Problems We Solve with Software

Consolidation Requires a New COA Structure

Problem

An international financial services company had three instances of their Oracle E-Business Suites. One instance was for the European countries and the UK, another instance was for the US, and the third instance was for the Asia-Pacific region. In all, the three instances had approximately 30 modules of E-Business Suites. There were three different charts of accounts – one for each instance. They realized that the consolidation process would be much easier if the new instance had a common chart of accounts. With a common chart of accounts, all of the transactions from the sub ledgers would be able to be merged without writing translation scripts for each instance. They would also be able to write consistent interfaces to third-party systems from their single new instance. Finally, the performance for their new data warehouse would be significantly improved by not having to perform translation every time data was extracted from their E-Business Suite and loaded into the data warehouse.

Solution

The company designed a new global chart of accounts. They used ranges of values within the natural account segment to accommodate local statutory requirements. They finalized on the mappings from each of the three charts during their first test run. Before they went into production with their new chart of accounts, they used eprentise Consolidation software to merge their instances with the three separate charts of accounts. Then, in their target, consolidated instance, they changed each of the charts of accounts to the new global chart of accounts using FlexField software. They only had to create one set of interfaces to their third-party systems and greatly enhanced the performance on their OBIEE data warehouse.

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%.

Add Additional Segments to Your Chart of Accounts

You need to track financials for different areas of the business than when you first implemented Oracle E-Business Suite.
Problem

A hardware company that implemented Oracle E-Business Suite in 2001 acquired a services business in 2004. As a result, they wanted to track activity in each region so they could determine what the staffing requirements were in different locations and minimize travel time for their consultants. The chart of accounts they designed in 2001 gave them no way of accounting for different locations. No third-party reporting tools were able to solve the problem — there was not enough flexibility at the source, the accounting flexfield. The company needed a way to change the underlying structure of the accounting flexfield itself, but did not have the resources to go through a lengthy re-implementation.

Solution

The company used FlexField software to make rapid changes to the structure of their accounting flexfield. Their outdated chart lacked a location segment, so they had been forced to attach location attributes to other segments in the flexfield. Using FlexField, they were able to add a location segment. Along with a line of business segment, the company also gained the ability to track profitability by location and were able to determine where to recruit and hire for different skill sets to be more competitive in different markets.

Comply with Regulatory Requirements

Problem

A prominent manufacturing and distribution company needed to change their chart of accounts a few years back. They followed Oracle’s recommendation, set up a new set of books with a new chart of accounts and used Oracle’s financial consolidation to consolidate their general ledger. However, when their auditor came to assess their Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, he said that since their history and their subledgers did not use the same chart of accounts for their detail transactions and it was difficult to drill down on their accounts, they were non-compliant. Since Sarbanes-Oxley’s inception in 2002, the company had complied by using third-party reporting tools, but management had finally made the decision that it would be more efficient to change the way they accounted for certain parts of the business at the source, the accounting flexfield. They were told that in order to make the changes they wished to make, a re-implementation of their E-Business Suite would be necessary, but they did not want to spend the time or the capital to get involved in a process that would likely last over a year. They needed a quick way to make fundamental changes to their accounting flexfield without the need for a re-implementation.

Solution

The company used FlexField software to restructure their accounting flexfield in a way that enabled them to save multiple millions of dollars in personnel and third-party software license costs over the next 3 years. Because their reporting, drill down and the transaction history was transparent (it looked like they had always used the new chart of accounts), the auditors and their compliance officers were pleased.

Eliminate Thousands of Cross-validation Rules

Problem

A financial services company had over 2000 cross validation rules to enforce which departments could use which cost centers and accounts. In their current chart of accounts, they had run out of digits in the ranges that were defined, so the structure that was supposed to have Revenue starting from 1000 to 1999, Liabilities from 2000 to 2999, Expenses from 3000 to 3999, Assets from 4000 to 4999, and owner’s equity from 6000 to 6999 now looked like this:

It was almost impossible to remember what account went with which cost centers for each department. Every time the company wanted to add a new value, they had to rearrange all their cross validation rules. Maintenance on the chart of accounts was taking days each year end when they added new tax accounts.

Solution

The company expanded their account segment to 6 digits using FlexField software, put everything in ranges, and went down to a total of 17 cross-validation rules. There was no longer any maintenance to add new accounts or new departments. As an aside, they were also able to streamline their reporting so new reports were generated quickly.

