Hi-Definition Transformation Problems > Application-specific Data Transformation > Budget Reduction

You need to reduce your budget by more than 20% and are looking for ways to save money.

Problem

A large automotive company was in financial trouble, and received a bail-out from the US Government. One of the terms of the bail-out agreement was that they reduce spending by at least 20%. Over the years, the company had grown, by acquiring other, smaller companies, but the acquisitions had never become fully integrated, even though they were all using the Oracle E-Business Suite.

Solution

After taking a close look at their operation, the company realized that they were maintaining 8 different data centers, and had over 20 instances of Oracle E-Business Suite running.

They used eprentise Metadata Analysis to identify differences among the systems, and then used FlexField software to implement a single Chart of Accounts. They also used eprentise Consolidation software to identify and resolve configuration differences, other flexfield differences, and resolve duplicates.

After the consolidation, which maintained the complete integrity of the data, they were down to only 2 instances of Oracle E-Business Suite, and they were able to close 6 of the data centers (they could have closed 7 and kept only 1, but they wanted to keep 2, for redundancy and fail-over purposes). In addition to the obvious money saved in facilities costs, they also realized a significant savings in software license costs, and were able to reduce their IT-related headcount by 30%. After the consolidation, they were also able to reduce their cost of inventories by limiting the parts on hand so that most of their items were ordered just-in-time. They negotiated better terms with their suppliers, and had consistent pricing everywhere in the world.