Petmate

The Challenge

After Wind Point Partners purchased Petmate, they commissioned an IT operations assessment. The assessment confirmed that Oracle EBS 11.5.10.2 would not be supported in 2013. With its ambitious growth plans, Petmate would also need access to the latest Oracle EBS functionality.

“We’ve traditionally been focused on operations and supply chain management, but recently charted a new path focusing on growth including acquisitions,” said Sudan Dewan, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. “We have extremely high on-time fulfillment rates, but needed to make sure that Oracle EBS would help us achieve new corporate capabilities while continuing to support the business.” With those factors in mind, in January 2012, Petmate made the decision to upgrade to Oracle EBS 12.1.3.

The Solution

With unforgiving deadlines in front of them, Petmate needed some upgrade solutions. Petmate released an RFP in February 2012 to find a functional consulting partner, choosing Lucidity in April. Mike Lynch, Vice President of Information Technology, also began conducting due diligence on systems integrators and tools. During his research, he came across Panaya.

The Panaya demo using Petmate’s own data was eye-opening.

“We felt the level of detail we got out of Panaya’s impact analysis would enable us to utilize more junior development resources rather than costly senior consultants, saving us significant dollar amounts”

With Panaya, Lynch’s team would not have to comb through the EBS system by hand; Panaya would take them directly to the problem code.

“We really thought Panaya would streamline the whole development process and make it much faster,” says Lynch. Petmate signed on with Panaya in June 2012.

The Results

The project officially kicked off in July 2012. While Lucidity supported the upgrade from a business perspective, tackling EDI and facilitating Conference Room Pilots, Petmate dove into Panaya for code corrections. “We used Panaya to identify the objects that were going to break,” Lynch said.

Petmate cycled through three Conference Room Pilots: one in July, one in August, and one in September that took the project right up to go-live. The offshore team worked on the latest code corrections in advance of each pilot. Meanwhile, Petmate conducted QA and testing.

Lynch reports that Panaya found at least 95 percent of the objects that needed correcting. Even though they were ready to go live on November 10, Lynch delayed the go-live date to Thanksgiving weekend, two weeks later, to minimize the disruption to the business. The new Oracle EBS system went live on time – with minimal issues.

The Bottom Line

The numbers back up the go-live result. Bringing Panaya on board considerably reduced the time needed for code corrections. Lynch calculates that Petmate saved 626 hours on code corrections, or 30 percent.

In addition to the pure time saved, the consulting costs for the code corrections phase was also cut in half. As Lynch anticipated, with Panaya’s results he was able to outsource the bulk of the code corrections, reducing consulting costs by 50 percent versus the expense of senior consultants.

The consulting savings due to Panaya added up to $124,000! The biggest Panaya benefit? The impact analysis which gave the project a big head start. “Panaya gives you a lot of knowledge that somebody would have to try to dig up without it,” says Lynch. “And their service was very responsive. Whenever we needed help, Panaya was there.”

Lynch also credits Lucidity, their functional consulting partner. “Lucidity was a huge value to us,” says Lynch. “They had invaluable knowledge about the R12 environment.”