The Oracle Cloud ERP Implementation Playbook

Here’s a mini-case study about change management challenges faced while implementing Oracle Fusion Cloud at a large-scale organization consisting of 1000+ employees. 

The Project: The project involved two service industry sectors; Logistics and Visa Facilitation Services. This was a transformation from Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) and other customized in-house systems to Oracle Fusion Cloud.

The primary objectives of the project were integrated financial and management reporting, integration with a bank’s payment system, review and resolution of pain points faced by the business in their normal operations and revamping of the old out-of-date reporting approach to a systemized and standardized one.

Oracle Cloud ERP implementations often bring drastic changes on an organizational level. In many cases, people are not willing to adapt to this change because of various reasons. Employees are very accustomed to the previous processes they have been following for years. Workflows are built into their mind with the passage of time. Some of the major challenges faced by implementors are resistance in employees to change and lack of technological literacy of senior employees to adapt to the redesigned process flows. This affects employees’ engagement and motivational level for crucial sessions.

There is no better way to tackle change management than being upfront and honest to the employees about all the possible structural and process changes. Senior management needs to ensure that employees are motivated enough to adhere to the changes. Implementations often involve quite a lot of effort from the workforce so companies often announce performance-based incentive schemes to keep the workforce driven and excited. From an implementor’s perspective, it is highly crucial to keep all the discussions focused and engaging. Oftentimes, the implementor has to play the role of a teacher with a coherent explanation power and logical reasoning. Any process change should be presented in a way that is understandable by a common business user with clear advantages and disadvantages. Sometimes, multiple solutions and workarounds are suggested for a single process to make sure that users are aware of all the possible ways to cater to a scenario.

Change Management Example: Chart of Accounts Redesign

Let’s take a real-life example of a major change at the organization. A company’s existing 1-segment chart of accounts (CoA) consisting of Parent and Child accounts was restructured into a 7-segment (excluding the segments defined for future use) chart of accounts. Important new segments introduced in the structure were Business Division, Location, Department and Intercompany.

Business Division and Location were incorporated as management wanted Division wise and Location wise profit and loss. What it meant was, most of the revenues and expenses would now be recorded with relevant business division and location rather than bifurcating the expenses segment wise at later stages. Primary purpose of department segment was to allocate costs among departments for cost analysis. Intercompany segment was a great value addition. The previous CoA included a separate GL account for each intercompany. The new CoA would have one GL account for Intercompany transactions while the relevant intercompany would be tagged in the Intercompany segment.

Implementations are very costly and it is important to cover all the possible future needs to avoid any major structural changes later on. The need for this restructuring came up after gathering all the current and future business and reporting requirements. On the surface, it sure looks like that end users have to put more efforts into this. An employee previously entering a manual journal with only the GL Account now has to consider the whole segment wise account combination. This was a major cause of demotivation for the employees.

As an implementor, the major problem here is to convince both parties (management and end-users) that this change will actually be beneficial in the long term once it is adapted properly and you cannot do that without comprehensive educational sessions and solid logical arguments defining all the benefits that this restructuring would bring. Multiple sessions were conducted demonstrating the integrated system functionalities to make sure that users are aware that they don’t have to fill the account combination throughout the whole cycles. These demonstrations also helped prove the point; account combinations on purchase requisitions being auto picked based on users entering minimal item information, combination being auto populated based on intercompany transaction types and combination being auto picked based on the defined Distribution Sets. These pre-defined mappings not only make the entries easier but also reduce the chances of error in data entry and future reconciliation issues.

In conclusion, change management is inevitable, you’re going to face this at every stage of the project. Every implementor needs to have sound knowledge of the ERP system and business processes to ensure that users handle the structural changes as smoothly as possible. Strong interpersonal skills, explanation skill and people management skills play a key role in tackling change management.