Built-To-Last Enterprises Fortify Themselves With Oracle Cloud ERP Amid The Pandemic

As the pandemic continues to disrupt lives all over the world, major enterprises are charging ahead with their ERP strategies to strengthen their business processes and improve their chances to better withstand future shocks. Oracle, the biggest Cloud ERP vendor, may stand to benefit from the shift.

The recent Oracle Live virtual event, which replaces the traditional Oracle Open World conference, demonstrates some of the biggest companies are actually stepping up their Cloud ERP adoptions, as opposed to taking a wait-and-see approach when dealing with any crisis situation.

Steve Miranda, executive vice president of applications development at Oracle, said there have been more go-lives of Oracle Cloud ERP and other Fusion applications in much of 2020 than what it experienced in the past. When Covid-19 forced lockdowns in many parts of the world earlier in the year, Miranda said there were 120 go-lives of Oracle Fusion Applications in a quarter in Latin America alone, far greater than what it saw in 2019.

Companies like Starbucks and Dropbox are expanding their use of Oracle Cloud Applications with the former running Oracle Cloud CX for customer service and support automation and the latter achieving faster financial close from its deployment of Oracle Cloud ERP that captures recurring revenues from a base of over 600 million registered users.

Rondy Ng, senior vice president of applications development at Oracle, attributes the uptick to the consensus among customers that inertia is no longer an option for anyone to run a business in one of the most turbulent periods in history. IT executives, in particular, recognize that the only way they can contribute and help make a difference through time and cost savings is by incorporating innovative technologies into their front-to-backend systems.

Ng said over the past few years the increased momentum of Oracle Cloud ERP has resulted in the vendor signing up more than 7,300 customers including 5,700 that have already gone live or about to do so. Its market presence looks even better when one combines 7,300 Oracle Cloud ERP customers – mostly large and midsized enterprises – with Oracle NetSuite’s 23,000 accounts primarily in the small to midsized ERP segments. The combined total of 30,000 Cloud ERP customers puts Oracle comfortably ahead of its main rivals like Workday and SAP, both of which have reported fewer Cloud ERP customers.

Jorge Rodriguez, vice president of finance transformation at McDonald’s, said during the Oracle Live event that the giant restaurant chain is in the midst of deploying Oracle Cloud ERP and EPM across the 120 countries where it operates. As McDonald’s adapts to the new way to better serve its 69 million customers daily through channels like kiosk and touchless ordering in the post-pandemic era, it is investing heavily in innovative technologies like next-generation drive-through/point-of-sale, voice recognition and mobile apps for personalization, order entry and payment, aligning them with what Oracle is capable of delivering.

Rodriguez said in order to help the chain make sense of the staggering amount of data from its 37,000+ restaurants and ultimately digitize its finance function, it is now relying on Oracle’s ability to enhance its Cloud ERP applications continuously with self-service financial reporting, artificial intelligence, machine learning and Cloud-based data warehousing capabilities. All told, Ng said over the past year the vendor has introduced 900 enhancements to its Cloud ERP applications including features such as intelligent process automation that renders manual data entries obsolete.

Linda Weber, vice president of supply, manufacture and finance technology at The Kroger Co., said the 2,922-store grocer recently went live with Oracle Cloud ERP through remote implementation by first running the GL module alongside with its home-grown and legacy accounting and inventory systems.

With no time to waste during the pandemic, Kroger embarked on an agile methodology to implement the new systems without giving full consideration of change management and what that entailed for its finance users. Weber noted that running both systems initially was a burden for some, but they soon were able to leverage the new features of the Oracle system much better after contrasting that with their previous workflow.

Another benefit is the flexibility of the Oracle Cloud ERP system to support new business opportunities such as easily onboarding suppliers that previously would not have been considered for their restaurant-designed SKUs, Weber added.

Both Kroger and McDonald’s still have some SAP applications, according to our Buyer Insight Master Database. For example, Kroger continues to run SAP SuccessFactors for talent management, and McDonald’s runs SAP S/4 HANA through its operations in United Arab Emirates. During last year’s Oracle Open World, Larry Ellison, co-founder and chief technology officer, cited a number of customers including Johnson & Johnson that have migrated from SAP to Oracle Cloud ERP because of its Cloud-native capabilities along with its seamless integration into mission-critical functions like Human Capital Management, Supply Chain Management and Customer Relationship Management.

This year’s onslaught of online events puts the delicate dance played out between these vendors and their strategic accounts into an interesting side-by-side comparison.

Today, built-to-last enterprises like McDonald’s, Kroger, Starbucks and others are consumed with the pandemic-induced objective of total business continuity. Achieving anything close to that goal could result in standardizing more of their enterprise applications on a single platform or staying heterogeneous and potentially multiplying their risks when they need to tackle three challenges all at once – the ability to sustain, scale and innovate in the post-pandemic era.

Oracle is rushing to capture the opportunity of not just increasing its wallet shares among these accounts, but also winning them outright with its full-stack approach from Cloud Infrastructure to Database to applications, something that may resonate with these built-to-last enterprises that have no choice but to become digital first or risk being caught flat-footed before the next crisis hits.

If anything, the current public health crisis has given the above onerous task an urgency that could reshape the enterprise software industry for years to come.

List of Oracle Cloud ERP Customers

Source: Apps Run The World October 2020

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