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Enterprise resource planning solutions are critical to many companies, especially those with widespread interests and lines of business. Oracle, which develops many ERP tools, offers a suite of modules for managing nearly every aspect of a modern business. As such, great care is required when transitioning to the comprehensive system or updating any of the suite’s modules.
In this blog we will take a look at what the Oracle suite has to offer and how it can impact your business, as well as some tips for an effective implementation. We will also present what tools Panaya has to offer to ensure that changes to your Oracle-based system produce the results you expect without costly disruptions to business continuity.
What is the Oracle E-Business Suite?
The Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) is an integrated suite of cloud-based applications for managing a wide array of business activities and automating various processes. The suite consists of a robust set of modules organized into several categories of enterprise resource planning: order management; logistics; procurement; projects; manufacturing; asset lifecycle management; service; financials; and human capital management.
Through these modules, organizations can incorporate the latest technology into their business processes to drive performance and productivity, meet consumer expectations, reduce costs, and improve strategic decision-making.
Oracle’s Role in Modern Businesses
As a comprehensive enterprise resource planning suite, Oracle EBS can have positive impact in every area of an organization’s business activities.
Centralization and data accuracy
The Oracle E-Business Suite has internal procedures to ensure its centralization of data preserves accuracy and coherence across the relevant Oracle modules, reducing silos and increasing operational efficiency. Leveraging the EBS as a single source of truth thus prevents potentially costly supply chain disruptions, enhances decision-making, and enables smooth business operations.
Flexibility and scalability
Oracle EBS can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud, with a wide range of features that easily integrate with other systems, and modules that can be adapted to different industries and business models. This flexibility also enables the EBS to scale rapidly in response to company growth, market demand, new Oracle functionality or changing operational requirements.
Compliance and security
Business data management with Oracle EBS is secured by a range of security features. These include encrypted storage, access authorization protocols, automations, real-time monitoring, and more. The suite also includes activity monitoring in order to comply with regulatory requirements, service level commitments, and internal or external audits.
Key Benefits of Oracle E-Business Suite
When deployed effectively, Oracle EBS provides a set of solutions that benefit businesses in a myriad of ways.
Streamlined business processes
Oracle EBS brings extensive automation to complex business processes, reducing manual effort, minimizing errors and enhancing productivity. The suite’s data standardization enhances collaboration, increases accuracy and reduces redundancy, while users can create cross-departmental workflows tailored to the needs of their organization.
Whether for finance, human resources, supply chain, project management, customer relationship management or other purposes, those EBS capabilities streamline business processes. As a result, companies can optimize their resource allocation, accelerate services and procedures, and respond more effectively to market demands.
Enhanced reporting and analytics
The integration of EBS applications and their highly customized deployments provide comprehensive, clear visibility into business operations. The solution’s robust reporting and analytics tools leverage this visibility in support of each organization’s unique business needs, providing valuable insights for data-driven decision-making, early identification of potential problems, and faster issue resolution.
Cost reduction and efficiency
Transition to the cloud-based Oracle EBS eliminates costs related to technology infrastructure and maintenance for any module a business adopts. As an integrated suite on a centralized platform, EBS also reduces the need for additional software and makes scalability easier. Companies adopting EBS solutions therefore immediately increase their efficiency and maximize the long-term value of their resources.
Increased customer satisfaction and loyalty
Oracle EBS has features and automations designed to streamline sales and marketing processes, and track key performance indicators. These EBS tools were designed to enhance customer relationship management from sales and marketing to consumer support and interaction analysis.
EBS also centralizes customer data and interactions from various touchpoints and modules, providing businesses with a 360-degree view of their customers. These insights enable companies to personalize consumer engagements, target marketing campaigns, and improve customer satisfaction.
Supply chain optimization
The supply chain management modules of Oracle EBS optimize the flow of goods and services, from procurement to inventory and delivery, as well as providing comprehensive data-driven insights. Businesses can reduce lead times, forecast demand, track shipments, and collaborate more effectively with suppliers, which minimizes inventory costs and enhances value chain planning. Oracle EBS is an integral part of a more agile and responsive supply chain, seamless supplier relationships, and better procurement decision-making.
Best Practices for Oracle EBS Implementation and Upgrade
The Oracle E-Business Suite runs best in Oracle Cloud, which provides an automated, scalable cloud infrastructure that saves money, enables greater productivity, and can respond to dynamic business demands. Whether you are implementing Oracle EBS for the first time or upgrading the suite, there are a few best practices worth considering for before and after deployment.
