideal for distributed environments
and the parallel processing required
for Apache Hadoop implementations,
helping companies explore both
structured and unstructured data
and accelerate the development of
business insights. “The Intel® Xeon®
E5 v3 processor is also ideal for
business-critical applications and isthe CPU used for Exalogic and Oracle
Private Cloud Appliance for running
Building the Cloud with Performance
and Trust to Drive BusinessDesigned for the cloud, today’s Intel® Xeon® processors are a key
component of infrastructures that deliver cost-effective performance—
and “future proof” cloud technology.
S P O N S O R E D C O N T E N T
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For more information, visit www.intel.com/cloud
“The Intel® Xeon® E5 v3 processor
is also ideal for business-critical
applications and is the CPU used for
Exalogic and Oracle Private Cloud
Appliance for running Oracle and
other business–critical applications.” —Sandra Cheevers, Senior Principal Product Director, Oracle
Oracle and other business-critical
applications,” says Cheevers.
Meanwhile, the Intel® Xeon®
processor E7 v3 family—theprocessor ideal for the intense
demands of in-memory comput-
ing—provides massive memory
capacity for workloads such as
real-time analytics. “The Intel®
Xeon® E7 processor powers the
Exadata X4-8 product line based
on 8-socket servers, delivering
Oracle’s largest memory footprint
for large databases and extreme
online transaction processing as
well as real-time analytics,” saysCheevers. The Intel® Xeon®
E7 v3 processors include Intel®
Transactional Synchronization Ex-
tensions, enabling companies to
process transactions in-memory
with configurations that can grow
to 8-socket systems and up to 12
terabytes of memory. That means
that companies can easily scale
up capacity to handle increasing
workloads.
Both of these Intel® Xeon®processor families provide a
number of features that help
increase performance. For example,
they offer built-in Intel® Turbo
Boost Technology, which automati-
cally allows processor cores to run
faster than their rated operating
frequency for short periods of time
in order to maximize performance,
enabling cloud services to quickly
adjust to spikes in demand.
For companies relying on thecloud, the high levels of perfor-
mance provided by Intel® Xeon®
processors translate into more
processing being done in less time,
and a shorter time to business re-
sults—benefits that are especially
significant when it comes to big
data and other compute-intensive
tasks. And all this helps reduce to-
tal cost of ownership while helping
the business be more responsive
and flexible.
Staying Ahead of Change
That kind of performance, along
with the continuing evolution
of Intel processors, means that
companies can easily keep up to
date with changing IT and busi-
ness demands by utilizing cloud
services powered by Intel® Cloud
Technology with the latest Intel®
Xeon® processors. In recent
tests, for example, the Intel®
Xeon® processor E5-2600 v3product family demonstrated a
3x improvement in performance
over previous generations of the
processors. Similarly, the Intel®
Xeon® processor E7 v3 family
showed performance increases
of up to 40% overall, and gains
of up to 72% for analytics
workloads, compared to previ-
ous generations. “With Intel®
Cloud Technology based on the
latest Intel® Xeon®processors,customers of cloud services
can take advantage of industry-
leading performance generation
over generation,” says Raejeanne
Skillern, general manager, Cloud
Service Provider Business at Intel
Corporation. “That means that
these cloud services are opti-
mized to deliver business services
faster and without interruption,
including big data analytics, high-
performance computing, andother business-critical workloads.”
Beyond high levels of perfor-
mance, Intel® Xeon® processors
provide built-in reliability, availability,
and serviceability (RAS) features
that keep cloud services running
smoothly. The Intel® Xeon® pro-
cessor E7 v3 family, for example,
provides more than 40 advanced
RAS capabilities designed for
99.999% uptime and the always-
on enterprise.
Security, of course, is a
fundamental concern with the
cloud—and for Intel’s approach to
the cloud. Intel® Cloud Technology
helps protect sensitive business as-
sets with foundational, hardware-as-
sisted security capabilities, allowing
companies to operate with secure,
trusted cloud services. For instance,
Intel® Data Protection Technology
with Advanced Encryption Standard–
New Instructions provides higher
levels of encryption and security
without slowing performance. That
means that companies can make
more-extensive use of encryption
to keep more of their data confi-
dential while in a cloud provider’s
infrastructure—without worrying
about slowing response times and
overloading systems.
Overall, the use of Intel technol-
ogy means that companies can
take advantage of the cloud with
confidence, enjoying high levels of
performance without compromise.
Looking ahead, Oracle and Intel are
collaborating on several fronts to
help companies get the most from
their technology and, ultimately, the
cloud. The cloud is still evolving—
and Oracle and Intel are working
together to drive that evolution, and
enable companies to put the cloud
to work in their businesses.
PARTNER CASE STUDY [
40% claim based on generational scaling of comparable 4x Intel Xeon processor E7-8890 v3 compared to E7-4890 v2 geometric mean average across 12 benchmark
results; 72% claim based on SAS Mixed Analytics workload measuring sessions per hour using SAS Business Analytics 9.4 M2 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. See http://
www.intel.com/performance/datacenter f or more details.
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LASER FOCUSLaser Technology Inc. integrates a cloud solution with its enterprise resource
planning core to better respond to business needs.
BY MONICA MEHTA | PHOTOGRAPHY BY RAY NG
Chances are, the most popular product manufactured by
Laser Technology Inc. (LTI) has made you stop — or at
least slow down — in your tracks. It’s the laser speed gun,
and police off icers worldwide use it to make the roadways safer.
What you may not know is that LTI engineered the first com-
mercial speed enforcement laser in history, effectively creating
a market for handheld speed measurement that previously
didn’t exist.Such inventiveness is at the heart of LTI’s mission. At the same time, LTI’s
products are built to order by a small staff and delivered with stringent dead-lines, so its processes need to be extremely efcient. The backbone upon which
the company has built that innovation and efciency is Oracle’s JD Edwards
EnterpriseOne enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions.
With a stable, reliable ERP system serving as the business backbone, the
operations team needed better visibility into the sales pipeline to enable a
smoother, faster, and more efcient quote-to-cash process. LTI chose Oracle
Sales Cloud, which can integrate with JD Edwards EnterpriseOne to facil itate
the ow of information between sales and the rest of the business. As Laser
Tech President Eric Miller sees it, combining cloud-based customer relationship
management (CRM) with an ERP core will help the company better meet its
business goals.
“We have to be as efcient and as inventive as possible,” says Miller. “Anintegrated ERP and CRM solution will streamline our complex business
40
TECHNOLOGY POWERED. BUSINESS DRIVEN.
SNAPSHOT
LASER TECHNOLOGY INC.
lasertech.com
Headquarters: Denver, Colorado
Industry: Laser measurement
Employees: 112
Oracle products: JD Edwards
EnterpriseOne enterprise resource planning
(ERP) solutions, Oracle Sales Cloud
ERIC MILLERPresident
Length of tenure: 27 years
Education: BS in electronics engineering
technology, DeVry Institute
Personal quote/mantra: “Do whatever it
takes to get the job done.”
