Fast food chain chooses Oracle Fusion

fast-food

Interesting article on Techtarhet.com.

It’s written by Patrick Gresham, an enterprise applications manager for a quick-service restaurant chain:

An excerpt:

After nearly 20 years of using Oracle Applications, we have millions of journal entries, invoices and receipts. Our purchasing and order lines date back to the early 1990s. Our system consists of an accounting flexfield with too many segments (because of the implementation of Oracle Projects) and a business model that needs to be re-engineered in anticipation of future growth.

I forgot to mention the more than 2,000 custom objects in our database. We not only want to upgrade and stay current, but we also need to undergo a modernization effort to streamline our business processes and maintain staff head count through standardization. With the goal to standardize 90 percent of our operations, we took the greenfield approach toward evaluating enterprise resource planning options.

During this journey, we met many representatives from Oracle. Through demos, we began to understand functional and technical benefits of Fusion Applications. We also gained an appreciation for what Oracle’s future holds and how we need to start retraining our staff now to embrace the opportunity. We learned that Oracle is mixing and matching features from its various applications; for example, the user interface is highly influenced by PeopleSoft. Also, the ability to make real-time decisions within Fusion General Ledger is done with a combination of Oracle’s Business Intelligence analytics software as well as Hyperion Essbase.

We received an Oracle Fusion Applications demonstration for six of the seven pillars offered as part of Fusion version 1. Key business users and information technology professionals were in attendance in each demo. Our chief information technology officer and the corporate accounting controller also attended some of these sessions. Functionality includes the ability to manage subledger closes from a single dashboard, slice and dice general ledger balances just moments after posting new entries or the social networking integration.

Staff was more excited about Fusion than Oracle Applications Release 12, particularly since we were planning a modernization effort. It was nice to have the business rallying behind Fusion, but the excitement still has to translate into business value to justify the change.

So we decided to take the next step and learn more about the Fusion Early Adopter Program. In this program, we would agree to help Oracle validate Fusion Applications before it became generally available. The benefit to our company would have been the ability to work closely with Oracle Development, start our modernization project earlier and get better deals on software pricing, since we would be willing to adopt Fusion early and solicit feedback on the product.

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