Working together to accelerate growth

Introduction

In a little over a year, PwC Canada and our client, a hydrovac excavation company that provides services to a variety of industries, including oil and gas, energy, construction and transportation, worked collaboratively to select and implement a new cloud-based ERP solution, Oracle Fusion.

This organization saw growth as a key opportunity, but felt they weren’t positioned to maximize operational efficiencies or to fully leverage the benefits of scaling. We helped them understand what commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) cloud ERP solutions could be used to rapidly replace their legacy systems and worked with them to assess which option was best aligned to their strategic goals, including the ability to generate new business value over time.

After our client chose Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP for their common business platform, we helped them develop a roadmap to the implementation and then to implement the solution across their HR, finance, supply chain, sales and field operations functions—and to integrate it with numerous other applications in order to drive more insightful decision making.

“This initiative represented an enterprise transformation that positions us for growth and success,” said the vice president responsible for implementing the common business platform. “We were able to implement a complete platform which addressed not only back office HR and finance processes, but key operational processes from procurement to selling and delivering services to customers.”

Challenge

The reason our client decided to consider a new cloud-based ERP system was simple: they had plans to significantly increase the size of their operations and weren’t convinced their current ERP was scalable enough to support their growth trajectory or flexible enough to enable efficiencies across their expanding business operations. This organization wanted to standardize processes and integrate the technologies and platforms they were using across their company to enable greater collaboration and to provide better insights into their operations so that they could make more informed operational decisions.

Recognizing the significant challenge ahead of them, this organization decided to bring on a strategic business and technology advisor that could help them navigate their ERP transformation right from the beginning. Our deep experience with cloud-enabled architecture, including systems and data integration, was a major reason they chose to work with us.

Approach

As a starting point, we worked collaboratively with our client to develop detailed business and functional requirements to better understand their future state needs and to develop robust selection criteria for their desired common business platform. We supplemented this with a detailed market scan aimed at finding them a COTS cloud ERP solution that could replace their existing legacy systems relatively quickly, integrate with their other external applications and give them a solid foundation for centralizing and automating their business processes over time.

We helped our client prepare their go-to-market approach and facilitated an RFI processes to provide recommendations on next steps. This process led them to select Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP as the best solution for their purpose based on a number of factors, including the availability of preconfigured Oracle Model Systems that would give them a leg-up on their cloud ERP journey.

Following our client’s decision to go with an Oracle solution, we worked with them to develop a roadmap for implementing it as their common business platform. We then helped them navigate their end-to-end transformation journey so they could get the most from their cloud-powered reinvention.

We used a pilot project-based iterative approach to help this organization move quickly, making adjustments as needed to better achieve their desired results. Our work included a number of different activities, including the design and configuration of various cloud-based applications (e.g., recruitment management, CRM, field services), in addition to a cloud integration later and custom extensions to the suite of applications. We also conducted over twenty integrations between Oracle Fusion and external applications used by this organization in order to provide them with more streamlined data to support analytics and decision making.

Our human-led and tech powered approach put people at the heart of our client’s transformation. From the very beginning, we focused on change management and training to help foster a seamless transition process and user adoption. We also spent time reviewing and refining our client’s relevant business processes so that they could begin seeing results even before their transformation was complete.

Impact

In less than a year, our client replaced their existing manual and electronic systems with Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP, radically improving the effectiveness and efficiency of their internal operations and putting them in a much better position to scale quickly.  

Once the solution was fully implemented, our client was also able to capture additional service time on jobs; this improved their revenues by ensuring that all work completed was accurately billed to customers. Moving to Oracle Fusion also gave them better control over their asset utilization, which allowed them to deliver a higher volume of services within a given timeframe without adding additional resources.