Huron Oracle Cloud Application Services

Highly engaged partner aligned to supporting out strategic outcomes

Huron was able to aid our company in delivering Phase I of our move to Oracle Cloud. This was made more complex due to the current pandemic as virtually all project activities were conducted remotely since mid-March. The solution included adoption of a co-existence model, with Financials, Purchasing and EPM moving to Cloud, and Manufacturing/Receiving/Order-Management/Shipping/Quality functions remaining in EBS R12. Phase II will include the EBS R12 functions being brought into Oracle Cloud in waves over the next 1-2 years. Huron brought industry expertise, the ability to adjust to our internal resource challenges (availability, solution adoption), effective remote instruction, solid co-existence solution delivery, and patience in helping our business personnel make the most out of an out-of-the-box solution. They demonstrated a strong "partnership mentality", aiding us in working through gaps identified in our testing cycles (CRP and UAT events), and providing insights and confidence to our Sr. management that were critical in our ultimate decision to go-live in Q4.

We selected Huron to support the transformation of our Corporate Center technology stack. The initial engagement was an analysis effort to document current state and define future state, define a technology implementation roadmap (no longer than 24 months) to achieve the future state, and assemble a business case to gain alignment for implementation. This effort was about 4 months in duration and allowed my team to evaluate both the working style of the vendor but also collaborate cross-functionally during 150+ working sessions. Following the assessment phase, we moved into the implementation phase delivering the following modules in sequence EDM->ERP->SCM->EPM->HCM; the implementation was further broken into two phases Financials/Procurement and HR. During the beginning of each phase we leveraged the Requirements Traceability Matrixes (RTM) developed during the assessment phase to baseline how the solution would be configured. This approach proved to be quite successful as it allowed us to fast-track vendor work and allowed my team to focus on areas of high value/high complexity. Work performed by the vendor was of high quality and on-time. We have experienced relatively quiet go-lives and begun driving value nearly immediately once in Production. Due to COVID, the implementation was begun and will likely be fully executed remotely. We were fortunate to have worked face-to-face with the vendor during the assessment phase which allowed us to establish relationships. That said, the vendor team paired well with my team to leverage preferred conferencing solutions, document repositories, and digital project management tools.

What Worked Well: our organization has a strong existing relationship with Huron Consulting Group and partnered with Oracle during the process of procuring a cloud based financials package as well as helping to complete a cloud Enterprise Planning and Budgeting cloud implementation. our organization selected Huron Consulting due to their strong, proven Oracle cloud skills, financial services industry expertise, and ability to deliver on overall project scope and deliverables. What Hasn't Worked Well: Overall we were very please with the final outcome of Huron Consulting's work with our organization. An area for improvement would be to have Huron Consulting inform our organization's leadership of identified project blockers and questioned decisions that may necessitate business process changes earlier in the discussions. One of our organization's overarching project guiding principles was to leverage Oracle cloud out-of-the-box functionality. At times, this required our organization to rethink and evaluate current business processes to the prescribed business processes in Oracle cloud.

Huron Consulting Group was engaged after the initial planning phase for our Oracle Cloud Financials Implementation was completed by another firm. We wanted to take a unique approach since other units in our organization were farther along in their projects and we wanted to leverage their work to the extent possible to minimize costs and time for our project. Huron assembled a capable and competent team with a broad range of resources to supplement our existing consultant resources. Our approach required them to be flexible and adapt to our needs. In a short span of 9 months we were able to journey through Business Process Design, Software Configuration, Integration Development, Conversion of key Business data, Business Process and Integration Testing, and Training. Realizing the transitioning of critical financial accounting, procurement, travel booking, expense reimbursement, and sponsored projects processes and systems ownership to a modern Oracle Cloud software suite that will support us for the coming years. Key achievements for our Project were • Integration of our Oracle Cloud Budget Planning and Oracle Cloud Financial Systems • Developed 32 Integrations with 17 boundary Systems • Built 58 training courses and training key functional users • Converted over 15,000 suppliers • 2,243 Functional Users were provisioned and had access day one • Went live with zero major defects by adopting a test-driven approach supported by a team of 400 users who invested 18,400 hours to execute 1015 test cases • Transitioned knowledge to our team to support the products in the future During this journey, Huron partnered with us in managing the unprecedented impact of the global coronavirus pandemic to our project and institution, and we completing the project on time.