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41
Eric Miller, President,Laser Technology Inc.
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processes and take care of some very detailed operations, so
that we can focus on the innovation.”
A Dependable Tool
When LTI released its laser speed gun in 1990, it was the
rst of its kind; previous speed measurement devices were
radar-based. Today, LTI remains the world leader in laser
speed measurement, and with tens of thousands of units in
operation, its products have court precedent across the globe.
In addition to the speed gun, LTI previously released a laser
handheld surveying product that maps and locates objects in
3-D space — also the rst solution of its kind — and a consumer
laser range nder, used in Bushnell Optics’ outdoor products
for hunters and golfers. It also adopted its laser speed gun to do very low-speed, high-precision measurements for NASA, which
used the unit for docking space shuttles and retrieving satellites
and other objects from space.As a result of its groundbreaking inventions, LTI grew
from 30 employees to 100 from 1992 to 1998, with a revenue
growth of 300 percent. To manage this extraordinary growth,
the company implemented a JD Edwards ERP solution in the
mid-1990s. In 2009, the company migrated from JD Edwards
World 7.3 to JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 8.12 and is currently
on 9.1. Mil ler says the ERP system has “drastically improved
operations,” tying together everything between sales order
processing, manufacturing, warehousing inventory, purchas-
ing, accounting, nance, and service.
Because of the high cost and complexity of LTI’s prod-
ucts, most of them are built to order. Since their most popularproducts — the laser speed guns — are sold to law enforcement
42
TECHNOLOGY POWERED. BUSINESS DRIVEN.
1Rank of speeding as cause of accidents and death on highways
100Number of countries that sell LTI products
1,000Number of customers per each LTI sales representative
100,000+Number of lives saved since 1990 by reducing worldwide traffic speeds
0.000000000001Number of seconds an LTI laser can measure to calculate distance
From left to right: Roosevelt
Rogers, vice president of sales
and marketing; Vicki Novosad,
JD Edwards EnterpriseOne
systems coordinator; Eric Miller,
president; and Chris Budden,
vice president of operations at
Laser Technology Inc. Left: Laser
Technology Inc. staff assembles
many products at the company’s
Colorado headquarters.
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agencies, they must meet stringent government-funding time
frames. If the law enforcement agencies don’t receive the prod-ucts and implement them by a certain date, they can lose the
funding that was allotted for the products.
This type of time constraint makes forecasting and planning
a vital part of LTI’s business. When LTI receives a sales order,
Manufacturing needs to conduct material requirements plan-
ning (MRP) to ensure that it has all the parts to build the order
on schedule. Some products have hundreds of parts that must be
either accounted for in the warehouse inventory or purchased.
All of this is accomplished with JD Edwards EnterpriseOne.
“The importance of MRP is huge. If a product has 500
parts and we only have 499 of them, that can shut down the
entire order-to-cash process. With the MRP capability of JDEdwards EnterpriseOne, our purchasing department can look
at forecasts and stocking quantities and make sure the parts are
there so that we can build the products we are promising to thecustomer within the time allotted. That is one of the most criti-
cal capabilities for us,” says Miller.
Financials are, of course, another important part of the
ERP system for LTI — being able to track margins and
revenue while accounting for every detail on its bill of materi-
als. The company also recently implemented JD Edwards
EnterpriseOne Service Management to bring repair and sup-
port processes up to speed with the rest of the business.
Chris Budden, vice president of operations at LTI, says JD
Edwards EnterpriseOne solutions have provided users with a
structured and straightforward platform for conducting busi-
ness. “Our ERP system provides seamless integration betweendepartments,” he says. “It’s a tool that we don’t have to struggle
43
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with or think about every day. It’s always there working for us,
day in and day out, and it allows us to spend our time on the
business at hand.”
Vicki Novosad, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne systems coordi-
nator at LTI, says employees are very positive about the system
because of its ease of use. “The JD Edwards environment is
very intuitive,” says Novosad. “You can fgure it out quickly,
even if you’ve never seen it before.”
Oracle Sales Cloud
LTI’s previous CRM system was not tied into the ERP sys-tem, and many processes, such as recording opportunities or
forecasting sales, were done manually through spreadsheets.
Sales teams couldn’t easily access customer information, and
conversely, the operations team had no visibility into the sales
opportunities that were coming in.
LTI chose Oracle Sales Cloud to integrate with JD
Edwards EnterpriseOne. When Oracle Sales Cloud is ful ly
implemented, it wil l provide a central location for sales repre-
sentatives to get information about customers on their mobile
devices, including their purchase and serv ice histories. Sales
team members will a lso be able to view the warehouse inven-
tory. Roosevelt Rogers, vice president of sales and marketingat LTI, says this information is very valuable for sales repre-
“OUR ERP SYSTEM PROVIDES SEAMLESSINTEGRATION BETWEEN DEPARTMENTS. IT’S A TOOLTHAT WE DON’T HAVE TO STRUGGLE WITH OR THINK ABOUTEVERY DAY. IT’S ALWAYS THERE WORKING FOR US, DAY IN ANDDAY OUT, AND IT ALLOWS US TO SPEND OUR TIME ON THEBUSINESS AT HAND.” —Chris Budden, Vice President of Operations, Laser Technology Inc.
44
TECHNOLOGY POWERED. BUSINESS DRIVEN.
Vicki Novosad, JD Edwards
EnterpriseOne systems
coordinator, inspects one
of Laser Technology Inc.’s
laser speed guns. Right:
Precision tools require
precision assembly..
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sentatives to be able to call up whi le in the eld.
“When we know what the inventory is, we can up-sell the
customer or add a solution to their current order,” he says.
“Without a CRM system that integrates with the ERP, we’re
dealing with the cost of lost opportunities due to the lack of
information that we have.”
Operations team members will in turn gain visibility into
the sales team’s opportunities, gaining earlier insight into
potential orders and giving them more time to check materials
inventory levels and get started on time-sensitive orders.Most importantly, tying the CRM solution to the ERP sys-
tem will help LTI provide a better customer experience. “Our
number one priority is to meet the needs of our customers,”
says Miller. “The integration of the CRM and the ERP wi ll
allow us to track all of our communications with each cus-
tomer, ultimately giving them the best possible buying experi-
ence and quality of products and making sure we’re shipping
what they need, when they need it.”
Next Steps
Budden and his team plan to add other cloud solutions that
can integrate with JD Edwards EnterpriseOne and provideadditional capabilities to the business. This includes more
visibility on al l processes, from sales, distr ibution, and ship-
ping on down to service. Examples include more barcoding in
the warehouse and inventory systems, reporting tools that can
provide more insight into the granular details of the business,
internet purchasing capabilities for certain products, and soft-
ware that can help with the automation of engineering change
order management.
