Oracle ERP Cloud Implementation Best Practices and Six Key Phases

Why Oracle Cloud ERP 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 meet the ever-evolving marketplace needs rapidly. The complex integration of point solutions with on-premises ERP systems limits the flexibility to add new capabilities to current systems.

Instead of the ongoing investment in on-premise systems, 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 risk of technological outdatedness 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.

Oracle ERP Cloud is a well-known cloud-based ERP suite that includes accounting, financial management, project management, and procurement modules for enterprise business functions. These modules run on the Oracle technology stack in Oracle’s cloud centers and can be accessed through public and private cloud implementation and with the support of hybrid deployment.  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 efforts around reporting.

Why is it Essential to Plan Oracle ERP Cloud Implementation?

There is a notable change and the shift from on-premises to cloud-based applications. It demands a shift in the mindset and needs adjustment to the business processes and policies along with the adoption of new ones. But before making any move on the Oracle ERP Cloud, you need to carefully plan the migration project. You need to understand your migration challenges, create a project plan, and define the objective and results accordingly. Develop a project vision and roadmap that defines stages and its goals, associated risks, and a detailed financial plan with resource requirements.

Frequent and clear communication with the team and stakeholders is essential for the project success. The organization needs to ensure that the communication should be very transparent with every stakeholder involved in this project regarding the task and timeliness. Also, access to the required resources should to be provided for timely completion of the tasks.. Another thing that organizations need to ensure is that they include detailed testing and validation, which is key to a successful Oracle ERP Cloud implementation methodology. 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.

Rather than directly moving into 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.

6 Key Phases in a 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 in Oracle ERP implementation-

Prepare for Oracle Cloud ERP Implementation

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

The project team will handle 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 will be to develop a detailed understanding of current issues, including process inefficiencies and requirements for the desired ERP system

Examining Oracle Cloud ERP Implementation

Armed with clear design requirements, the development phase can begin. 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 won’t be replaced by the Oracle Cloud ERP system.

In parallel with software development, the team should develop training materials to help users adjust to the new system. It also needs to begin 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 may hold duplicate or inconsistent information. The project team should determine which data to migrate in this phase, avoiding the blanket migration of all historical data, lots of which is likely irrelevant.

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

Planning for the Oracle Cloud ERP Production Deployment

In this phase, you prepare for systems, user, and organizational readiness. A system and resources list needs to be addressed and corrected. Provision users by configuring username, password, and related information. Organizations should focus on change management and required user training and adoption. It is essential to have everyone on board and share the decision across the organization about each step of deployment.

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 important to involve users in the design phase, since they have the most intimate understanding of current business processes. Involving them in the design also helps to ensure that they’ll welcome the new system and take full advantage of it. We basically do a show-tell walkthrough session with the users wherein we showcase the Oracle Cloud ERP system’s workflows and processes. These sessions are also called as Conference Room Pilots Or App Reviews. These show and tell sessions are basically providing demo to the client’s business users and taking their feedback on the vanilla functionalities to determine the fitment of standard Oracle ERP functionalities to the desired ERP processes.

Gap analysis can be used to identify process intricacies and unique quirks that may require customization of the Oracle Cloud ERP software; or changes to workflow or processes to more closely align with the ERP system itself. The team can present the gaps to its implementation partner or supplier and ask them to identify potential solutions. This phase also determines the strategy of data migration from the old ERP system to the new Oracle ERP system. It also involves designing the third-party applications that need to be integrated to Oracle ERP and also various reporting that need to happen through the new ERP.

Configure & Test your Oracle Cloud ERP Implementation

Initial testing of the basic functions of the software should be followed by rigorous testing of the full capabilities of the system (SIT – System Integration Testing), including allowing some employees to test the system (UAT – User Acceptance Testing) for all their day-to-day activities. This phase should also encompass testing of the migrated data and include introductory end-user training. Post development, the first step is to perform SIT testing to ensure the Oracle ERP system and the third-party applications connected to Oracle ERP is working fine. This is followed by UAT which is predominantly performed by business users supported by the implementation vendor.

Before going to UAT, the training materials are built to help the business users perform the UAT. The 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 also assist with technical training depending on the technical components involved in the implementation.

Deploy Oracle Cloud ERP Implementation

This phase is basically determining the readiness of the new Oracle Cloud ERP. The validity of the UAT completion, data migration and open issues are accessed to determine whether the system is ready to Go-Live or not. Based on the Go-No Go decision, the new Oracle Cloud ERP goes Live.

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 will shift to listening for user feedback and adjusting the system accordingly. Some additional development and configuration may be needed as new features are added to the system. New staff will also need to be trained on the system.

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

Oracle ERP Cloud Implementation Best Practices

When planning an Oracle ERP Cloud implementation, choosing the appropriate partner is a best practice that helps you with the Oracle ERP Cloud implementation journey. The selected Oracle ERP Cloud implementation partner must have deep past and relevant experience with the Oracle ERP implementation methodology and your industry. Partners with implementation expertise increase your chances of a successful project.

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

Conclusion

The ERP landscape has taken a drastic shift with Cloud ERP solutions which comprises of advantages like high availability, optimized performance, faster time-to-market, improved user experience, and adapting to 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 by handholding them right from understanding your business needs and solving your pain points, to implementing the Oracle ERP Cloud seamlessly. For more information, visit us at Implementation services for Oracle Cloud Applications.