Stallion Oilfield Services, a leading energy service company, struggled with non-standard business practices as well as antiquated and manual systems. The company needed to change and standardize processes across all business units, establish governance, and accounting controls. A modern financial, procurement, and inventory management solution was the answer. Stallion selected Oracle ERP Cloud and partnered with Perficient to deliver the implementation in a six-month timeframe.
In our previous post, we chatted with Jason Lu, Stallion vice president, and CIO, as well as Scott Forbes, director of technology and got their insight on a couple of granular aspects in regards to their implementation, those being project-based issues and challenges. These aspects provide crucial considerations – in a make-or-miss environment – for organizations interested in Oracle Cloud.
In this last post of the series, we continue to dig into the specifics of Stallion’s cloud journey with project considerations and things to know to better inform your organization’s journey. From the logistics standpoint, Jason and Scott address some of the most common questions when undertaking a project of this magnitude. Better yet, they provide the peace of mind to move forward with your project by disclosing valuable project specifics and expectations. Lastly, they wrap it up with how Oracle Cloud has given their business greater visibility thanks to advanced analytics.
Continue reading or tune in to the entire webinar by clicking here.
Project Considerations and Things to Know
Is there a phase two, what’s next for your project?
[Stallion] We bought a lot of Oracle’s suite, but not all of it. We’ve considered Oracle’s EPM suite with their functionality for expediting the closed process. I can almost say with a great deal of certainty that we’ll probably be investing in Oracle Supply Chain with a full-blown implementation within the next year. That wasn’t done in the first year just because we needed to make some changes within the organization to make that a reality. We have the desire to kind of expand or double down on this, although we did go out with establishing a pretty strong footprint. So most of these we’re going to view as smaller medium-sized projects rather than big, large-scale implementations like we did last year.
On the HCM side, we have continued to onboard more of their features like goal performance management and compensation, recruiting and onboarding. So those that come in at sort of a Phase I (b, c, d and e) over the last six months. Although it’s not been painless, just like implementing any new functionality, irrespective the software, there’s an organizational change component to that. But it’s been easy enough that the leaders within our HR organization have wanted to take on implementation of some of those modules even when it was outside of the plan. We think carpe diem “seize the day” we might as well keep rolling this out as it’s been running so well so far. Why not continue the trend?
Did you find you needed any additional subscriptions? For example, Oracle Integration Cloud after you started the implementation project?
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[Stallion] The only one we needed is that we asked for one test environment and we ended up wanting two, but that was the only exception. And that may have been more because we were doing HCM and ERP at the same time and they were on slightly staggered schedules. ERP would be ready for a refresh in the test environment and the HCM team was still working/testing something so that they couldn’t do that. Otherwise, one might be enough. But in our situation, two became essential for sure.
How are the constant quarterly updates handled and are there any negative impacts?
[Stallion] Honestly, there are some negative impacts in that we were not used to the frequency of it and it’s something that does equate to more work for the IT organization where we’re still spearheading the testing with both the HR team when there’s, when recently when we went from 18C to 19A. It’s not terrible. It’s nothing like an implementation and the way we look at that as, hey, this is a whole lot better than doing an implementation every two or three years of a major upgrade.
We haven’t needed to take on any new people to do those things, although the one person that I did hire this year, will be starting to take the lead role in fleshing out and doing some of the testing on behalf of the business. But a lot of what was I guess the key piece of the big change was that the business had to be a little bit more used to being involved in testing those upgrades. But by and large, the testing, the upgrades have been, I wouldn’t say the only derogatory impact one time on 19A we asked for a two-week delay from Oracle, but Oracle was gracious enough and accommodated the request for a delay. That’s just becoming part of our operating tempo and it’s become part of our standard operating procedures.
Now that you’ve completed the transformation, what analytics metrics has made it possible to give more visibility into the business?
[Stallion] We’ve always had really detailed revenue tracking in terms of the service line, the product line, the source of that revenue. But we’ve not had the same thing on the expense side. So having the more flexible GL structure is allowing us to get that level of information without something like a full-blown project accounting process. That’s just not something that fits our business. So that’s been one of the big ones.
This concludes the Stallion Webinar Q&A series walking through their success story with Oracle Cloud. We appreciate your time and attention. For your convenience, please see below for the entire blog series from start to finish:
»»Stallion Webinar Q&A: Selling the Big Idea – Oracle Cloud – Part 1
»»Stallion Webinar Q&A: Handling Organizational Change – Oracle Cloud – Part 2
»»Stallion Webinar Q&A: Addressing Project-based Issues and Challenges – Oracle Cloud – Part 3
To learn more about Supply Chain 4.0 and how it can transform your business, you can download our entire guide here or below.