Miller says having a solid ERP system on which to build
these added capabilities is essential for growth in today’s
marketplace. “JD Edwards EnterpriseOne has allowed thecompany to constantly innovate and go to the next level,” says
Miller. “It has tied all the pieces of the operation of the business
together. We could not have hit our levels of growth if it weren’t
for the capabilities that the system provides.”
Monica Mehta is a frequent contributor to Prot.
Scan to learn more about the Oracle solutions featured in this story.
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PROFIT AUGUST 2015
READY ON THE ROAD WITH
ORACLE SALES CLOUD
The sales representatives at Laser Technology Inc.
(LTI) typically have 1,000 customers each within
their territories. With such a massive client base, they
need a powerful customer relationship management(CRM) system that can give them all the information
they need about each customer while on the road.
Company executives chose Oracle Sales Cloud for its
ability to integrate with the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne
enterprise resource planning system, and for its robust
CRM capabilities.
Oracle Sales Cloud allows sales representatives
to prepare for customer meetings, log calls, manage
opportunities, and update forecasts from anywhere
with mobile access to the CRM system. Represen-
tatives can use a single, native application across all
mobile platforms—phone or tablet—with offline capabil-
ities as well. Sales managers can use incentive compen-
sation capabilities to motivate their sales teams, align
territories and quotas with sales strategies, and analyze
sales representatives’ performance through sales
performance dashboards with scorecards and leader
boards. Oracle Sales Cloud also offers sales analytics
and forecasting, enabling managers to improve predict-
ability by analyzing forecast periods, adjust forecasts
for sales representatives, and get product recommen-
dations for cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.
“When sales reps are out in the field, a lot of times
customers don’t know exactly which products they
bought from you,” says Roosevelt Rogers, vice president
of sales and marketing at LTI. “Having that information
on hand, so that you can answer their questions right
away and provide more suggestions on products that
will help their business, is extremely valuable.”
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With roots dating back
to 1941, Weatherford
International is one
of the world’s largest
diversified upstream oil field ser-
vices companies, offering a host
of products and services including
drilling oil and natural gas wells,
manufacturing and sales of oil field
tools, and creating software for
maximizing well production.
Weatherford has a presence
in more than 100 countries, with
more than 45,000 employees. The
company has some 10,000 active
Oracle’s JD Edwards users, making
it one of the largest JD Edwards
customers in the world operating on
a single global database instance.
Prior to 2014, Weatherford
had implemented an older ver-
sion of the JD Edwards enterprise
resource planning (ERP) solution
with custom integrations to a large
number of ancillary and external
systems. Any change in business
process, due to market condi-
tions or a new regulation, meant
that a change would have to be
implemented in the ERP platform.
This often led to customizations in
the JD Edwards environment that
made it difficult to adopt ongoing
upgrades and revisions.
An outdated company website
affected the company’s ability to
effectively share information and
take its story to the market. Weath-
erford’s marketing organization was
increasingly becoming frustrated
with the outdated information on
the website and the long delivery
times associated with changes to
the website.
Weatherford’s IT organization
saw the need for a digital transfor-
mation to occur. Weatherford part-
nered with KPIT, an Oracle Platinum
Partner with deep Oracle Fusion
Middleware expertise, to create
a “Digital Enterprise Hub.” The key
goals of the Digital Enterprise Hub
are to
1. Engage and empower the cus-
tomers, employees, and partners
to share information
2. Improve operational efficiencyby automating business processes
and access to information
3. Improve time to market in
delivering solutions aligned with
evolving business needs
Using these goals as key re-
quirements, Weatherford and KPIT
designed the Digital Enterprise
Hub leveraging core components
of Oracle Fusion Middleware. Key
elements of the hub provided the
capability to develop flexible andagile business processes. “The
concept of a Digital Enterprise Hub
and reusable services did not exist
two years ago at Weatherford. Now
we are fully engaged on service-
oriented architecture (SOA) and
the enterprise services mindset
that it brings,” says Jason Penner,
director of application development
and information management at
Weatherford.
Penner says Oracle Fusion
Middleware and KPIT enabled
Weatherford to build composite
services that span multiple sys-
tems, including JD Edwards. This
is leading to dramatic benefits in
terms of how Weatherford interacts
with customers, employees, and
partners, and it provides access to
shared data.
Business to Business, Enhanced
A top priority of the program was
to improve the interaction between
suppliers and customers. The
B2B component of Oracle Fusion
Middleware made communications
with customers and suppliers far
more reliable, secure, and helped
Weatherford maintain compliance
with Petroleum Industry Data
Exchange (PIDX) industry standards.
Partner satisfaction has risen since
the implementation of Oracle B2B,
and Weatherford’s IT organization
now has time to work with the
business to drive higher adoption of
electronic commerce. “After imple-
menting Oracle B2B, Weatherford
saw dramatic improvements in the
number of daily transactions, while
at the same time lessening the time
IT was spending researching transac-
tion failures,” says Penner.
A Transformation to Succeed in the Digital WorldKPIT helps Weatherford build a Digital Enterprise Hub for rapid delivery
across business processes.
S P O N S O R E D C O N T E N T
Jason Penner, Director of Application Development and Information
Management, Weatherford
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For more information, visit www.kpit.com/transform
We consider KPIT a pioneer in helping
customers realize the true value
in Oracle Fusion Middleware. Theirstrategic approach and innovation
is a key differentiator.”—Jason Penner, Director of Application Development
and Information Management, Weatherford
Oriented Around ServicesA big advantage with the Digital
Enterprise Hub was during the
upgrade from the older version
of the JD Edwards ERP solution
to JD Edwards EnterpriseOne
9.1. The SOA integrations were
migrated with minimal effort and
almost no coding changes. The
hub allowed Weatherford to build
an architecture that provided en-
terprise services to be consumed
internally by other applicationsand externally by customers
and suppliers. “We aren’t using
traditional ‘enterprise applica-
tion integration’ anymore as a
solution for point A to point B
integration,” says Penner. “Now
we’re exposing these interfaces
as enterprise services and allow-
ing for authenticated users in the
organization to get information
from JD Edwards EnterpriseOne
and other key systems via SOA.”
Extending the Mobile Enterprise
Mobility was an important ele-
ment in Weatherford’s digital
journey. The Digital Enterprise
Hub helped Weatherford to start
using mobile and social through
the use of Oracle Access
Management Suite to provide
security for mobile usage. Using
this platform it has been pos-
sible for Weatherford to quicklydeploy mobile solutions that
leverage existing enterprise
services and deliver composite
applications that provide signifi-
cant benefits to the company’s
mobile workforce.
