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products - consolidation
consolidation case study 2
One of the world's leading providers of telecommunications services
provides local, long distance and international telecommunications
services, Internet services and information technology solutions.
This global telecommunications company serves more than 28 million
exchange lines as well as providing network services to other licensed
operators.
To manage their business transactions, the company relies on Oracle
Applications. In an ever-evolving industry, the challenges to remake
an organization are many and complex. Accurate data - reflective
of current corporate strategies - are paramount for success. Using
software developed by the eprentise team and a small project team,
this global company was able to combine multiple instances to avoid
disparate archives, upgrade without sacrificing historical data
and filtered out specific data in preparation for a business divestiture
The Challenges of Change
Mid-year 2000, the global telecommunications company decided to
upgrade to a newer version of Oracle Applications. The communications
company faced an expensive "wither-and-die" migration
process for its data, reported their systems development accountant.
The Alternatives
The traditional method would create two diverging Oracle Applications
implementations: one with several instances of the old version containing
the historical data collected before the change, and another running
on the new software version that combined invoice and ordering information
from departments within the company's wireless division. Migration
of data would require custom scripts, a raft of consultants and
a brute-force approach.
The company's only other alternative to re-implementation and the
resulting segregation of data was the software developed by the
eprentise team. According to Joshua Greenbaum, a principal at Enterprise
Applications Consulting in Daly City, California: "The eprentise
team is trying to solve an age-old problem that has typically been
solved the hard way."
Automating Change
Using the consolidation software developed by the eprentise team,
the telecom was able to combine its multiple instances of Oracle
Applications before its planned upgrade. The process took five months
instead of the year or more that was predicted.
The telecommunications company put people versed in the firm's
business processes and its Oracle software on the project. The methodology
developed by the eprentise® team allowed the company employees to
achieve project objectives with business terminology and user-defined
rules through a windows interface rather than programming language
Immediate Impact
In Computerworld (March 18, 2001),the company confidently
estimates the company saved as much as 1 million pounds because
of the unified data stores. In addition, they said that their historical
data was migrated into the new software, allowing the company to
provide better customer service because of that integrated database
Another advantage to using the software developed by the eprentise
team is that the migrated data is clean and accurate.
Maintaining data integrity, normalization and removing duplicate
and garbage data are of key importance in this kind of project,
says Greenbaum. He continues: The software is good at making sure
that the data is right, he says, and the eprentise team backs it
up with testing and validation. The brute-force method that many
consultants use can't offer the same promise of accuracy.
Summary of Results
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