Why select Oracle Applications for your organization's ERP system?

What do Ingersoll Rand, Starbucks Coffee Company, General Dynamics and Harvard University have in common? They use Oracle Applications 11i to automate their operations.

Set aside all the sales and political machinations that can, and do, occur in the executive offices when an organization decides to purchase an ERP system. Let's ask the question: What are the compelling attributes of Oracle Applications? Does Oracle really have a better offering than SAP? This article takes a brief look at Oracle Applications' strengths -- the product's extensibility, its technology stack, ease of implementation and the total cost of ownership -- and what they mean for companies that are selecting an ERP system.

Extensibility

While no "out-of-the-box" ERP system can meet the needs of every customer, Oracle Applications' flexibility is an attribute that has drawn many companies into its fold. Oracle's offering also shines in several areas with regard to extensibility -- Web applications, workflow and reporting.

Oracle's approach to Web applications is so flexible that an organization's IT department can personalize a Web application, such as iProcurement, so that employees logging in from Bangkok see relevant information for that region, and employees logging in from Dallas, Texas, access information that is appropriate to their region. iExpense is another example of the incredible configurability of Oracle's Web applications. Many companies have used this portion of Oracle Applications to streamline their business processes associated with employee expense reimbursements. Robb Robison, Purchasing Manager at a Bay Area software company, is a fan. "I worked with SAP at my previous employer. I'm working with Oracle now. It's just more flexible. For example, iExpense is simpler and easier to work with than anything SAP has. And it's in English!"

Oracle's workflow and business event system allows companies to configure business processes in a variety of ways, with the capability of sending e-mail notifications and alerts to practically anyone associated with the organization. SAP does not offer anything that is equally configurable or flexible.

One of the common complaints of SAP customers relates to the difficulty associated with getting actionable information out of SAP. A senior manager at a utility and SAP customer bemoaned the fact that he needed additional headcount for business system analysts to produce reports and access needed financial information. In contrast, Oracle reporting is so easy and accessible that any user with the proper privileges can produce a report. Further, with Oracle's addition of Daily Business Intelligence, retrieving actionable data from the applications has become a matter of reading a dashboard and drilling into the necessary data.

Technology

Oracle's technology stack for its Applications makes the flexibility and configurability possible. It is true that better "best of breed" solutions exist in the market. Still Oracle embraced the middleware market early on when it began talking about using its middleware as the cornerstone for a "service oriented architecture" in 1999 (see Note 1).

Consequently, the company has a strong middleware product. Further, Oracle Corporation has worked on simplifying and opening its Applications architecture. The benefit to Oracle's customers is a product that is easier to install, maintain and use productively. Finally, the company's efforts toward creating a unified data model are paying off. With Oracle Applications' unified data model, organizations have one source of record. There is no more jockeying between departments -- sales and accounting, for example -- about which numbers are valid. SAP still makes its customers work with five different data models. If a company wants a single source of truth with SAP, it must build a data warehouse. Oracle's Daily Business Intelligence product makes a data warehouse optional for many of its customers. The result is faster access to actionable information at less expense.

Implementation challenges

ERP systems are complex. An ERP implementation is such a major undertaking for any organization that poor planning, misaligned scope or mediocre execution can result in bringing the company's operations to a complete halt. Over the years, news reports have described the more egregious implementation failures -- Irish Health Services, Hewlett Packard, Hershey Foods, Whirlpool and King County, Washington. Whether these failures were the principal responsibility of the customer or the vendor does not change the reality of increased challenges that any company faces when it attempts to implement SAP's software. According to Nucleus Research, companies that it interviewed encountered a couple of daunting issues implementing SAP -- customization and integration. These two challenges led to additional, equally serious problems confronting SAP customers, increased duration and internal costs for deployment. SAP requires on average four times more internal resources, and companies spend almost twice as much for SAP training (see Note 2). Further, the SAP customization and integration issues can increase consulting costs substantially.

A company can install Oracle Applications and begin conducting its operations successfully in six months. Oracle Applications was installed and deployed at Brocade Communications in San Jose, California, in six months, as well as at OpenWave in Cupertino, California. American Tower in Boston, Massachusetts, completed its implementation in eight months. Toni & Guy USA based in Carrollton, Texas, assisted by BearingPoint's R2i methodology, completed its Oracle Applications deployment in five months! How many companies have been able to implement and be productive on SAP in eight months or less? As of January 2006, the answer is none that this author is aware of.