Leveraging Information
The Digital Enterprise Hub allows
key systems in Weatherford
to use a common platform toshare data. Data from Weather-
ford’s master data management
platform is now shared through
services that are consumed
by other key systems. “One of
the key benefits is that many
services have been built to en-
able JD Edwards EnterpriseOne
to become an easily accessible
source of truth for many orga-
nizational entities,” says Advait
Waghmare, head of the OracleFusion Middleware practice at
KPIT.
Through standards-based
interfaces, Weatherford is
now implementing many more
enterprise-wide services, such
as customer lookup, item avail-
ability, and item pricing. This
has led to greater efficiency and
helps eliminate the possibility
of multiple versions of data that
are not synced. Weatherford hasalso built various near-real-time
interfaces, which allow immedi-
ate notification of internal events
to external systems.
Improved Company Image
In order to improve the digital
image and share information
with customers and others, KPIT
helped Weatherford to improve
the company’s website. After
selecting and implementingOracle WebCenter Sites, the
new Weatherford.com site now
serves as an important platform
to support business growth and
stakeholder engagement. It also
meets Weatherford’s marketing
goals to improve sharing of key
product and service information
with customers while improving
the image of Weatherford as a
true technical leader in the oilfield services industry. Content
editors can self-serve and
deploy fresh content indepen-
dently, and promotions easily
go through proper workflows for
approval. The user experience
on the website and social chan-
nels has dramatically improved.
Penner says, “The new website
has helped to deliver an engag-
ing and relevant digital experi-
ence, making Weatherford standapart from its competitors.”
Partners in Growth
Weatherford attributes much of
the project’s successes to the
partnership with KPIT, noting that
KPIT’s experts in Oracle Fusion
Middleware advised Weatherford
on exactly what such a platform
could do for the company. “We
consider KPIT a pioneer in help-
ing customers realize the truevalue in Oracle Fusion Middle-
ware. Their strategic approach
and innovation is a key differen-
tiator,” says Penner.
Weatherford now has a strong
and robust platform, which will
contribute significantly in its con-
tinued evolution toward becom-
ing a digital enterprise.
PARTNER CASE STUDY [
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48 BIG IDEAS
TECHNOLOGY POWERED. BUSINESS DRIVEN.
Connecting Flights
Over a 17-year career at GrupoAeroméxico, while working his way upto chief information ofcer, Benjamin
Hernandez had a front-row seat to its con-tinuous expansion. Currently, 26 compa-nies make up Grupo Aeroméxico, includ-ing Aeroméxico (Mexico’s largest airline),Aeroméxico Connect (a regional carrier),Aeroméxico Servicios (ground handling),Aeroméxico Cargo, and AeroméxicoCapacitación (training center).
Serving as head of IT strategy puts Hernandez
at the hub of the company’s efforts to adopt new
technology and continuously transform the
business. And with processes that run acrossmany subsidiaries — not just ight scheduling, but
crew management, eet maintenance, and
the other critical components of running an
airline — he must view the entire business from
multiple angles.
“We have initiatives that run across the whole
business: to optimize resources, to increase rev-
enue, to reduce cost, to make our employees more
productive, to generate information to support
the tactical and strategic decisions, and more,”
says Hernandez.
Here, Hernandez talks to Proft about what it
took to unify enterprise resource planning (ERP)
across all of Grupo Aeroméxico’s companies,
why it chose Oracle E-Business Suite on Oracle
Managed Cloud Services, and which projects his
department will take on next to help the business
continue to soar.PROFIT: What do the executives at Grupo
Benjamin Hernandez,
CIO, Grupo Aeroméxico
Grupo Aeroméxico uses Oracle cloud technology to streamline 26 companies.
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP Technology Is Taking Education to School THOUGHT
LEADERSHIP Turning Ideas into Products DATAWATCH Are You Ready for Cloud?+
LEADING STRATEGIES
BY AARON LAZENBY | PHOTOGRA PHY BY RAFAE L MONROY/GETTY IMAGES
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49
PROFIT AUGUST 2015
“WE PUSHA BUTTON,
AND WE
OBTAIN THE
RESULTS
FOR ALL THE
COMPANIES
IN ONE
ACTION. . . .THERE IS
A SINGLE,UNIVERSAL,
UNIFIED TRUTH.”
Aeroméxico want to achieve to keep the com-
pany successful?
HERNANDEZ: We want to continue being the
leader in the domestic market and an important
player in international markets. Also, we wantto have a very good product — we have a mod-
ern eet, the best schedules, and good service.
We want a staff that understands passengers’
needs. We want to differentiate ourselves for the
passenger experience.
When we talk about passenger experience,
we need to understand the expectation for each
type of passenger we serve today. What do they
value? A business traveler is going to have very
different expectations from customers heading
to the beach in Cancún. For example, we target
our frequent yer program specically to our
business travelers.
A good customer experience means we under-
stand the expectation of each segment, measure
how well we are meeting those needs, and design
or adjust our service accordingly. This is part of
our culture.
PROFIT: How has Aeroméxico used enterprise
IT to keep pace, given the company’s large size
and expansion?
HERNANDEZ: Heading into 2010 as the economy
improved, we knew we needed to replace our
systems. So we dened an IT roadmap with
three phases.Phase one was about replacing all the front-
ofce applications. We spent almost two years
replacing our reservation, sales, and distribution
systems and everything related to passengers — from schedule planning to reservations, kiosks,
our website, our mobile site, and more.
Phase two was streamlining back-ofce ERP
applications. We required a unique application
for all the companies to standardize administra-
tive processes, consolidate the nancial results
for all companies, control the operational cost,
and provide information to analyze revenue and
route protability. Right now, we are in phase
three, which is about replacing, optimizing, and
integrating all systems that support operations
and maintenance.
PROFIT: What are the challenges around IT consol-
idation for such a complex organization?
HERNANDEZ: The rst challenge was that we didn’t
have a unied system for nancials, human
resources, or general accounting. So we knew we
needed to introduce a new tool to align all these
companies. But at the beginning, the leaders of
these companies were concerned. The subsidiar-
ies thought that their business was signicantlydifferent in comparison with the airline and that
could generate problems for their operations.
So we had to get it right — and the project was
intensive. We looked at the ofce process for each
of our companies and developed process maps to
understand the business at a fundamental level.Who was responsible for each step in our business
processes? Once we had a deep understanding
of these operations, we could begin implementa-
tion of the systems. From there, the challenge is
to train people — and to get them to use the same
new tools and follow the same new processes.
It took us a year to implement — and after
several months of operating with the tool, we have
feedback from users on how it works. They are
telling us how to improve more of the operation,
so we are analyzing and reviewing some deni-
tions to bring new Oracle functionality, and
making some exceptions where it is necessary for
certain companies to meet labor union or govern-
ment requirements.
PROFIT: Why did you decide to use Oracle for your
ERP upgrade?
HERNANDEZ: We evaluated both Oracle and SAP.
We looked at functionality, methodological
approach, compliance with Aeroméxico require-
ments, and price. We contacted several executives
from other airlines about their back-end systems.