Planning and implementation
The first stage is to define your business objectives in adopting or upgrading Oracle EBS and identify processes you’d like to see automated. This, of course, is the basis for the project scope and a detailed project plan, including customizations and changes to your current processes.
To mitigate the risk to your business continuity, be sure not to delay data migration, as it can be time-consuming and complex. It is also absolutely imperative to carry out effective testing of any application software you intend to implement (functional testing, user acceptance testing, regression testing, and the like).
Training and change management
EBS adoption can be most effectively accomplished by involving business users in the implementation process early on and providing them with attentive support after deployment. This includes updated testing, training and user guides, as well as follow-up employee coaching to promote EBS best practices.
It is also important to plan for future change management. That’s why Oracle provides a set of templates for recording your EBS application configurations, all of which should be inventoried and stored. In addition, any test scripts and results should be recorded in a repository for future reference. For the best long-term results, always ensure available Oracle patches are applied and periodically search for suspected issues with every upgrade.
Panaya’s Enterprise Testing Solution for Oracle
Oracle’s readiness scripts, offered in support of testing for their EBS upgrades and patches, are free to use. However, they are only partially effective in ensuring a successful implementation. They identify around 70% of your true upgrade risk and, conversely, issue 80% false or non-actionable alerts. Moreover, the results themselves do not provide insights for correcting the detected issues.
Panaya Release Dynamix steps into the breach, accelerating and de-risking Oracle EBS implementations, upgrades, customizations and patches. With Panaya, you can navigate those changes with complete confidence, from planning and scoping to go-live, knowing exactly how they will impact your system and ensuring they meet your business objectives.
A full project plan: know all the unknowns
Don’t settle for generic best-practice plans. Panaya provides tailor-made, ready-to-execute project plans based on your unique system customizations and usage, including all corrections and testing activities. In less than 48 hours, you can see exactly what needs to be fixed and how long it will take to resolve – long before you start.
Optimize the scope with impact analysis
Project plans produced by Panaya include scope optimization through risk-based testing analytics. Based on your own code and actual system usage, not estimations, Panaya determines precisely how each EBS installation or change will affect your business and ranks the risk of workflow disruptions. When you optimize resources based on Panaya’s analysis, you can reduce your EBS project scope by 80% and still be sure your business operations will continue as expected.
Control and streamline testing
Gain control of every aspect of your functional, system integration, regression, and user acceptance testing, with a business process-centered approach designed specifically for systems like the Oracle E-Business Suite. With Panaya’s unique “pass the baton” system, each tester knows immediately when it is their turn, what they need to test, and which data to use. Automatic notifications, comments and data-sharing capabilities ensure that cross-functional and globally dispersed collaboration is always seamless and continuous.
Gain real-time visibility and customize dashboards
Panaya’s real-time data from all testing cycles make it possible to track progress and remove bottlenecks to accelerate risk-free go-live. The testing data is presented in intuitive, customizable and personal dashboards offering real-time actionable insights into requirements, defects resolution, patches and customization analysis, and user activities.
Collaborate with closed-loop defects management
Panaya’s holistic defects management includes auto-generated documentation capturing every step taken while testing Oracle EBS applications, along with screenshots, annotations on impacted code snippets, and suggested fixes. Automatic closed-loop notifications eliminate time-consuming manual communication between testers and developers, preventing defect inflation and ensuring consistent re-testing. In addition, Panaya’s audit-ready test evidence enables rapid compliance with internal and external quality standards.
Do everything faster
You can kickoff your Oracle EBS project in days with Panaya’s friendly, easy to use SaaS platform, requiring no installation to get started. The ready-to-execute project plan is generated in about 48 hours, while automatic scoping and built-in collaboration cut project time and effort by 50%.
Conclusion
The Oracle E-Business Suite includes a wide array of applications and capabilities for managing companies of all sizes and across all industries. Implementing the suite’s specific business activity modules, upgrading the solution or integrating a patch provided by Oracle all require careful, comprehensive testing to ensure a smooth go-live.
No matter how complex or customized the suite of Oracle solutions is, Panaya enables testing based on actual operational code and application usage. That means you can foresee the impact of any patch or custom development, and automatically mitigate the risk to business processes and integration points. The risk-based testing and effective cross-departmental collaboration enabled by Panaya ensure a quick and risk-free go-live for your Oracle EBS.