SAP has been successful with its pitch to CEOs and CFOs regarding the benefits and features of its products. However, in speaking with the very people who will actually deploy, maintain and use the ERP system -- system analysts, business analysts, subject matter experts and end users -- they maintain that Oracle Applications, even with its warts, is easier, more user-friendly and less time-consuming than SAP.

Total cost of ownership

All roads -- extensibility, technology and implementation -- lead to total cost of ownership (TCO) and ROI. Which is better, Oracle's or SAP's? Oracle Applications' extensibility and flexibility alleviate the need for customization. With less customization come faster deployments, lower consulting costs and internal resources that return to business operations quicker. The effect of all these attributes is a lower cost of ownership. In fact, not only are Oracle's costs lower than SAP's, but Oracle's average three-year TCO is 48% lower than SAP's (see Note 3). With a difference that substantial, why select SAP?

Conclusion

If an organization is looking to sustain its competitive advantage and become a market leader in its industry, this means constant organizational change through streamlining business processes, reorganization and restructuring, and so forth. As economic history confirms, these activities are demanding in and of themselves. They become nearly impossible with an ERP system that is inflexible, difficult to implement and maintain, hard to use and unnecessarily costly. Oracle Applications, on the other hand, can be successfully deployed in a short time frame. It is flexible and highly configurable. It has a lower TCO than SAP. Working with Oracle Applications is easier than SAP, according to users who have seen both. Does Oracle really have a better offering than SAP? The answer is a resounding "Yes!"

Source: http://www.techtarget.com

The Best Fit for Smaller Sized Companies, Oracle or SAP

If you are looking at ERP, enterprise resource planning, solutions for your organization, or even if you are not in the Technology field, you most likely have heard of the enterprise system giants Oracle and SAP. In the past, the “big” ERP vendors catered mostly to the Fortune 500, or even Fortune 100 companies who had pockets deep enough to afford the capital intensive software and implementation resources required for a large scale ERP deployment.

If you are looking at ERP, enterprise resource planning, solutions for your organization, or even if you are not in the Technology field, you most likely have heard of the enterprise system giants Oracle and SAP. In the past, the “big” ERP vendors catered mostly to the Fortune 500, or even Fortune 100 companies who had pockets deep enough to afford the capital intensive software and implementation resources required for a large scale ERP deployment. However, given the competitive and economic environment the “big” players in the ERP space are focusing on a new market, small to mid-sized companies. The emergence of less capital intensive alternatives on the market such as SaaS, software as a service, and other open source applications in the CRM (customer relationship management) and human resources space amongst other application have gained market share and the large ERP vendors such as Oracle and SAP are fighting back to gain back this lost market share. Sofware solutions come and go, and many mid-sized companies are reluctant to take on the risk factor associated with new vendors and applications on the market given the lack of history and track record. Assuming you are narrowing your focus to a big ERP vendors, such as Oracle or SAP, and are convinced that they can fit the needs of your smaller sized business, here are some pros and cons between both enterprise solutions: The main factor for any capital investment of any sized company is the return on investment, or ROI. This is critical for smaller companies as budgets for operations are slim and mistakes in and capital investments could be catastrophic to an organization as there is little solace in taking a write off on the balance sheet. In independent and general opinion survey, over forty percent of small businesses found and ROI on SAP and over 90 percent found an ROI with Oracle solutions. A second key factor was getting the solution up and deployed. Again, for a smaller sized company with limited resources to assign to “new” initiatives, any downtime or increase in implementation time can seriously affect profits. With respect to SAP, almost 70 percent of implementations were completed on schedule, while almost 80 percent of Oracle implementations were on time. However, from a budget perspective, only 40 percent of SAP implementations were on budget while over 60 percent of Oracle implementations were on budget. Probably the biggest statistic to which solution comes out ahead is whether a current customer would choose the same vendor the next time around. Almost 70 percent of SAP customers said they would recommend SAP while almost 90 percent of Oracle customers said they were satisfied with their application and recommend them to customers. With mixed general data like this, the best process for ERP practitioners looking to ferret out the right enterprise solution for their organization would be to take their analysis one step further and drill down on Oracle and SAP clients/customers with their identical company profile, size, industry, and business strategy as their organization and do a more streamlined analysis on these key ERP success factors.

Source: www.erp.com