Take Advantage of Oracle’s Subsidiary Ledgers

Problem

A multinational manufacturing company wanted to upgrade to E-Business Suite R12 from 11.5.9 in order to take advantage of its subledger accounting functionality. With locations across the globe, secondary ledgers that use accounting methods and currencies specific to the location of the business – while all still using the same primary ledger for headquarters in the UK – was an attractive feature for the company. However, the company’s business had changed since it first implemented E-Business Suite, and much of the data in the current chart of accounts was obsolete (location, product line, and cost center values all needed a thorough overhaul). They also carried customer information in the CoA since they did not have receivables when they first implemented. Since it did not make sense to carry over the junk during an R12 upgrade, the company needed a way to clean up their chart of accounts before upgrading so that they could have a fresh start in R12 and use subsidiary ledgers with only the information they needed.

Solution

The company used FlexField software to clean up their chart of accounts in 11.5.9. They decided to use the FlexField software prior to the upgrade process since 11.5.9 was a known stable environment and an environment that the users were familiar with. They designed their new chart of accounts without a customer segment and, using FlexField software, cleaned up the values in the other segments by mapping the obsolete values to a single new value for each segment. After they made the change using FlexField software they upgraded to R12. There were no issues with upgrading, adding new modules in R12, and implementing the customer master in their Oracle E-Business Suite. The integrity of the database was maintained, and they were able to use the features of R12 effectively. They now consider using FlexField software a part of their routine maintenance to continuously change the chart of accounts to reflect changes in their business.

Change Your Chart of Accounts for IFRS

Problem

An international brokerage firm was in the planning stages of preparing its financial systems for compatibility with IFRS. Management had a good grasp on what needed to change for compliance, but they were unsure of how to actually make the changes. They had been told a reimplementation of their entire E-Business Suite was the only option, but their business was changing so rapidly that they didn’t know if they could afford the downtime that would be required. They needed a fast method of changing their current chart of accounts without being invasive to their users.

Solution

The company used FlexField software to make the necessary IFRS-compliant changes to their existing chart of accounts over a weekend. They used the software not only to make the chart IFRS-compliant, but made enough changes to the chart that allowed them to decommission a third-party reporting tool that was costing them thousands of dollars a year in license fees – they could now get the reports they needed straight from the GL.

Comply with CGAC or SFIS Federal Standards

Problem

The National Business Center of the Department of the Interior operates as a shared services center. The Federal Government has mandated that each federal agency must change its chart of accounts structure to comply with the Common Government-wide Accounting Classification (CGAC) structure. One of the National Business Center’s customers, MCC, needed to change their chart of accounts to comply with CGAC. They needed to add two additional segments and change the length of two other segments.

Solution

Team members from the National Business Center worked with the MCC users to design a new chart of accounts and used FlexField software to make the change. Because the federal budget tables use segment values rather than code combinations, eprentise developed a new Federal Budget Allocation module for federal agencies that aligned values in the federal budget tables to the new CGAC-compliant Chart of Accounts. The customer was able to optimize their accounting flexfield structure to comply with CGAC as well as support the current state and future growth of the organization.

Shorten Month-end Close Process

It takes you 14 days to close each month because you are using hundreds of spreadsheets to reconcile your financials.

Profile

A financial services company had 27,000 cost centers in their chart of accounts. Reconciliation from their subledgers was a nightmare because the users didn’t have consistent posting processes. Values in that cost center included project values, department values, location values, and product line values. They had to break up every transaction to reflect the different segments that they wanted to track. For example if a transaction was for $1000 credit and was a project in New York for a security product, they created 3 credit accounting entries to each of the three cost centers representing the project number cost center, the cost center for New York, and the cost center for the security product. Of course, they created 3 or more debit entries for the offsetting entries. Anyone was allowed to create new cost centers for any reason. The cost centers were not in any logical ranges so creating reports was hard, budgeting was hard, and the maintenance on any accounting reclassifications was overwhelming.

Solution

They used FlexField software to map many of their cost centers to one new cost center value. They also created a separate segment for locations, and a separate segment for product lines. They reduced the number of cost centers to approximately 1100 and reduced their close cycle to 2 days.

Simplify FSGs and Other Reports

Writing reports is a major effort because your accounting structure has grown and the values are not in ranges anymore.

Problem

A large manufacturing company implemented Oracle E-Business Suite eight years ago, and the chart of accounts has grown dramatically since the implementation. The company did not initially design the chart of accounts to accommodate the addition of numerous accounts in specific ranges, so new accounts were added haphazardly in random places in the chart wherever room could be found. Over time, reports became much more difficult to create because accounts that should have been grouped were dispersed throughout the accounting flexfield – they became unable to use logical ranges to simplify report writing, and the cost in employee time and wages of creating reports rose to extremely high levels. The company needed a way to reduce the dispersion of the accounts and return to writing reports based on logical ranges.

