6 Phases to a Successful Oracle ERP Cloud Implementation

The business landscape is in flux, and success lies in being able to move with it. Digital transformation is driving businesses to reconsider their technology strategy, including moving beyond the organizations’ legacy ERP systems. On-premises, monolithic, one-size-fits-all ERP systems are inflexible and expensive to customize, leaving businesses less agile and unable to rapidly meet the ever-evolving marketplace needs. The complex integration of point solutions with on-premises ERP systems limits the flexibility to add new capabilities to current systems. 

Why Oracle Cloud ERP Implementation? 

Many organizations have turned their focus to cloud-enabled ERP systems because of the flexible, agile, and cost-effective structure of their ERP application portfolios on the cloud.

Cloud-based systems are easily configurable, constantly updated, and quick to implement and use. Cloud ERP adoption further reduces the risks incurred by outdated technology while delivering growth, innovation, operational agility, and efficiency. It enables growing businesses to quickly expand into new regions around the globe without making significant investments into their ERP infrastructure because they are highly adaptive to accelerated rates of change. One of the best-known cloud-based ERP suites is Oracle ERP Cloud.

Oracle ERP Cloud covers the following enterprise business functions:  

• Accounting 
• Financial management 
• Project management 
• Procurement

These modules run on the Oracle technology stack in Oracle’s cloud centers and can be accessed through public and private cloud implementation with the support of hybrid deployment. Generally, organizations select Oracle ERP Cloud due to its broad feature set and ease of integration with other Oracle products. It also benefits businesses by effectively reducing the time and effort around reporting. 

Why is it Essential to Plan the Oracle ERP Cloud Implementation?

There is a notable change in shifting applications from on-premises to the cloud. It demands a change in mindset and needs adjustment to the business processes and policies along with the adoption of new ones. However, before making any move on the Oracle ERP Cloud, you must carefully plan the migration project, including: 

• Understanding your migration challenges 
• Creating a project plan 
• Defining the objectives 
• Deciding on the outcomes you want to achieve

In a nutshell, you need to develop a project vision and roadmap that defines stages, goals, associated risks, and a detailed financial plan with resource requirements. 

Best Practices for a Successful Oracle ERP Cloud Implementation 

Implementing Oracle ERP Cloud is a significant undertaking that can lead to increased efficiency, improved business processes, and enhanced decision-making capabilities. To ensure a successful Oracle ERP Cloud implementation, consider the following best practices:

Engage Stakeholders Early and Often:

Frequent and clear communication with the team and stakeholders is essential for the project’s success. The organization needs to ensure that every stakeholder involved in this project is clear about their tasks and their timeliness. Also, access to the required resources should be provided for the timely completion of tasks.

Ensure Continuous Testing:

Another thing that organizations need to ensure is that they include detailed testing and validation, which is critical to a successful Oracle ERP Cloud implementation methodology.

Enable Seamless Data Migration and Quality Assurance:

It is also crucial to safeguard your data and have an inventory of your current data. Discover errors and gaps in your current system and data. It would help if you resolved errors before migrating to Oracle ERP Cloud.

Evaluate Cloud Readiness:

Rather than directly moving onto Oracle Cloud ERP implementation, it is crucial that you first plan, prepare, and complete the readiness of the migration. Many companies overlook this planning phase, which is why several Oracle Cloud ERP implementations fail.

Consider a Phased Implementation Approach:

Rather than a big-bang deployment, start with core functionalities and gradually expand the implementation to other modules. This approach minimizes disruption, allows for better testing, and ensures that each phase is successful before moving on to the next.

In the following section, we’ll talk about the 6 phases of a successful Oracle ERP Cloud implementation.

6 Key Phases for Successful Oracle ERP Cloud Implementation

A typical Oracle ERP Cloud implementation methodology can be split into six phases: Prepare, Examine, Plan, Design, Configure & Test, and Deploy. Each phase is unique and has its specific objectives. Here are the steps involved in an Oracle ERP implementation:

1. Prepare for Oracle Cloud ERP Implementation

This includes researching the chosen Oracle ERP system, setting up a project team, and defining detailed system requirements.

In this phase, the project team handles a broad range of roles related to the implementation, including laying out the project plan and target dates, ensuring adequate resources are allocated, making product and design decisions, and day-to-day project management.

One of the team’s early goals is to develop a detailed understanding of current issues, including process inefficiencies and requirements for the desired ERP system.

2. Examine Oracle Cloud ERP Implementation

Armed with precise design requirements, the development phase begins. This involves configuring and, where necessary, customizing the software to support the redesigned processes. It may also include developing integration with any of the organization’s other existing business applications that the Oracle Cloud ERP system won’t replace.

