Custom EBS Data Transformation

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.

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.

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.

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.