Solution

The company used FlexField software to restructure and expand their accounting flexfield to match the current and future needs of the company. They also created a master row set in FSG for their reports. Though the new master report set took 2 weeks to develop, now they are able to create new reports on demand in just an hour. Using FlexField software, they lengthened the current segments to accommodate more values and mapped the dispersed accounts to new values to create new logical ranges for all their segments. After the change, they significantly simplified report writing and reduced the cost of reporting by 60%.

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.

Reorganize Departments

Your organization structure has changed, and you are continually reorganizing.

Problem

A high-tech manufacturing company currently has 10 segments in their chart of accounts:

• company – 3 digits
• business unit – 3 digits
• department – 4 digits
• account – 3 digits
• subdetail – 4 digits
• intercompany – 3 digits
• management company – 3 digits
• product code – 4 digits
• project code – 8 digits
• marketing channel – 2 digits

They do extensive reorganizations each quarter to accommodate department changes. There were two identified needs: a short-term change to ease the burden of the quarterly reorganizations, and a longer-term redesign of the Chart of Accounts. The reorganizations are caused when people (sometimes individually, and sometimes in groups) are moved from one department to another and all of their corresponding costs need to be changed to the new department. In the last reorg there were 819 department changes. These departmental reorganization changes generally take between 12-15 people about a month (not full time for anyone and a coordinator about 30-40% time).

Solution

The company used FlexField software to reorganize the department numbers to represent a true cost center rather than an HR organization. They estimated that the change to the chart of accounts saves them almost $500,000 annually and they are able to close their quarter much faster.

Move Legal Entities to a New Ledger or Set of Books

Problem

Before moving to E-Business Suite, the legacy systems for a steel manufacturing company did not handle multiple legal entities. They had set up separate accounting books for each legal entity. Not really understanding the functionality of E-Business Suite, they initially set up their applications to have multiple sets of books – one for each legal entity.

Solution

Using eprentise Reorganization software’s MSM Legal Entities module, they moved all the legal entities into a single set of books giving them visibility into the entire enterprise and the ability to operate consistently.

Merge Org Units or Inventory Organizations

Profile

A utility company had thousands of warehouses across the city to stock their cable, poles, meters, and other supplies. Each warehouse was set up in their Oracle E-Business Suite as a separate inventory organization. Every time a work order came in, the truck drivers had to check the inventory at the closest warehouse and if the item was out of stock, had to check 4 or 5 other warehouses to locate the item. If the item was not used, they had to go back to each of the warehouses to have the item restocked. Sometimes a warehouse would reorder an item when the same item was overstocked at a warehouse just a few blocks away.

Solution

The company decided to consolidate their inventories into 4 warehouses – one in the north, one in the south, one in the east, and one on the west side of the city. They used eprentise Reorganization software’s MSM Inventory Organizations module to consolidate their inventory organizations. The result was a 20% savings on the warehouse costs, approximately 40% savings of time for their truck drivers, and a 27% savings on inventory costs.

Consolidate Supplier Terms

You have different terms with your suppliers and don’t know how much you buy from each supplier.

Profile

During an ad-hoc vendor analysis project, a large computer manufacturing company discovered that throughout the organization, it had many different contracts with each of its suppliers, each with different payment terms, inconsistent discounts, and shipment policies making it difficult to determine how much business they did with any one supplier, whether they were getting the best prices, and whether they were able to leverage their purchasing power. Furthermore, it discovered that there was no uniform way of accounting for the cost of goods sold, as expenses were set up to be tracked only by product. While accounting for expenses by product made it easy to determine profit margins for a particular product line, the lack of consistent accounting practices.

Solution

The company used eprentise Reorganization software’s MS Inventory Organizations module to consolidate its inventory organizations into organizations based on product lines, and to assign their costs consistently at the subinventory level within each organization. They also standardized on their min/max reorder points for each item, and standardized on their receiving policies within each organization unit. They used eprentise Data Quality software to identify and resolve duplicate suppliers and MRO items. Four hundred vendor contracts were renegotiated, the supplier list was consolidated, and the company was able to save an estimated $9 million a year in supplies.

Inventory Consolidation

You are acquiring a new plant and want to consolidate the inventory into your existing inventory.

Profile

A manufacturing firm recently acquired a plant and needed to integrate the new inventory with its own. Not only did the inventoried products need to be added to the new system, but the historical data from the acquired plant was necessary in order to allow the acquiring company to continue to provide accurate forecasting data to management.