For the evaluation and selection process, we
assigned a committee to select the tool/applica-
tion. The committee was composed of peoplefrom nance, human resources, payroll, supply
chain, and IT. With KPMG’s help, that group
conducted a very structured and transparent
evaluation and selection process, and the decision
was that Oracle is the best option for us.
PROFIT: What will you work on next?
HERNANDEZ: Right now we are trying to reach the
next step, which is to consolidate the activities of
all our companies that share similar and repetitive
processes. In November of 2014, we started build-
ing a shared services center for Grupo Aeroméxico.
PROFIT: You implemented Oracle E-Business
Suite via Oracle Managed Cloud Services for
your ERP system. Why did you deploy the
suite this way?
HERNANDEZ: Deploying on a managed cloud
allowed us to simplify the implementation
process. Infrastructure selection and provision-
ing adds time and complexity to the effort — to
the point where that almost becomes a paral-
lel project. Especially before the applications
are implemented, it’s difcult to determine the
required infrastructure to support the transac-
tional volume. You don’t know how the system
will perform, and how to increase the capacity inthe future.
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50 BIG IDEAS
TECHNOLOGY POWERED. BUSINESS DRIVEN.
Oracle has implemented that same infra-
structure for a lot of companies, so their spe-
cialists know very well how to determine the
capacity plan for that infrastructure. More
than that, if you realize that the service is
not performing well enough, Oracle can
immediately increase processing capacity,
memory, and more.
So for me it was a good option to use
Oracle Managed Cloud Services, because it
reduced the risk. It also reduced complexity
and the time it took to implement our new
ERP system.
PROFIT: What are some of the benets you’re
realizing already?
HERNANDEZ: The most important benet is
that we have a unied nancial system. We
no longer have any controls that live outside
of the system — we have connected all our
companies with a single platform. The same
general ledger catalog structure is in place
everywhere, and the information ows
across the modules. Everything is there.Second, the architecture, processes, and
timing are the same for all the companies.
We need to close the rst week of every
month. In the past, each company sent us
spreadsheets in Excel, and we’d look at these
results and try to reconcile them. When
we handled nance this way, we’d have
arguments about who had the best version
of the truth. Today, nobody from any of
our companies can say, “I don’t have that
information.” We don’t have to worry if the
information is accurate or up to date, either.
We push a button, and we obtain the results
for all the companies in one action. And that
is the ofcial information, because it was
obtained from the ofcial system. There is a
single, universal, unied truth.
Aaron Lazenby is editor in chief of Prot.
SNAPSHOT
GRUPO AEROMÉXICOaeromexico.com
Headquarters: Mexico City,Mexico
Industry: Travel and
transportation
Employees: 13,745
Revenue: US$3.1 billion in 2014
Oracle products and services:
Oracle E-Business Suite; Oracle
Managed Cloud Services; Oracle
Financials Managed Cloud
Service; Oracle iProcurement
Managed Cloud Service; Oracle
Purchasing Managed Cloud
Service; Oracle InventoryManagement Managed Cloud
Service; Oracle Human Resources
Managed Cloud Service; Oracle
iRecruitment Managed Cloud
Service; Oracle Payroll Managed
Cloud Service; Oracle Hyperion
Financial Management Plus
Managed Cloud Service; Oracle
Database, Enterprise Edition
Managed Cloud Service; Oracle
Enterprise Governance, Risk, and
Compliance Manager Managed
Cloud Service; Oracle UserProductivity Kit Professional;
Oracle Consulting
BENJAMIN HERNANDEZ
CIO
Length of tenure: 17 years
Education: Master’s degree
in computer science, Kharkiv
Polytechnic Institute
Personal quote/mantra:
“Las Tecnologías de Información
son un medio para hacer que las
organizaciones se hagan máseficientes y realicen sus objetivos
y estrategias.” (“Information
technology is a means to make
organizations become more
efficient and achieve their
objectives and strategies.”)
Scan to learn more about the Oracle solu-
tions featured in this story.
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52 BIG IDEAS
TECHNOLOGY POWERED. BUSINESS DRIVEN.
An increasingly popular choice is cloud-based
ERP, which customers can deploy and sca le
quickly at a predictable cost.
Selim Burduroglu, a global innovationevangelist-architect within Oracle’s Education
and Research Global Industry Solutions Group,
says it’s no surprise that education-focused
organizations are investing in cloud-based ERP
solutions such as Oracle Enterprise Resource
Planning Cloud (Oracle ERP Cloud).
“Modernizing with Oracle ERP Cloud
improves transparency. This helps reduce
operational costs and naturally leads to better
decision-making and streamlined processes,”
Burduroglu says. “So organizations can have
better alignment of their resources to effectively
support the core mission: education, research,
and public service.”
MODERNIZING TO MEET INNOVATION GOALS
Administrators and technology executives at
Boise State University (BSU), a public research
institution serving more than 22,000 students in
Boise, Idaho, are keenly aware of af fordability
issues. Recently, campus decision-makers decided
to move BSU’s on-premises implementation of
Oracle’s PeopleSoft software to Oracle ERP
Cloud in order to reduce maintenance costs so
that it could reallocate funds to technology inno- vation and overal l university expansion.
BSU has experienced phenomenal growth over
the past decade in both the number of students it
serves and the degrees it offers. Its focus used to
be on undergraduate and associate degrees, but
today it also offers graduate degrees in elds such
as education technology and engineering, and it
has built a reputation for research in geoscience,
biomolecular science, materials science, public
policy, and other elds.
“These programs and degrees are great for the
university, but they are complex and expensive,”
says Jo Ellen Dinucci, associate vice president for
nance and administration at BSU. “Couple that
with reduced state funding and limits on how
much tuition can be raised, and all of a sudden
you have a real stress on your infrastructure to
gure out how to deliver services more effectively.”
Managing IT at the university is challeng-
ing not because its needs are unique, says BSU
CIO Max Davis-Johnson, but because so many
diverse departments must buy and use different
types of software and hardware — for everything
from administration, classroom instruction, and
research labs to procurement, athletics programs,and health services.
BSU technology executives were happy with
the features, extensive footprint, and reliability
of the university’s PeopleSoft software. But when
it came time for an upgrade last year, Davis- Johnson and team decided to evaluate cloud alter-
natives as a way to lower BSU’s ERP infrastruc-
ture costs. They determined that Oracle ERP
Cloud provided the new features they were after
while adding more exibility and scalability.
BSU will deploy Oracle ERP Cloud in stages.
In the rst phase, expected to go live in early
2016, it will roll out the service to administra-
tors, academic staff, and nance team members.
Dinucci expects to take advantage of a redesigned
chart of accounts so that the nancial book of
record for BSU will maintain information in a
more streamlined way. It will also provide ex-
ibility for improved nancial reporting, allow-
ing departments to make better decisions when
managing their budgets.
