Change Your Chart of Accounts Structure

Problem

A utility company has been live on Oracle E-Business Suite for approximately 10 years. They moved to EBS, but the accountants were adamant that the chart of accounts remain the same as the legacy system. They set up four segments: Company (2), Cost Center (2), Account (4), and Future (3). All values were numeric. Cost centers became the catch all for projects, departments, and locations. The company was running out of values for both the cost center segment and the account segment and did not want to reuse values. The company needed to retain all history.

Solution

The company used FlexField software to:

• Expand their Cost Center segment to 3 digits
• Expand their Account segment to 6 digits
• Add a Project Segment
• Add a Department Segment
• Add a Location Segment

As a result, the company was able to track by departments, locations, and projects. There was plenty of room to put their natural account values in ranges so that reporting and analysis was easier.

Move to a Single Global Chart of Accounts

Problem

A pharmaceutical company is upgrading to R12 in their Oracle E-Business Suite because of the capability to have multiple ledgers. Their current set up had a separate set of books for each of the European countries because they implemented before the Euro was the European standard currency. Since they originally implemented with seven separate sets of books for each of the countries where they did business in Europe, they didn’t see a need to standardize on a single chart of accounts. Now, in R 12, they can record all transactions in a single ledger because the currency is the same. However, in order to use a single primary ledger, they need to have a single chart of accounts.

Solution

The company created their new chart of accounts, and mapped each of the seven charts of accounts to the new chart of accounts. Using FlexField software, they completed the conversion process to their new chart of accounts with three test runs in 5 months. In two of the segments, they made the segments large enough to allow each country to have its own range of values. Using security and cross validation rules, they were able to restrict access to those values, giving each country some freedom in the way they controlled operations without limiting the company’s ability to operate globally with consistent data. As a side, they are able to close their books each month in 3 days instead of the 12 days that it took before the chart of accounts change. They estimate that they have reduced operating costs for their accounting team by approximately 35%.

Merge Ledgers or Sets of Books

Problem

A large system integrator put each line of business into a separate primary ledger in their E-Business Suite. Realizing that the same customer may use each of their ERP implementation services, their security services, and their data warehouse services, they decided to merge their ledgers. The chart of accounts, the currency, the calendar, and the accounting conventions were the same for all 9 of their ledgers.

Solution

The firm used eprentise Reorganization software’s MS Sets of Books module to merge their 9 ledgers into a single primary ledger. They created operating units for each of the lines of business to keep the transactions separate and to maintain controls within the organization. They used Multiple Organizations Access Control in R12 to enable cross organizational processing and reporting on operating units in their subledgers.

Consolidate Multiple Production Instances of EBS Into a Single Instance

You want to go to a central data center and consolidate your Oracle E-Business Suites into a single instance.

Problem

A manufacturing company had 7 different implementations of Oracle E-Business Suite. Each application instance was configured at the plant level and had different product numbers structure, and different business processes that were implemented in their application. They could not consolidate their inventory into a single warehouse because of the different structures. The customer wanted to standardize all products and consolidate the databases into a single data center. They determined that they would save maintenance costs and license fees by having a single global instance, resolve business process inconsistencies, and save operating expenses when all the data resided in a single data center. The instances and the set-up decisions from their initial implementations were not well documented.

Solution

The company used eprentise Metadata Analysis to identify differences among the systems. After defining the target instance, the company used FlexField software to implement a single chart of accounts. Finally, the client used eprentise Consolidation software to identify and resolve configuration differences, other flexfield differences, and resolve duplicates across instances before merging all seven instances into the new target environment. They were able to quickly determine common customers, suppliers, and product lines so they were able to streamline their operations, understand their customers better, and leverage common business practices across the enterprise.

Avoid a Reimplementation

Oracle has told you that the only way to solve your problem is to reimplement.

Problem

Over time, businesses undergo major changes — reorganizations, mergers, or divestitures. They develop new lines of business, set up global operations, or work in different ways to comply with new statutory and regulatory requirements. Similar to many of the companies that use our software, this global security software company was always going through major changes. They had acquired several smaller companies, sold about 15 different divisions, and in general, didn’t have the same business as they did when they implemented Oracle E- Business Suite 12 years ago. The problem is that as their business changed, their EBS was stagnant. In order to keep up with the changes, the security software company maintained thousands of spreadsheets, implemented a data warehouse, and used a middleware product to integrate a variety of systems. There were literally hundreds of people trying to determine what parts of their business were profitable.

Solution

At first, the company was told that their only choice was to reimplement their EBS. They were told that a reimplementation would take two years and about 50,000 hours of consultants. They didn’t like this option both because of the time involved and the costs. They were worried about the skill levels of the consultants, whether they would be able to accurately create what their future state would look like, and the project generally going over budget with the scope continually changing as the business changed. Instead, they decided to purchaseeprentise Reorganization software to reorganize their existing EBS, resolve duplicates, and as an ongoing solution to accommodate the ongoing changes of their business and the resulting underlying changes to the setup of the EBS environment. eprentise produces software that reliably enables organizations to adapt existing systems to meet ever-changing business conditions. At the heart of the eprentise solution is a rules-based engine containing actions (copy, merge, filter, and change) and built in integrity rules that can be combined to affect changes to a relational database environment. The eprentise software provides testable, repeatable, rules-driven results, without custom coding.

By allowing applications to be changed to meet your changing needs, eprentise provides the ability to recognize the financial rewards of business and technology initiatives quickly and reliably.