In parallel with software development, the team develops training materials to help users adjust to the new system. It also starts planning data migration, which can be complex since it often involves extracting, transforming, and loading data from multiple systems, each of which may use different formats and hold duplicate or inconsistent information. The project team then determines which data to migrate in this phase, avoiding the blanket migration of all historical and irrelevant data.

Also, this is the phase where the development of the reports happens. Oracle ERP comes with in-built out-of-the-box reports, also called OTBI (Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence) reports, which can be easily tuned by business users themselves. If these reports do not fulfill the need, new custom reports are developed.

3. Plan for the Oracle Cloud ERP Production Deployment

In this phase, systems, users, and organizations are assessed for cloud readiness. A list of systems and resources are created, addressed and corrected. User provisioning is done by configuring username, password, and related information. With the focus on change management and required user training and adoption, the organization ensures that everyone is on board and shares the decision about each deployment step.

4. Design the Oracle Cloud ERP Implementation

The design phase works from detailed requirements and an understanding of current workflows to develop a detailed design for the new Oracle Cloud ERP system. This includes designing new, more efficient workflows and other business processes that take advantage of the system.

It’s essential to involve users in the design phase because they have the most intimate understanding of the current business processes. Involving them also helps ensure they welcome the new system and take full advantage of it. Basically, it’s a walkthrough session with the users where the Oracle Cloud ERP system’s workflows and processes are showcased. These are also called Conference Room Pilots or App Reviews. The show and tell sessions not only help provide a demo to the client’s business users but also provide an opportunity for taking their feedback on the vanilla functionalities to determine whether the standard Oracle ERP functionalities are a fit to the desired ERP processes.

Along with that, gap analysis is done to identify process intricacies and unique quirks that may require customization of the Oracle Cloud ERP software or changes to the workflow or processes to align closely with the ERP system itself. The team presents the gaps to its implementation partner or supplier to seek potential solutions. This phase also determines the data migration strategy from the old ERP system to the new Oracle ERP system. It also involves designing the third-party applications that need to be integrated into Oracle ERP and various reporting that needs to happen through the new ERP.

5. Configure & Test Oracle Cloud ERP Implementation

Post development, the first step involves performing System Integration Testing (SIT) of the system’s full capabilities to ensure the Oracle ERP system and the third-party applications connected to Oracle ERP are working as expected.

User training materials are then built. Training sessions are conducted to showcase the functionalities of the Oracle ERP to the business users. These trainings usually focus on the functional part and assist with technical training depending on the technical components involved in the implementation.

This training is followed by or coupled with UAT (User Acceptance Testing), which is typically supported by the implementation vendor. During UAT, a group of representative employees are asked to test the system and any migrated data by simulating their day-to-day activities in the software.

6. Deploy Oracle Cloud ERP

This phase determines the readiness of the new Oracle Cloud ERP. The validity of the UAT completion, data migration, and open issues are assessed to ensure the system is ready to go live. Based on this analysis, a Go-No/Go decision is reached. If the decision is to Go, the Oracle Cloud ERP instance is launched.

Nurturing the Oracle Cloud ERP implementation after deployment helps to keep users happy and ensure the business achieves the desired benefits. The project team may still be responsible for the ERP system during this phase, but its focus shifts to user feedback and adjusting the system accordingly. Some additional development and configuration may be done as new features are added to the system. New staff are also trained on the system.

Oracle releases periodic updates every quarter, which are tested and deployed to the production instance. This is an ongoing activity that requires validation of the functionalities being used to ensure that the current processes are working as before.

Oracle ERP Cloud Implementation—Select the Best Partner

When planning an Oracle ERP Cloud implementation, choosing the right partner will help ensure success. Your Oracle ERP Cloud implementation partner must have deep past and relevant experience with the Oracle ERP implementation methodology and your industry.

Work with an acclaimed Oracle ERP Cloud implementation partner to build a robust roadmap and Oracle ERP implementation methodology around project definition, teams, design, rollout, and communications. A trustworthy partner will recommend an Oracle ERP Cloud implementation methodology based on the technical and functional aspects that will optimize your organization’s processes and enable you to leverage advanced technology features like artificial intelligence (AI), ML, or blockchain.

Conclusion

The ERP landscape has taken a drastic shift with Cloud ERP solutions that offer benefits such as: 

• High availability 
• Optimized performance 
• Faster time-to-market 
• Improved user experience 
• Customized solutions based on business requirements

Hexaware leverages its wide-ranging industry and domain expertise to provide profound consulting and advisory services to transform your ERP to Oracle Cloud. We do the handholding all the way through the journey, right from understanding your business needs and addressing the pain points to implementing the Oracle ERP Cloud seamlessly.

For more information, visit us at Implementation Services for Oracle Cloud Applications.