Dinucci also plans to automate all the uni-
versity’s purchasing and payables transactions to
alleviate the paper involved with procurement to
pay and to speed up manual processes using auto-
mated workow approvals and attachments.
“As we start the transit ion to the cloud,
the IT staff will be freed up from traditional
software maintenance tasks to focus on inte-
grating on-premises systems with the cloud,”Davis-Johnson says. “And since they won’t be
spending so much time supporting administra-
tive transactional systems, more resources will
be available to create innovative applicat ions
EYES ON THE HIGHER-EDUCATION PRIZE:
MAKING COLLEGE MORE AFFORDABLE
Making college more
affordable and improv-
ing student completion
rates are major focuses
of President Obama’s
FY2016 budget, as he
sets an objective for every
US adult to attain at least
one year of higher educa-
tion or career training.
Education technology is
slated to play a key role
in translating that goal
into reality.
The Obama admin-
istration has proposedestablishing a cooperative
agreement with states
that would make the first
two years of community
college free for students
acquiring job training or
completing work toward a
bachelor’s degree.
The administration
would also like to see
higher-education institu-
tions embrace more tech-
nologies, such as online
learning communities and
e-advising tools to make
it easier for students
to interact with teach-ers and administrators.
Furthermore, institutions
are being encouraged to
offer massive online open
courses or classes that
combine in-person and
online instruction.
As President Obama
puts it, “If we want
America to lead in the
twenty-first century,
nothing is more important
than giving everyone the
best education possible.”
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54 BIG IDEAS
TECHNOLOGY POWERED. BUSINESS DRIVEN.
for other campus systems.”
One such innovation already generating
excitement is a new cloud application for post-
awards grants management. The application willhelp university research program administrators
streamline administrative tasks and ensure that
funds provided by grants are allocated correctly.
The new application will provide precision and
transparency to the grants management process,
as well as more-sophisticated reporting about
project expenditures and nancial transactions.
BSU had not taken advantage of a delivered
grants management application before, but
managing grants is an essential and increasingly
important task due to the growth of the univer-
sity’s research and graduate programs. Dinucci is
looking forward to the increased visibility offered
by Oracle ERP Cloud’s enhanced budgeting,
cost-allocation, and cost-reporting tools.
“For universities, it’s perfectly ne to offer
a program that loses money, but they can’t all
lose money,” she says. “You have to understand
the decisions you’re making to keep your entity
nancially sound, while at the same time offering
a wide variety of educational choices for society.”
Moving to Oracle ERP Cloud is just the rst
step. In the next year, BSU will migrate to Oracle
Human Capital Management Cloud (Oracle
HCM Cloud) to streamline HCM tasks such asrecruiting and learning management.
BRAINY DECISION FOR LUMOSITY
Like BSU, San Francisco, California – based
Lumos Labs is turning to Oracle ERP Cloud to
improve its nancial reporting, transparency,
and oversight. Lumos Labs, which was founded
in 2005 and launched the Lumosity online
“brain-training” site in 2007, likes the cloud
approach to ensure that it has the exible infra -
structure to support business growth.
Lumosity features more than 40 engaging
brain games, available on the web and via iOS
and Android apps. With membership growing
quickly — including rapid international expan-
sion — and the continual launch of new services,
the time is right for Lumos Labs to implement a
full-featured ERP system, says Tyler Chapman,
director of nance and accounting. There was no
internal debate, he says, about whether the cloud
is the way to go.
“We offer our training services through
the cloud, so cloud ERP makes sense for us,”
Chapman says. “It’s accessible, it’s highly efcient
from a cost and resource standpoint becausewe’re not buying and deploying a system our-
selves, and it’s always up to date.” Why Oracle?
For one thing, “we like the fact that Oracle sup-
ports many of the largest technology companies
in the world,” he says.Initially, Lumos Labs is implementing Oracle
ERP Cloud’s nancial module, which will go
live this summer. Chapman expects the cloud
software to make the company’s nancial close
process more efcient and scalable, compared
with the QuickBooks software it used previously.
“The most important thing the nance group
does is provide accurate numbers to people in a
timely way so they can make educated decisions
about the business,” he says. “Oracle ERP Cloud
will enable us to do this.”
Leaders at Lumos Labs plan to use Oracle
ERP Cloud’s extensive international capabilities,
such as the ability to manage transactional taxes
and do local statutory accounting, to accommo-
date Lumosity’s recent entry into the Japanese,
German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and
Korean markets. As the company continues to
expand and automate, it is also considering taking
advantage of Oracle’s planning, procurement,
and HCM solutions and the mobile functionality
provided by the applications.
Also like BSU, the Lumos Labs team thinks
the cloud service will let it reallocate IT resources
to other areas of the company that are “morecustomer-facing and have more value-add,”
Chapman says. He adds, “We have the infrastruc-
ture we need, and we can be nimble — easily scale
up or down to follow the business.”
Oracle’s Burduroglu emphasizes that efforts
to modernize core nancial systems must lead to
competitive advantage — whether an institution
offers conventional education services or lifelong
learning. Says Burduroglu, “Having a modern,
reliable, and congurable cloud-based system of
record for nancial systems provides a solid foun-
dation from which educational organizations can
launch better and new ideas more sustainably.”
Alison Weiss is a frequent contributor to Prot.
“YOU HAVE TOUNDERSTANDTHEDECISIONSYOU’RE
MAKING TOKEEP YOUR
ENTITY
FINANCIALLY
SOUND, WHILE
AT THE SAME
TIME OFFERING
A WIDE
VARIETY OF
EDUCATIONAL
CHOICES FOR
SOCIETY.” —Jo Ellen Dinucci,
Associate Vice President for
Finance and Administration,
Boise State University
Scan to learn more about the Oracle solutions
featured in this story.
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Copyright © 2015, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates.
oracle.com/erp
or call 1.800.ORACLE.1
ModernERP CloudFinancials, Procurement, Projects, EPM & Value Chain
23 Languages, Localized for 50+ Countries
Analytics & Social Collaboration
Performance & Security
Complete
Global
Real-Time
EnterpriseReady
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56 BIG IDEAS
TECHNOLOGY POWERED. BUSINESS DRIVEN.
THE EXPLORERSOracle’s R&D labs prepare for future technologies.
BY MINDA ZETLIN
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
A nurse works in a hospital all day,using her tablet to record patient stats andwrite notes about their treatment. Hershift over, she leaves for home, taking hertablet with her. As she steps through the
hospital door and walks into the parkinglot, all HIPAA-protected patient data iswiped from her device, leaving her per-sonal data and apps intact. She can usethe tablet for whatever she likes, and heremployer has no concerns about privatedata being compromised if the tablet islost, stolen, or accessed by an unauthor-ized party during her off-hours.
