A nation-wide professional services company was running an on-prem version of Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) Financials and Projects and needed an unbiased evaluation as their hardware aged, support costs began to increase as relative performance decreased. Like many other companies, they began to explore moving to the cloud, but they were unsure how to choose from the wide range of cloud options with licensing and compliance implications to consider. Our team evaluated hosting Oracle EBS on AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). After careful evaluation, OCI provided the best combination of low total cost of ownership, flexibility, and … Read More
Growing Orthopedic Institute Gains Modernization, Security, and Flexibility through Migrating to the AWS Cloud
The Orthopaedic Institute of Ohio (OIO) faced the challenge of refreshing legacy hardware while planning for the increase in capacity of several upcoming acquisitions. To solve these challenges, OIO asked M&S Consulting to evaluate and create a strategy for its cloud alternative. We recommended Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a good fit for their needs and provided a strategy that would migrate over 90% of their servers to the cloud. The primary business applications for OIO are Patient Electronic Medical Records and Imaging solutions which are vital to the success of treatment. To support migrations, we created a set of … Read More
What Do SAP, Salesforce, and Solar Have in Common?
A large, publicly-traded solar power company used Salesforce to track sales activities and SAP for billing and other finance-related functions. Each of these systems performed their respective functions effectively; however, our customer believed that sharing information between systems could greatly improve efficiency with new customer deployments and internal processes. They called on us to help advise them and implement a new integration. Our team focused first and foremost on the business needs. Many data integration projects fail to deliver returns because they focus on tools and tech at the expense of the business drivers. Once requirements were fully understood, we … Read More
Smart Cards Speed Up Just-in-Time Provisioning
A large government organization hosts a common services platform for thousands of users. Their user provisioning process required manual intervention, which took time and was susceptible to error. With hundreds of thousands of users, this time and exposure to error added up. Our team optimized the user provisioning process by designing and implementing a just-in-time (JIT) provisioning solution. However, instead of relying on SSO and SAML assertions, our solution grabs the required information from the user’s two-factor authentication source, their smart card. In this way, users are automatically provisioned to the web applications as they attempt to access them, instead … Read More
Cloud-First Applications at Harvard Business Publishing
Harvard Business Publishing is an organization responsible for strong corporate learning programs and prestigious publications such as the Harvard Business Review. M&S Consulting was tasked originally with performing a migration of HBP’s infrastructure from on-prem to the AWS cloud. The initial solution focused on a traditional lift-and-shift migration to get the HBP data and application infrastructure to the AWS cloud. M&S Consulting utilized infrastructure-as-code through AWS CloudFormation to build a repeatable, versioned infrastructure for the migrated applications. Once in the cloud, the solution focused on re-architecting and optimizing existing applications to take advantage of cloud infrastructure capabilities, as well as … Read More
The Sales Reports You Want vs The Sales Reports You Get (video)
Leadership at a large media and entertainment company with over 2,500 sales-focused users was receiving standard sales reports through Salesforce. Managers could not easily view data for each user in the same format as the rolled-up reports, and individual users could not see their own data the way their manager could. This meant that there was a constant disconnect between how leadership managed the business and how individual contributors tracked their own results. The popular business intelligence tools oversimplify the data or create basic dashboards, which did not meet the client’s needs. Working closely with our client, we developed a … Read More
Could IT Managed Services Be Right for Your Organization?
M&S Solution Architect, Shruti Karat, discusses three reasons why IT managed services may be right for your organization. – Video transcript – Hello, Everyone, I wanted to take some time and talk about three reasons why IT managed services might be right for your business. Jumping right into it, reason number one, it allows you to focus on your core competencies. Every organization has core competencies that make you unique. It drives your business and differentiates you from other companies. However, all organizations have functions that are not part of their competitive advantage but is needed to be performed for … Read More
Big Challenges Facing Higher Education IT Administrators for 2020-2021
Watch the video of M&S Director of Higher Education, Kate Hazen, addressing some of the big challenges facing Higher Education IT Administrators in the coming year. Contact us to discuss how we can help you meet these challenges. – Video transcript – With the increased pressure on higher education along with diminishing budgets, higher education IT organizations are faced with some difficult decisions in regard to where to focus valuable time and resources. I believe three key areas should be addressed: Number One, there should be an increased emphasis on training and support for faculty and students in online technology … Read More