“Integration and business intelligence are, for me, the key technologies
for the next 12 to 24 months.”
—Scott Fenton, CIO, Wind River Systems
always get an accurate rundown on what products a customer
owned. Customer data in general was undependable. Some
orders were being shipped incorrectly, due to inaccurate customer addresses. Orders weren’t being properly transmitted from
the company’s Siebel CRM system to its Oracle E-Business Suite
instance, creating massive amounts of
manual data input and reconciliation
and, sometimes, dropped orders. And
critical sales reports were being generated
manually, which involved assembling
information acquired via e-mail, creating Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, and
then e-mailing those out, a process that
often took days.
It wasn’t long before Fenton formulated a three-step blueprint for solving
the problems. A thorough data cleansing
would be complemented by an upgrade
of Wind River’s outdated Siebel CRM
implementation, from Release 6. 3 to
Release 7. 8, and improved integration
between the Siebel software and Oracle
E-Business Suite. For the latter, Wind
River would rely on Oracle Fusion
Middleware, Oracle SOA Suite, and
Oracle Customer Data Hub. It was a plan
that required the heavy involvement of
business leaders.
“These weren’t IT projects; they were
projects in which IT was working with
the business side on rollout and implementation,” says Fenton. Each part of
the project had a business sponsor from
the executive team and a commitment of
staff resources from the business side.
Being armed with better customer data and a new Siebel
implementation wasn’t going to deliver the needed benefits
without strong integration. The Oracle Fusion Middleware components enabled that to happen. Siebel CRM has become the de
facto interface for the sales staff, and any new leads or opportunities entered are immediately synced with Oracle E-Business
Suite via the customer data hub. The deployment is still too fresh
to have yielded quantifiable results, but Fenton reports customer
records that are cleaner than ever, an entirely streamlined order-to-cash process, and a massive reduction in data duplication.
Wind River is taking further advantage of the Siebel
CRM integration with Oracle E-Business Suite by rolling out
Oracle Business Intelligence, which will help it turn those
clunky reports created in Microsoft Excel into Web-based
dashboards updated in real time via the integration with
Oracle E-Business Suite.
With a key integration effort under his staff’s belt, Fenton
has plans to build on that success. For instance, he’d like to tie
in some of the company’s other applica-
tions, such as customer online support,
teleservices, and a knowledge manage-
ment app that provides customers with
access to a searchable knowledgebase.
Says Fenton, “Integration and business
intelligence are, for me, the key technol-
ogies for the next 12 to 24 months.”
And why not? Wind River has the
building blocks it needs for refreshing
inefficient business processes with the
introduction of new technologies that
can tap the power of the company’s
Oracle SOA Suite.
“It opens up so many doors,” says
Fenton. “The basic foundation for the
house is there, and we feel that we can
add on as many rooms and levels as technology permits.
Success, Times 30
Winners of the 2007 Excellence Awards and
Their Consulting Partners
Winner Consulting Partner
Apollo Group E2E Consulting
BAE Systems Australia Oracle Consulting
Booz Allen Hamilton Oracle Consulting
(Hyperion consulting services)
City of Kent ImageSource
Credit Suisse Oracle Consulting
Deutsche Bank Oracle Consulting
Embry Riddle MyCroft
GE Healthcare
IKON Office Infosys
Ingersoll Rand Dyna-BI Systems
Logitech TasmanAve
Merrill Lynch Sofia Technology
Mexicana Condor Consulting
Move.com CSC
Northwestern University Intelligent Chaos
PepsiCo
Projection Design Oracle Consulting
PTC Whitebread/Zannet
Qualcomm
Rackable Intelenx
Ross Stores Accenture
Secure Path Innowave
Temple Inland DCC
Turkcell Oracle Consulting, HP
Syntax-Brillian Innowave
Vicor Oracle Consulting
Universal Lighting BIAS
Vion Food Oracle Consulting, Deloitte
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Wind River Oracle Consulting
*No consulting partner identified
PARAMETRIC TECHNOLOGY CORP.:
A SINGLE SOURCE OF TRUTH FOR
CUSTOMER DATA
Oracle’s 2005 acquisition of Siebel
Systems is starting to yield its most powerful benefits, thanks to Oracle’s growing
list of integration offerings, which have
helped Parametric Technology Corp.
(PTC) increase operational efficiencies.
Less than a year ago, the maker of product lifecycle management software recognized that the mixture of point-to-point
integrations it was using didn’t provide its sales force with the
kind of data access and consistency it needed. Product information and price lists were managed by the company’s product
marketing group in Oracle E-Business Suite, but that information
was updated in the Siebel Customer Relationship Management
(Siebel CRM) system only nightly. That meant that any updates
that occurred during the day weren’t available to the sales staff
until the following day.
Meanwhile, salespeople entered leads and opportunities
into the Siebel system, but the crucial contact information
therein found its way into the customer records in Oracle
E-Business Suite only once it had been manually rekeyed.