This scenario, using geo-fencing technology,
is one of the many concept demos created by the
R&D teams working at Oracle. Their goal: astechnologies gain marketplace acceptance, be
ready with applications and use cases that will cre-
ate business value — allowing Oracle customers to
quickly take full advantage of emerging technolo-
gies, tools, and devices.
The period from the introduction of a new
piece of technology to when it is either declared
niche (think Google Glass) or achieves widespread
acceptance (think GoPro) is getting shorter and
shorter, observes Jake Kuramoto, senior direc-
tor of user experience emerging technologies at
Oracle. “The time it takes for a new technology
to gain mass adoption is compressing, causing
innovations to spread more quickly than ever
before,” he says.
Kuramoto goes on to note that 20 years ago,
people started using the internet at work; eight
years ago, people started bringing smartphones to
work; and five years ago, people started bringing
tablets to work.
Once users adopt a new technology and
become comfortable with and dependent on it,
they soon want to use it for their jobs as well. The
ultimate goal for Oracle’s R&D teams is to have
applications ready and waiting when that momentarrives. To that end, they check out each new
piece of technology, come up with use cases or
concept demos that demonstrate those concepts,
and then share those use cases and demos with
customers. Depending on the reaction, they may
go forward to the prototype stage and eventually
launch a product. The key is to move ahead of
the market, learning everything they can about
new technologies and devices well ahead of when
customers want to start using them.
The JD Edwards Labs team, a research group
focused on customers using Oracle’s JD Edwards
solutions, is like “the Lewis and Clark of our
organization,” says A.J. Schifano, senior princi-
pal product manager at Oracle. “They are the
risk-takers and pathfinders who clear the way for
us in product development to synthesize emerging
technologies into enterprise-class solutions.”
The key is to find the intersection between
gee-whiz new technology and solid business
value, explains Gary Grieshaber, vice president
of product strategy at Oracle and head of JD
Edwards Labs.
“You don’t just use technology for technology’ssake,” Grieshaber says. “If you look in the indus-
“THE TIME
IT TAKES
FOR A NEW
TECHNOLOGY
TO GAIN MASS
ADOPTION ISCOMPRESSING,
CAUSING
INNOVATIONSTO SPREADMORE QUICKLYTHAN EVERBEFORE.” —Jake Kuramoto, Senior
Director of User Experience
Emerging Technologies, Oracle
I - H U A C
H E N
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57
PROFIT AUGUST 2015
try, there’s lots of technology that’s just great but
doesn’t materialize for us because it doesn’t have
that business value.”
SMARTWATCHES: EVERYTHING AT A GLANCEOne example of that pioneering spirit is Oracle’s
approach to the smartwatch, a technology that
seems to have captured everyone’s attention
recently. The smartwatch trend is nothing new
to Kuramoto’s team, which has been playing
around with smartwatches and creating use cases
for them since 2012. That year, Noel Portugal,
emerging technologies user experience devel-
opment manager at Oracle, bought a Nike+
FuelBand. Portugal, a tinkerer by nature, was
interested in portable sensors and Nike’s devel-
opment ecosystem. Meanwhile, Jeremy Ashley,
group vice president, Oracle Applications User
Experience, became a devoted Pebble smartwatch
user and backed the original Pebble’s record-
breaking Kickstarter project. As other smart
fitness trackers and smartwatches came on the
market, the team continued to watch them closely.
“They all have SDKs and APIs to write realcode against,” Kuramoto says. So the team did just
that to determine what was possible with smart-
watches and how customers might use them. “We
start with an idea, build a small use case, test it out,
show it to people at conferences and other events,
take that feedback, and make changes.”
By 2014, there were many more wearables — both fitness bands and smartwatches — on the
market. “Apple hadn’t thrown its hat in the ring
yet, so we were still early enough,” Kuramoto
recalls. At that point, Kuramoto paired a designer
and a developer to investigate five popular, wear-
ble devices: Fitbit Force, Google Glass, Jawbone
UP24, Pebble, and Samsung Galaxy Gear. The
five pairs researched and evaluated each device,
and from there, the team developed a framework
for how Oracle solutions should work with smart-
watch platforms going forward.
First, al l processing would be cloud-based and
consistent among devices, with only the front end
to customize for each device. The team also took
note of what users most want from their smart-
watches — the ability to get important information
with a quick look at their wrists. That led to Oracle
Glance, an application for Oracle ApplicationsCloud, currently at the demo stage and perfectly
timed to launch when (or if) adoption of Apple
Watch — or smartwatches in general — becomes
widespread. Since processing happens in the cloud,
Oracle Glance will work with the Android Wear,
Android Auto, and Pebble platforms as well.
The idea behind Oracle Glance is to quickly
give users key information and notifications and
allow them to complete tasks with a simple touch
or swipe. So sales reps can glance at their watches
for the most up-to-date information relevant
to the deal at hand. Technicians can use their
watches to track their time on a specific project.
And everyone can get important alerts and mes-
sages right on their wrists or in their cars, so they
can see them and even respond without having to
pull out a smartphone — which, depending on the
setting, may be distracting, dangerous, or rude.
Though Apple Watch’s initial reception has
been lukewarm, there’s no doubt that smart-
watches are the way of the future, says Gurbinder
Bali, director of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne
development at Oracle. Recent research shows
that 60 percent of users find themselves using
their smartwatches more than they anticipated,he notes. “That’s a pretty sizeable number. It
MOON SHOTS
Oracle’s R&D labs are
home to “moon shots”
in which R&D teams
explore technology that’s
not ready for prime time,
but may have a profound
effect someday if it comesto fruition. Here are a few
such projects:
Head-mounted virtual
reality displays. New
phone-based headsets
(such as the Samsung
Gear VR) can provide a
mind-bendingly realistic
3-D experience. But can
they provide true busi-
ness value?
Yes, says Gurbinder
Bali, director of JD
Edwards EnterpriseOne
development at Oracle.
This might include creat-
ing virtual tools for the
real estate industry to give
customers a full sense of
locations they cannot visit.
Another use case is in the
construction industry,
where onsite supervisors
could record a detailed 3-D
report and send it back to
the offi ce (in lieu of written
notes) for managers toexperience for themselves.
Drones. Drones are
already in use for shooting
landscapes for mov-
ies and delivering small
items to remote locations.
Unfortunately for Amazon
and others with dronedreams, they won’t be
unleashed in urban areas
any time soon, and can’t
yet fly truly autonomously.
But when they’re ready,
there are a host of use
cases waiting for them,
including agriculture,
mining, surveying, forestry,
and delivering Wi-Fi to
places that would other-
wise have no internet.
Gesture. One Oracle team
has spent some time
playing with the Leap
Motion device, which
allows users to control
a personal computer
using gestures in midair
rather than a touchpad or
mouse. Gestural interfaces
will definitely have their
place when combined
with an augmented reality
device such as Microsoft’s
HoloLens, which allows
users to create holographic3-D images. To complete
the illusion of a 3-D object
made of light, users need
to be able to “handle” the
object and turn it around for
inspection from different
angles, requiring gestural
interface technology.Biometric controls.
