Eaton’s Marcos Baccetto (left), Operations
Services Manager, and Patrick Randrianarison,
President, South America and Vehicle Group
South America
A Singular Focus
BUSINESS AND IT HAVE A SHARED VISION AT EATON’S VEHICLE GROUP SOUTH AMERICA.
any companies have mission statements, found framed
and hung on cafeteria walls or lying on the desks of corpo-
rate officers, their stretch goals and earnest promises etched into
Lucite knickknacks. Those statements, once written, are often
soon forgotten, the knickknacks buried under spreadsheets on
the executives’ desks.
But not at Cleveland, Ohio–based Eaton Corporation. The
70,000-employee, US$13.7 billion company is managed using
the Eaton Business System (EBS)—a shared set of values, a
common philosophy, and a standard set of tools and processes
deployed throughout the highly diversified global power management enterprise. Eaton embeds the company’s core values in
every facet of executive decision-making.
PAULO FRIDMAN
Promoting customer focus and a culture that emphasizes con-
tinuous improvement and the transfer of best practices and key
learning across the organization, the EBS is how Eaton works as
an integrated company. That same singleness of approach pro-
vided the philosophical platform that helped Eaton executives
pursue an intensive effort to achieve a single instance of Oracle
E-Business Suite in the century-old, US$2.5 billion Eaton Truck
Group. This business serves major global truck, automobile, and
agricultural supply manufacturers such as GM, Ford, Mercedes-
Benz, John Deere, and Volkswagen, among others.
A BURNING PLATFORM FOR CHANGE
The truck operations in Brazil were acknowledged to be a
potentially difficult step in this transformation due to size,
business complexity, and the significant number of localizations required. But the Eaton Truck Group in Brazil represents
a significant portion of sales by the Eaton Vehicle Group,
which also has responsibility for global automotive manufacturing. Motivated by what Eaton executives called a “burning
platform for change,” leaders at the Valinhos, Brazil–based
Vehicle Group South America (VGSA) needed to rationalize
their highly fragmented and customized IT environment by
integrating the multiple instances into a single Oracle instance
for the entire group.
