Client
The client is a significant player in the printing and publishing industry. They offer access to high-quality books through book clubs and book fairs, supporting educators and students with literacy instruction, classroom magazines, and digital programs.
Challenge
The organization identified a critical need to streamline the monthly financial statement preparation process to free up time for essential business tasks. They realized that the labor-intensive nature of finalizing financial statements resulted in operational bottlenecks. These hindrances, in turn, led to additional issues, including the backdating of transactions at the point of sale, which had a detrimental effect on business operations.
Here are some of the challenges faced by the client:
- Time-Intensive Financial Closing Process: Primarily caused by the large number of different operating applications running simultaneously.
- Lack of Scalability: Resulting from multiple business segments, including Children’s Books Publishing, Education, and International Books.
- Slower Issue Resolution and Response Times: Due to complex technological infrastructure.
- Highly Complicated Architecture: Caused by integrated applications with substantial data traffic.
The client realized that the reason for the delays in closing the books at the end of the month was a complex network of nearly 44 different operating applications running concurrently across various channels. Also, due to the rarity of the technology and the required functional expertise, they had challenges finding replacements whenever resources left the organization.
Impact: Month-end closing was delayed, as each application affected finances, creating a bottleneck with transactions occurring after the point of sale.
Solution
Firstly, the Hexaware team has successfully and skillfully provided the client with Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3 support. Secondly, due to the solutions’ complexity, Hexaware’s team effectively handled over 100 critical tasks, particularly during the transition phase. This also resulted in the management and troubleshooting of thousands of operational integrations. Hexaware provided the following key activities:
- Delivered Level 2, Level 3, and Level 4 Application Support.
- Managed over 100 Critical Jobs.
- Monitoring and troubleshooting over 1000 Integrations.
Renowned for its expertise in the IT industry and commitment to surpassing client expectations, Hexaware’s team of professionals developed the following solutions to address the client’s specific challenges:
- Streamlined transition process within a short timeframe.
- Maintained 99% adherence to service level agreements (SLAs) after a three-month stabilization period.
- Resolved an average of 600 support tickets per month.
- Implemented a service integration and management (SIAM) based solution, integrating the infrastructure and application support teams.
- Executed significant modernization projects, including:
- Integrating boundary systems
- Enhancing the customer portal to provide billing visibility using Java, XML, and Web Services
- Implementing a digital subscription system to manage customer contracts with Contract Lifecycle Management (ASP, .NET) and support Oracle EBS
- Assisting with the migration of JDE to Oracle Cloud
Benefits
Hexaware’s team of experts closely monitored the client’s systems and processes to identify areas for improvement and successfully achieved the following benefits:
Process Benefits:
- Achieved a stable state even with adding 7 new applications during the transition period.
- Implemented Problem Management with a Root Cause Analysis (RCA) process in place.
- Provided Oracle application maintenance and support with a 95% Service Level Agreement (SLA) compliance.
Technology Benefits:
- Ensured Data Quality at a 99.5% tolerance level during the Stable State Start.
- Optimized the performance of the Oracle AR invoice job, reducing the processing time for 0.5 million invoice lines from 180 minutes to less than 50 minutes.
- Improved the customer portal response time by 80%
Business Benefits:
- Reduced the time for financial month-end closing from 3 days to 1 day through multiple process improvements.
- Improved the performance of the BCOE (Book Club Order Entry) AS400 systems by 85% through code optimization.
- Achieved an 80% improvement in customer portal response time through process harmonization.
Summary
Hexaware’s IT support and solutions for Oracle Application yielded impressive results. Clients experienced an 80% improvement in customer portal response time, benefiting from over 35% faster automation and achieving a remarkable over 60% increase in critical job completion. These outcomes showcase the tangible impact of Hexaware’s expertise and solutions.