Admittedly this is a far-
in-the-future applica-
tion, but one of Oracle’s
user experience labs has
been experimenting with
Muse, an EEG-sensing
headband. Though Muse
devices are primarily used
to reduce stress, brain
waves can also be used to
control objects, such as
causing a ball to roll. The
Nymi bracelet uses the
wearer’s EEG for system
authentication.
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58 BIG IDEAS
TECHNOLOGY POWERED. BUSINESS DRIVEN.
means that at a human level, the wearable plat-
form is successful in allowing people to consume
information and interact with their devices.”
So Bali and his team are building smartwatch
apps with a more industrial focus. In addition tothe notications and alerts all smartwatch users
want, these apps could interface with JD Edwards
solutions to send an alert that a machine on a
shop oor requires attention. The watch’s near
eld communication (NFC) capabilities or its
linked smartphone could deliver specic infor-
mation about a particular machine when the
supervisor or technician is near it.
“MACHINES ARE OUR BIGGEST USER COMMUNITY”
Wearables are only one technological area getting
close attention from Oracle’s R&D teams. Another
is the Internet of Things. The geo-fencing use case
in which medical records are automatically erased
is not the only demo to emerge from this explora-
tion. In another, a JD Edwards partner inspired
by the work of JD Edwards Labs created an onsite
scavenger hunt at a conference, where players
collected points by touching their NFC-enabled
smartphones to Raspberry Pi devices located
throughout the event. This could easily have real-
world applications, where users need to check in or
prove their presence at a specic location.
And this is just a small glimpse of what’s pos-
sible with the Internet of Things. “I kid people allthe time and say, ‘Our biggest user community
has yet to be explored, and that’s machines,’” says
Lyle Ekdahl, senior vice president and general
manager of Oracle’s JD Edwards family of prod-
ucts. He’s not entirely joking. As Ekdahl points
out, as of October 2014 there are more machines
than humans on the planet.
A third area the Labs team is exploring is visu-
alization around data and storytelling, to make
information more quickly and easily absorbed by
the visually oriented human brain. “In one demo
we take dry reports such as a quarterly earn-
ings report and create a short video that will tell
you the story of the quarterly earnings, walk you
through the numbers, and explain what’s happen-
ing year over year,” Kuramoto says. Meanwhile,
within JD Edwards Labs, Bali’s team is con-
sidering 3-D visualization use cases using the
Microsoft HoloLens, which could allow a user to
“handle” and examine a holographic 3-D object,
such as a human heart or a malfunctioning part
within a machine, from different angles.
Though each of Oracle’s several R&D labs
has its own mission, the free ow of information
among them benets all. For instance, Kuramotoand Bali have a standing monthly call where they
exchange ideas about new technologies and how
they could be used to benet Oracle customers.
“A single smart person thinking about something
could be productive, but the human mind can only
think about so much,” Kuramoto says. “Workingwith these teams has helped us all raise our game.”
WHAT IT MEANS TO BE MODERN
Creating independent R&D labs helps Oracle
remain a modern organization, Ekdahl explains.
“The keys I see to a modern enterprise are that
you have to fundamental ly recognize that we are
in a period of massive change — along the lines
of the change that happened with the Industrial
Revolution.” The rapid pace of technological
innovation, combined with global macroeconomic
changes, has created very fertile ground for this
kind of rapid evolution, he adds.
For Oracle customers this means that previous
ways of running an organization are no longer
sufcient. “It’s not just all about top down, mak -
ing sure everybody follows a standard process,”
Ekdahl says. Instead, the challenge is to become a
bimodal organization that can incorporate both a
top-down hierarchy and a atter, less structured
approach. “You have to have a mindset that says,
‘Yes, I need to execute, especially on some of
the traditional pieces of the business. But at the
same time, I have to start embracing some form
of holacracy.’”That bimodal mindset helps organizations ask
themselves fundamental questions, he adds — not
only, How do we do business? but also, What is
the business? “That,” concludes Ekdahl, “leads to
more-innovative thinking.”
“The pace of technology has increased rapidly
over the past ve or six years — almost to the point
of not being able to predict more than two years
out,” says Ashley. “Now we have to look at emerg -
ing technologies and very quickly assess the merit
for enterprise users. This is very applied R&D.”
Minda Zetlin is coauthor, with Bill Peging, of
The Geek Gap: Why Business and Technology
Professionals Don’t Understand Each Other
and Why They Need Each Other to Survive
(Prometheus Books, 2006).
THE KEY ISTO FIND THEINTERSECTION
BETWEEN
GEE-WHIZ
NEW
TECHNOLOGY
AND SOLIDBUSINESS
VALUE.
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featured in this story.
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TOGETHER ORACLE AND
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC EDUCATION ARE
Leading the Wayin Ocean Educationand Marine Research
National Geographic is a 501(c)(3) organization. PHOTOGRAPH BY ENRIC SALA
National Geographic Education supports themission of the National Geographic Society to
inspire people to care about the planet by
creating compelling educational materials for
young people and the adults who teach them.
NG Education provides unique learning
experiences to educators and advocates for
improved education in geography, the
environmental sciences, and other disciplines
that are critical to understanding our world.
With support from Oracle, National Geographic
Education is engaged in a major project to
develop teacher leaders in marine ecology and
create materials about ocean science and
geography for students, families, the ocean
recreation community, and the general public.
Support our work today. Visit nationalgeographic.org/education.
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Already uses numerous cloud services
Has defined policies for how the cloud isacquired and managed
Is more likely to have a strong partnershipbetween IT and other parts of the business
Is more than twice as likely to have a chief
information officer (CIO) leading the way
59% Sales Force Automation
59% Travel/ExpenseManagement
58% Training
55% Marketing
52% Recruiting
Billing/Invoicing
Financial/Accounting Procurement
Supply ChainCompliance
Top Five Cloud FunctionsAdopted by Cloud Leaders
60 BIG IDEAS
TECHNOLOGY POWERED. BUSINESS DRIVEN.
DATA WATCH
I - H U A C
H E N
ON THE HORIZON WHAT’S NEXT FOR CLOUD LEADERS? According to the Harvard Business Review report “Cloud Computing Comes of Age,” the
cloud has forever changed some key business processes. Of the 376 business and technology leaders interviewed, 60 percent have some cloud
services in their businesses, working primarily in marketing, recruiting, and sales automation. But what’s next? Cloud leaders are looking
for enterprise resource planning clouds on the horizon. “It’s no longer enough to deliver speed and simplicity; the cloud must also supportmission-critical operations,” says Rod Johnson, group vice president, Oracle Cloud Applications. More at bit.ly/1JU8AUO. — AARON LAZENBY
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