Modernizing a Business with Oracle Cloud and Salesforce

For over 40 years, the Company has been a leading provider of manufacturing solutions and life science sample-based services and solutions worldwide – working in a variety of industries from semiconductor manufacturing to technology device manufacturing to life sciences. With its precision robotics, automation, and cryogenics expertise, the Company strives to bring new ideas, new technologies, and new ways of thinking to its customers in order to drive the future.

Like any company that has long been a leader in its field, the Company realized that its legacy financial planning platforms, such as EBS, Great Plains, Acumatica, QuickBooks and NetSuite, no longer met their needs. Following numerous acquisitions, the Company began running into roadblocks caused by the many disparate systems, including time-consuming manual processes and duplicate data sources that complicated planning and budgeting, creating inefficiencies throughout the organization. Carrying on with their existing tech stack would stand in the way of the Company achieving its long-term goals, instead of enabling them with the following benefits that a solutions upgrade would provide:

• Standardized global business processes
• Streamlined financial consolidation
• Aligned and integrated support and service processes between Salesforce and Oracle
• Solid Technology Foundation that is scalable and can account for future growth
• Standardized platform across the organization without fear of being version locked

With such an expansive enterprise, the Company knew this transformation would require IT strategy and expertise beyond the capabilities of only its inhouse IT team. An Oracle Partner since 2002, a Salesforce Consulting Partner since 2006 and Boomi Partner since 2018, Apps Associates (Apps) was the answer to their project needs.

Using a multi-phased approach to the Oracle EBS migration that spanned multiple  years, Apps Associates advises and supports the company in converting their financial planning and related Integration processes to Cloud ERP, Oracle Finance, SFDC and Boomi. The phases included:

1. Sample Management
2. Go-Live of Consumable Business
3. Go-Live of Stores (Large Refrigeration Units)
4. Secondary Sample Management (following an M&A)

In phase one, the team tackled sample management to set the stage for the remainder of the project.  The sample management business had complex pricing calculations and billing practices that were not scalable and required manual checks and balances.  The solution combined standardized and scalable Oracle processes, for both financials and order management, as well as leading CRM practices in Salesforce and integrated them with a custom billing engine to automate, simplify and more accurately create customer billings.  Leveraging Oracle’s powerful reporting tool, the Company had better visibility to their AR aging, monthly recurring revenue forecast and customer pipeline.   Phase one also included the implementation of a Middleware tool Boomi which was the central hub for all Integrations between Oracle Cloud ERP, Salesforce and other systems. Boomi’s Master Data Management was also implemented to facilitate a single source of truth among Customer, Supplier, Employee and User records.

With phase one completed, subsequent phases each enabled a hyper focused approach for separate business units with varying go-live launches throughout the engagement, to ensure the least amount of day-to-day disruption as possible. Apps’ experts led the charge in replacing the company’s Enterprise Quality Solution (HQMS) with Oracle Cloud and implementing Cloud ERP in areas such as Finance, SCM, and PPM. Additionally, Apps guided and supported the Salesforce CRM transformation for Sales and Support by optimizing Sales Cloud across business units, implementing Service Cloud and Field Service Lightning and created a custom pricing engine in Salesforce that references Oracle Cloud customer-specific pricing strategies. Through the course of the above, Boomi was further utilized to facilitate various integrations between these systems to ensure data flowed seamlessly and accurately through them.

Finally, following Apps’ advisory for best practices in opportunity management, quoting, case management, field service and middleware implementation, the Company was ready to reinforce their position as industry leaders.

To-date, the Company has been able to relieve issues previously caused by missed monthly billings, address process standardization through global design and phased approaches, increase focus on change management for overall improvements in user experience (UX), and adopted best of breed Salesforce functionality with full integrations for its service processes. The universal platform has also led the Company to realize the following benefits for increased, long-term, global success:

• Standardized business processes and elimination of customizations
• Reduced financial close process and expedited financials reporting
• Eliminated legacy/at risk end of life systems