A global leader in the building products industry with a presence in over 45 countries was facing a common but critical challenge with their Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS): they needed to upgrade or risk losing support. However, as a manufacturing company, any downtime would mean lost revenues and no work for their employees. This customer was using EBS 12.1.3 and needed to upgrade to 12.2.10 quickly to avoid a loss of support. However, they also needed to upgrade the operating system (AIX), database (from 19c), and multiple other components of the technology stack. To further complicate the challenge, they had … Read More
Rebuilding a Solid Oracle EBS Foundation for a Quickly Growing Company
A mid-sized federal government contracting company had been using Oracle E-Business Suite for many years. The good news for the company was that it had experienced monumental growth and opened new business lines. The bad news was that their Oracle environment had accumulated a lot of deferred maintenance and was an out-of-date version which could lead to Oracle desupport, risking their government compliance and contracts. In addition, with their changing business models, the system needed new functionality which required additional Oracle modules. They needed to find a competent partner, quickly. …documentation was sparse, despite heavy customization, and high turnover meant … Read More
Struggling to build an SAP BRIM team?
In previous articles, we described some of the business challenges our client had faced while implementing SAP BRIM to manage billing and invoicing for their media sales business. Now, let’s focus on what is likely your greatest challenge: building the right team. We were able to build a team with the right amount of industry knowledge, SAP BRIM experience, and strong project leadership in a short amount of time. Previous firms had been unsuccessful in their implementation efforts in large part due to their inability to build quality teams. Our success in other areas of their business gave our client … Read More
Architect and Migrate Oracle Products Into AWS for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts – Department of Industrial Accidents (DIA), which oversees the Massachusetts workers’ compensation system, faced the challenge of migrating from legacy hardware while upgrading existing infrastructure. In addition, a large Oracle workload needed to be upgraded and migrated while adding a level of redundancy to the application’s middleware. To solve these challenges, the M&S team evaluated and created a strategy for DIA’s upgrade and migration. DIA had chosen Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a good fit for their needs and wanted to migrate over 90% of their servers to the cloud, utilizing AWS native services in lieu … Read More
Togetherness: Better Employee Engagement and Retention
In the digital era, companies are running behind if they still choose to manage their employees manually. Even for companies that do go digital, sometimes security concerns and poor employee engagement arise depending on how the employer maintains their data. According to Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends 2016 report, 92 percent of participants saw a need to redesign their organization to improve employee engagement and retention and build a meaningful culture. This same survey found that 82 percent of respondents see culture as a competitive advantage, driving innovation, and employee behavior. We’ve all seen or heard the horror stories of … Read More
Simplifying and Expediting a Migration Using AWS Application Migration Service at the University of South Alabama
Housed in the College of Medicine at the University of South Alabama (USA), the Center for Strategic Health Innovation (CSHI) is a nationally recognized leader in innovative healthcare technology applications and the development and deployment of healthcare technology platforms, as well as the delivery of advanced preparedness teaching and training. CSHI’s cornerstone system is RMEDE™, the Real Time Medical Electronic Data Exchange, an industry-leading program that features predictive analytics capability, customizable ad hoc reporting, and is a world-class data warehouse architecture and business intelligence platform. CSHI was able to decrease its infrastructure costs by 40-50%. Their application is now running … Read More
SAP BRIM Implementation Delivers Increased Flexibility and Profitability
In a previous article, we described our client that was attempting to implement SAP; today we will start to describe some of the problems we were able to solve for them. They are a large client that sells a variety of consumption-based media advertising products which can be delivered multiple times, under a variety of circumstances, and through different advertising delivery systems. The business is further complicated by a complex hierarchy of business partners. As a result, a single invoice could include over a million billable items. Previously, the client used their delivery system for billing and invoicing. However, this … Read More
Proper Project Management Helps Rescue SAP Implementation
Sometimes a project needs rescuing to avoid added delays and unnecessary costs. This happened to one of our larger clients when trying to implement SAP. Multiple teams outside of M&S had tried and failed to implement the solution our client needed. Because we had several successful medium- and large-sized projects with them across various technologies, we were called upon to step in and take on the challenge. The initial focus of our Project Management as a Service (PMaaS) team was to evaluate the SAP project’s current state and identify any significant gaps. However, very quickly, we realized that no requirements … Read More