Solution

The company used eprentise Reorganization software’s MSM Inventory Organizations module to consolidate their inventories into a single warehouse as well as to consolidate their inventory organizations. They were able to reduce their warehouse costs by 35% and their inventory costs by 25%.

Break Down the Silos

Each area of your business was set up differently, there is no sharing, and you need to break down the silos.

Problem

A multinational corporation that has been in business 22 years had recently begun to notice that the systems behind its different business units kept track of the same information, but in different forms and formats, creating a large amount of duplicate data that was difficult and time-consuming to reconcile. In the early stages of the business, each line of business developed its own systems rather than adopting a large ERP system to drive the business as a whole. When E-Business Suite was finally adopted, each line of business implemented its own instance of the Suite, not considering that they were still duplicating the effort of tracking the same data and then having to weed through it for reporting purposes. Many third-party hardware systems were introduced in order to integrate the systems, but they found that the new hardware actually increased the time required to get the reports they needed. The company needed a way to increase communication between the systems and reduce the amount of duplicated efforts across the company.

Solution

The company used eprentise Instance Consolidation software to consolidate all of its instances into a single instance that functioned on its own. During the process, duplicate data such as customers, vendors, employees, and products was eliminated, and the silos of information were broken down allowing different areas of the business to communicate seamlessly. The company was then able to get the reports its needed straight from E-Business Suite and was able to eliminate a large energy footprint in the form of integration systems.

Change Your EBS Calendar

Problem

A pharmaceutical company has been acquired. The old company used a fiscal 4-4-5 calendar (so period 1 ended on January 28) and the new parent company uses a monthly calendar (with period 1 ending on January 31).

Solution

Using eprentise Reorganization software’s Calendar Change module, the acquired company changed the start and end dates of each of their GL periods. eprentise created unposted journal entries to add all the transactions from January 29-31 to period 1 and subtract them from period 2. It did the same for all the periods in the year. After changing the start and end dates for the GL periods, they used eprentise to synchronize the Fixed Assets calendar, the project accounting calendar, and the inventory calendar to the GL calendar. Everything tied out to the penny with the new calendar.

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.

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.

Change Your Calendar in E-Business Suite

Problem

A pharmaceutical company has been acquired. The old company used a fiscal 4-4-5 calendar (so period 1 ended on January 28) and the new parent company uses a monthly calendar (with period 1 ending on January 31).

Solution

Using eprentise Reorganization software’s Calendar Change module, the acquired company changed the start and end dates of each of their GL periods. eprentise created unposted journal entries to add all the transactions from January 29-31 to period 1 and subtract them from period 2. It did the same for all the periods in the year. After changing the start and end dates for the GL periods, they used eprentise to synchronize the Fixed Assets calendar, the project accounting calendar, and the inventory calendar to the GL calendar. Everything tied out to the penny with the new calendar.

Sell a Part of Your Business

Problem

A large entertainment company is selling their “Stores” division to another company. They don’t want the new company to be able to see the proprietary data from the other segments of the business, that aren’t being sold.

Solution

Using eprentise Divestiture software, the company created a filter rule to separate and delete data from the accounting flexfield in the Oracle E-Business Suite. Once the rule was created, they quickly and easily ran a report to show what data met the criteria set out in the rule. They then deleted all transactions not related to the “Stores” division.

The eprentise method maintained all relational integrity and adjusted all totals to reflect the deleted transactions.

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.

Integrate Your E-Business Suite with an Acquired Suite

You have just acquired a company who also uses Oracle E-Business Suite.

Problem

A global manufacturing company running Oracle E-Business Suite recently acquired a smaller competitor who also uses OEBS. They needed to Standardize Oracle Financial and Manufacturing Applications from both companies so that they could operate as a single company. They needed to quickly identify the differences in data between systems, standardize and consolidate data from the merged company, determine common customers, suppliers, and product lines so duplicates can be resolved, and obtain an accurate view of current and future operating requirements.

Solution

The company used eprentise Consolidation software to consolidate the two systems. eprentise Metadata Analysis generated a report listing all the differences in database objects and in the set-up data. The parent company’s E-Business Suite was identified as the target. After changing the chart of accounts and the calendar for the acquired company, the business users decided how the data was to be merged into the target. The company standardized all configuration data and resolved duplicates for all master data using eprentise Data Quality software. All transaction data from the acquired company was synchronized with the cleansed master data and moved into the target database. The history from both companies was preserved. There was no coding, and the instances were merged and went into production within 180 days of the acquisition.

They identified the benefits as being able to operate as a combined entity quickly. They captured the economies of scope and scale and leveraged the combined information resources, reduced the cost of internal support services, and achieved process efficiencies and business synergies quickly.