Here are a few time-tested perennials sure to reap big rewards.

Weed Your Garden
This is a good time to focus on your company’s core competencies and eliminate redundancies and underperforming products and divisions.  Sell off areas that are not aligned with your core values so that your precious financial and human resources can be used to help drive profitability in the areas that are performing well.

For example, Compton Petroleum Corp.’s three-year projection of its operating plans, which revealed a large funding gap, brought industry speculation that Compton would need to sell significant assets, beginning with non-core assets, to solve cash-flow problems, according to a CNN Money report.  In another example, a major U.S. bank saved $30 million a year by cleaning up and consolidating duplicate data following a series of acquisitions, according to an IBM report.

By reducing redundant processes, consolidating systems and sloughing off areas negatively impacting companies, CEO’s will be in a much better position to take on new business in the future.

Start Large Projects Now
This may sound counterintuitive.  But during a recession, the sales cycle will necessarily take longer, so companies can turn this into a plus by using the extra time to focus on quality.  Additional testing will help ensure new products have adequate time to mature before entering the market.

Buyer’s Market
For those companies that find themselves cash rich, the recession can be a bargain hunter’s dream.  Low interest rates and a bounty of distressed companies looking for infusion of cash provide attractive opportunities; but it’s a good deal only when it adds value to the parent company.

In the earlier Compton example, Centennial Energy Partners said publicly that they thought Compton was an “opportunity-rich company” and asked the Compton board of directors to consider selling its company to Centennial.

Stay Connected
Hard times provide exceptional opportunities to build customer loyalty.  Make sure you begin the process by keeping your employees and investors informed of any changes.  This not only has a calming effect but also ensures that the public receives consistent, accurate messages.

Customers appreciate it when a business is willing to work with them on pricing and flexible financial arrangements.  When the economy improves, they will remember how companies treated them when times were tough.

By following these common-sense strategies, businesses can not only survive a recession but actually thrive.

Suppose for example, that you want to separate the data because your company has decided to sell off a division. Division is a segment in your accounting flexfield, so maybe you just determine the segment value of the division to be sold off, identify all the code combinations that have the value for that division, and then find all the tables that have the relevant code combination ID. Oh, you say, that’s easy. I can just write a select statement with a where clause (for division number 100) and my Oracle Applications will be separated. Not so fast. It’s not as easy as it sounds because all the transactions cannot be filtered easily based on the above condition.

• Not all the transaction tables carry the code combinations related to the division. E.g. you may have invoices with the division code but the related payments do not have the same.
• You may have invoices with multiple invoice lines with separate division codes.
• You may have an invoice line with distributions assigned to multiple divisions.
• You may have payments that pay invoices related to different divisions.
• In-flight transactions may pose challenges. E.g. checks may have been entered but not cleared.
• Taking part of a transaction may affect the balancing segment. Adjustments need to be made so that the debits and credits are equal for each balancing segment value and the retained earnings are not affected.
• How are you going to handle the history?

What about creating an archive? Surely, that is easy. For this example, assume that you want to archive all transactions that are more than 3 years old. All you have to do is pull all the transactions by date. Was that date created? Date modified? Date closed? Date of the invoice? Date of the payment? Date the check cleared? What about the in-process transactions? How long should they stay open? When you post in summary, and then try to go back to find the detail, how will you reconcile? If you post in detail, what adjusting entries will you need to make so that the year balances correctly and still maintains your audit trail for Sarbanes Oxley? What happens if you upgrade your applications and then need to restore the archived data? Will you need to go back and reopen all the periods and repost? How can you be sure that you aren’t creating double entries and what about all those adjusting entries you made to balance – will you need to reverse them? Maybe you are keeping the archived transactions in a separate Oracle Applications instance (the same version as the time of the archive). Is that version still supported by Oracle? Do your current users know how to navigate through the older version?

Subsetting the data has similar issues:

• When you are selecting a portion of the data, you need to make sure that you are selecting all the related data – configuration, master, and transaction, or the integrity of the database may be compromised.
• You will probably want both open and closed transactions so that you can test for a complete business cycle (purchase to pay, recruit to retire, etc.) That may include workflow elements like approvals that are not directly related to the filter criteria.
• Security rules, data groups, organization units, current responsibilities, enhancements and bolt-ons will have to be evaluated to see if they need to be revised to accommodate the test cycle.

The takeaway here is that separating the data for any reason is a business issue – not just a technology issue. The business has to identify the requirements, do the analysis, and be an integral part of the solution.

A growing number of boardrooms are facing the problematic question of what information to share.  By September 2007, global divestitures had reached a record-setting $1.64 billion for the year in almost 10,000 deals, up 25 percent for the same period in 2006, according to Dealogic, a software developer for the investment-banking industry.  Divestiture, or selling off a part of the company, can be a healthy strategy for pruning under-performing divisions, responding to changes in the marketplace, allowing a company to focus on different markets, or just because cash is needed for new initiatives.  Some of corporate America’s most well known names are in the midst of divestitures, getting rid of assets that are considered “noncore” and refocusing their resources.  While divestitures can provide many benefits, executives must plan what information to share under stressful conditions.  They are expected to sustain growth and retain existing customers while reducing the impact of organizational changes.

Disposing of unwanted divisions or products is complicated.  Deciding how to handle information during a divestiture is not unlike splitting the assets of a marriage during a divorce.  Not only is the parent company affected, but acquiring companies are as well.  Very often the divested company is sold to a competitor.  Providing historical information for the part of the company to be divested may increase the selling price, but may provide information that you don’t want your competitors to have.  Some information, such as customer lists, is considered low risk.  Competitors likely know already whom major customers patronize.  And realistically, by the time a divestiture is announced, it’s likely that some key data may already be in the hands of departing employees, or already part of the buyer’s information.  Of greater concern are trade secrets, trend analyses, prices, discounts, cost of goods sold and contract terms with suppliers.  If exposed, this information could give competitors an advantage and should be kept private, if possible.  Public and private companies have different obligations.

Due to the complexity of accurately managing changes to such large relational databases, technology has entered the picture as a substitute for a large piece of the painful consulting work and is playing an increasingly larger role by helping to automate the process, reducing time and expense.  Planning ahead is essential; experts recommend starting at least three to four months prior to the separation and regularly communicating the impact of changes to all business units.  With so much at stake, wise executives will take careful steps to decide what information to disclose and what to keep private, and then use technology to automate the separation once the decision is made.