its point-of-sale system with accounts
receivable by 200 percent.
“We are able to process a large
amount of data every single day in a
couple of hours, and the time it took
to close our books went from 10 days
to 7 days,” says Sarkar. “In terms of
daily accounting, we are able to post
our daily retail sales on time—that
used to take two or three days to
complete. We are now able to rec-
oncile cash for 280 stores with more
than 45 banks on time.”
Mark Bravo, senior vice presi-
dent of finance at Skechers, says as
Skechers expands into new coun-
tries, the first thing executives do
when they open a new office is call
Oracle, and Oracle staff sends along
the country-specific requirements.
“Even before we have an accountant
hired, we’re ready to do business
and accounting in that country,
because Oracle is there for us world-
wide as we grow,” says Bravo. “We
don’t need to set up another IT
department in that business unit—
we give them the application URL,
and off they go.”
Weinberg affirms the benefits
of Oracle On Demand: “Being in
the cloud computing world has
made us a lot more fleet-footed in
being able to incorporate new busi-
ness units, domestically as well as
abroad,” he says.
KICK-STARTING BUSINESS INSIGHT
Having addressed operational
inefficiencies and removed a
number of obstacles to growth,
Skechers management focused on
finding a BI tool that would allow
executives to gain better business
insight. Oracle Business Intelligence
“We are able to utilize and streamline Oracle Database not
only with our financial applications but also with our business
intelligence tool. It helps us to have a single vendor to manage
all these applications,” says Sarkar.
After a three-month implementation period, Skechers went
live with Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition in
early May 2011. Users can now log in to the Web-based application and call up dashboards that provide detailed financial
Walking on a cloud: Skechers CFO and COO David Weinberg believes hosted enterprise
applications have made his company more speedy and agile, easily adding new functionality for
different geographies and business units.
Sarkar. “Now, we are able to set up financial processes in dif-
ferent countries with minimal effort. We are keeping our users
happy, and that keeps me happy. Having stable development
and testing environments also helps us to ramp up very key
projects in less than 40 percent of the time it took before we
went live on Oracle On Demand.”
With the help of Oracle Platinum Partner OSI Consulting,
the implementation took nine months, and Sarkar says the
company went live with “hardly any issues.” PeopleSoft applica-
tions have enabled the company to improve the integration of
