“While my personnel budget didn’t
go down, it’s not going up either.
I’m able to fulfill more orders, I’m
able to deal with more distributors, I’m able to deal with more
customers, and I’m doing it on the
same personnel budget.”
—Kelly Kutz, Director of IT, Life Data Labs
with built-in integration and best practices. This involved filling
out a questionnaire designed to get at the heart of the enterprise. “Our financials, our tax structure—basically, it was close
to 300 questions,” says Kutz. “We answered all the questions,
and that took a little input from just about everybody in our
company about how we wanted to do business.”
This is something that a smaller software vendor, one that
didn’t have the advantage of years of experience and thousands
of prior implementations, wouldn’t be able to offer. Life Data
Labs would have needed to figure out all the particulars on its
own. This was a huge differentiator, says Kutz.
“Having such a large organization to deal with gave me the
ability to go to my rep and say, ‘This is the functionality I’m
dealing with, this is what I want, figure out how to do it,’ and
they would come back with a technical consultant who would
then say, ‘This is how you implement that.’ I liked it,” he says.
Sage also found value in Oracle E-Business Suite. The
company, which started its search for a new software infrastructure at the end of 2004, was outgrowing its legacy applications
and needed something more robust—it was experiencing steady
growth and wanted to make sure that growth could continue.
But ease of use was definitely an issue.
Barrett says that Oracle E-Business Suite software was easy to
install using an outside consultant. Ongoing technical support
is handled internally with a little help from Blue Gecko, a third-party DBA support team, he says.
“Blue Gecko helps apply patches. And it’s nice having access
to folks who know a little more about the database side of
things,” he says. “We’re a small operation—we had three people
before the implementation and only one during the implementation. Now we have two, so it’s nice having a backup system
there.” And Oracle is there for the company too, says Barrett.
“It’s not uncommon for Oracle to come visit us. We’re not
exactly a huge shop. But it’s not just a phone call; it’s people
coming onsite, looking at our situation and talking to us.”
Su-Kam CIO Sashi Kumar says that his company was able to realize
full ROI on its technology investment within a year, and he expects
that they’ll continue to see financial benefits as the company
continues to grow.
the company, which is India’s biggest manufacturer of power
inverters and power supply products, could continue to grow.
Su-Kam, like Sage and Life Data Labs, was chugging along
with pieced-together software programs and manual processes
for its financial and inventory management as well as customer
service and ordering. The company’s first challenge was figuring
out what they could use to replace each. This is where Oracle
Business Accelerators made a huge impact, helping Kumar identify key business flows and figure out which software modules
would work best and what implementation strategy to employ.
“Oracle helped us create a document that detailed what we
really needed and how the organization would benefit from
each product,” says Kumar. “This was very beneficial because
today it is very difficult for any IT head or CIO to get budget
approval, so having a document that showed exactly what we
needed and why was important.”
Sashi Kumar, chief information officer for Su-Kam Power
Systems, based in Haryana, India, says that he felt the same way
about the challenges facing his company. Before they started
working with Oracle, he didn’t know how his four-person IT
staff was going to be able to upgrade its infrastructure so that
WHERE SMALL IS BIG
Software aside, one of the most surprising aspects of Sage’s
implementation, according to Barrett, was the personal attention his company received. When Barrett was considering
upgrading to Oracle Discoverer as well as the latest version of
Oracle Database (Oracle Database 10g), he wasn’t sure that the
company’s hardware could handle it and scale effectively. He
posed the question to Oracle’s developers and within hours
had his answer. Postimplementation attention didn’t wane, he
says. Even after the software was installed, Barrett was able
to go to Oracle’s support team with a list of questions and get
answers quickly. And Barrett could ask about more than just
