The Future is Bright for Oracle E-Business
Oracle E-Business has its roots back in the late 1980s, when Oracle Corporation first released their financial applications. Despite all the Cloud hype of recent years, only around 1-2% of Oracle’s on-premise customers have moved to Oracle Cloud Applications. There is a large install base of Oracle on-premise applications, including Oracle E-Business. These enterprise systems form a critical part of the IT backbone of many large enterprises globally, supporting Finance, HR and Supply Chain processes, and much more. Companies have made a significant investment in the technology.
Recent announcements from Oracle on the future product roadmap for Oracle E-Business mean that Premier Support is guaranteed until at least 2030 and that during this period, there will be continuous innovation of the product. Rather than this being end of life, Oracle E-Business will continue to be supported for another 12+ years, and during this period, users of the product will continue to benefit from the development of new features and functionality.
For the circa 90% of customers in the UK on R12.1 (and those back on 11i), the announcements also provide welcome clarity in that the current latest major release, R12.2, will be the final version of Oracle E-Business that carries us through to 2030 and beyond. This means just one more major upgrade is required! Given that Premier Support for R12.1 ends in December 2021, the upgrade needs to take place in the next 3 years.
Mind the Gap
Often organisations have implemented Oracle E-Business many years ago. As we go and visit new contacts who are using Oracle E-Business, we typically see that a gap has emerged between what the system is actually delivering for the business, and what it is capable of:
- Companies are under severe pressure to evolve in order to survive and thrive in today’s economy. The design of an IT system that was conceived perhaps 10+ years ago may no longer support the organisation’s current strategy.
- The vast majority of customers are not on the latest release of the product and even those that are, have usually arrived there via a series of technical upgrades, and therefore aren’t leveraging the latest functionality that the product has to offer.
- The key business users that we around at the time of the implementation have often left the company, and with them, their valuable knowledge of the software and how it has been implemented specifically for that organisation. Even if they are still there, have they kept up to date with the latest product developments, and the benefits these can bring?
Some of the symptoms of these issues are that Oracle E-Business is sadly often seen as the problem rather than the solution, off-system manual processes breed like wildfire and a proliferation of Excel spreadsheets appear. It doesn’t have to be like this!
Make Oracle E-Business Great Again
There are plenty of strategies to adopt that will help to better leverage the investment in Oracle E-Business: Looking at using new (and existing) functionality features available in the product, examining the potential use of complementary products, investing in knowledge acquisition and considering the use of Cloud technology where appropriate.
We’re passionate about helping organisations to maximise the value they get from their investment in Oracle technology. Based on what some of our customers have done to leverage more value from Oracle E-Business, we‘ve put together a “Top 10 Ways to Make Oracle E-Business Great Again”. The “Top 10” isn’t in any particular order, and there is plenty of content that we’ve left out, but we’ve tried to include a flavour of each of the strategies that can be adopted. We hope that something in here triggers an idea about what you could do to improve your use of Oracle E-Business system.
We’d love to hear your feedback or any ideas you have for improvement of Oracle E-Business. If you’d like to discuss how we can help you to make Oracle E-Business Great Again, then please contact me on mark.vivian@claremont.co.uk.
#MakeOracleEBusinessGreatAgain
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If you are looking for an Oracle partner who can help you with your technology investment, goes about it the right way and can back up the talk, then contact us. You can email us at info@claremont.co.uk or phone us on +44 (0) 01483 549314.