While there are many reasons as to why organizations are reducing customizations, the most important is the cost of developing, upgrading and supporting these customizations.  Packaged applications have also come a long way in recent years in delivering more robust functionality. Software vendors have invested heavily in providing industry specific, legal, regulatory and best practice enhancements to their applications.

We are seeing a trend in new implementations where organizations are more willing to adopt the business processes built into the software instead of customizing it to operate like their legacy system. Companies recognize the cost to develop these customizations is high, but it also increases the complexity and risk during their implementation project. I also suspect the growing trend of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications (Salesforce and others) is helping organizations become more comfortable with adopting application delivered business processes. Unless a customization provides a competitive advantage or helps to meet specific business or regulatory requirements, companies are not investing in those customizations.

Approaching customization retirement, like retiring from the workforce, will require early planning, realistic goals, progress monitoring, and plan execution. As you begin your upgrade project, carefully analyzing the customizations to be retired will take some time and effort. You need to make sure you have a solid understanding of what customizations exist today, the functions they provide and the users / departments that require them.  Most organizations don’t have their customizations documented, so an inventory of your customizations should be taken prior to any upgrade project.

“No customizations!”

In some extreme cases, we have seen clients require Steering Committee review and approval before removing or adding customizations. In others, their users have to justify the business requirement or organizational value. I don’t think it is realistic to assume that you will be able to retire every customization within your application. Ideally, you would be able to replace all customized functionality with what the application delivers, but there is generally plenty of room to retire many customizations based on changes in need.

The number or percentage of customizations to retire will vary from organization to organization, but most who take the time to analyze their current customizations are able to retire at least 25% of those objects.

So, when starting your next upgrade or implementation project, remember these three things:

1. Start Planning Early
2. Set Realistic “Retirement” Goals
3. Monitor Your Progress

Oh and make some time for golf.

This year, Emerging Solutions, an Emtec, Inc. Company, is sending 20 brave associates to the starting line and will cheer them on from the sidelines. Running or not, the evening is guaranteed to be a blast.

As the largest single-evening Corporate Challenge in the U.S., last years’ Challenge hosted over 23,000 participants from 635 companies with donations benefitted the Greater Chicago Food Depository. This years’ race anticipates more than 24,000 participants and raise more than $600,000 for Chicago Run and the American Red Cross Association of Greater Chicago.

American Red Cross Association of Greater Chicago is a disaster relief foundation providing food, shelter and emotional support to victims of disaster. Chicago Run is a non-profit that supports free running aimed to promote increased physical fitness, improved self-esteem amongst middle-school youth.

Our associates take pride in being able to give back to the community and support local efforts. The JPMorgan Corporate Challenge one of many ways that we stay involved. To see what other efforts and activities we are involved in, please read our holiday post on Corporate Social Responsibility and view our website for more information.

We are excited to see our associates run as fast as they can and hope to see all of you at the finish line! Below are pictures from past years at the J.P. Morgan Corporate Challenge.

To learn more about the J.P Morgan Corporate Challenge or to get involved, click here to visit their website!

Happy Running!

a) Typical “Big Data” examples within organizations

b) Real-world value propositions from harvesting “Big Data”

Simple Definition and Context

Let’s start with establishing a definition and context for “Big Data” since the name alone can be misleading.  Big Data is a reference to the very large scale of data available or being created that cannot be easily handled using traditional processing, methodologies or technologies.  Big Data can relate to structured or unstructured data.  The challenges with Big Data can include how to capture it, the methods for storing it, how to understand it, how to analyze it, how to search it, or how to visualize it and correlate it to something familiar.  Data can be tagged as “Big Data” by evaluating it against the above classifications and by considering at least two factors:

1) The scale and sheer volume of the data in comparison to what is reasonably expected

2) The speed at which it is created or is expected to grow

Since there is a lot of subjectivity in defining “Big Data”, let’s list some real-world examples to solidify the understanding.

Big Data within Organizations

Using the definition above as guidance, a growing number of possible examples may belong in the “Big Data” category. For the sake of being concise, the following represent the types of “Big Data” organizations commonly encounter and the value that can be derived from them.

Call & Contact Details

Transaction Details

Web Clicks & Logs

Other interesting Big Data examples you may encounter include:

Application Logs

Informational, warning, error, monitoring and event messages are continuously produced by software systems, hardware devices and application platforms.  Proactively recognizing potential issues from the patterns can help improve the quality of service and reliability that the IT groups need to ensure.  Furthermore, it can be an element of a good risk mitigation strategy if the services and platforms are a critical part of your business.  This content is often overlooked for the value it possesses.

Social Media

Tweets, Facebook and Google+ posts, blogs & responses have quickly become acceptable means of social interaction between people.  The sheer number of people using these channels creates a “Big Data” problem.  The data and growth is exceptionally large to deal with. The content is text-based and needs to be evaluated in context to derive at the right interpretation. Furthermore the relevance of the content (eliminating noise) is difficult to decipher.  The jury is still in deliberation over the ROI for harvesting this information.  Nonetheless, it’s difficult to ignore.

GPS Trace Records

Equipment, products and personnel are increasingly fitted with GPS technologies that can track every move from point A to point B.  The ability to proactively analyze this movement can lead to supply chain efficiencies, human capital effectiveness, bottom-line cost reduction, fraud mitigation and allow for overall control and continuous visibility.

Technology & Instrument Output

Needless to say, there are countless unique examples within industries.  Utility and communication companies produce incredible amounts of usage details that can be used to manage demand and optimize performance.  Genomics and scientific organizations are deploying technologies producing ever granular bits of potentially important information.

Documents & Other Unstructured Data

Virtually every organization produces an immense amount of unstructured data, or in other words information that does not easily conform to a defined data model.    This can include internal documentation, publications, correspondences, health records, audio recordings, etc.  Not only is this a content management problem but it also requires unique analytical techniques to harvest value from the content.  Increase the scale of it and it now becomes a Big Data challenge.  Businesses can use this data for ensuring compliance, managing risk and achieving more complete records.

Many more organizations will have “Big Data” challenges over the coming years. Some of this can be attributed to their individual growth as a company but much of it is the result of technology advances and outside factors.   It is safe to conclude that all organizations with Big Data will need to take some action to do something valuable with it, at least to remain competitive.

In future blogs I will talk in more specifics about individual approaches, technologies and business application around Big Data.  In the meantime, please feel free to comment below or reach out to me to talk about “Big Data” challenges you are facing.

Is Oracle Fusion just a new version of your traditional ERP application or is it truly a “Real” Next Generation product?

The answer is YES, it is a REAL next generation product!  It would have to be for clients to even consider the investment given how much they have already invested in their current application footprint.

What makes Fusion so special? 

Actually, there are many reasons.  First, Fusion was developed using open industry-standard based technologies.  Additionally, Fusion is a best-in-breed application created from integrating top tier-1 applications including PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, E-Business Suite and Siebel.

While these are all great features, they may not be enough to crown Fusion as the “Real” next generation application suite.

So what is the secret sauce that pushes Fusion over the top?

For me, it’s the integration of world-class operational applications combined with Business Intelligence, Specialized Analytics and Mobility.

The Fusion applications are integrated with Oracle’s leading Business Intelligence products (OBIEE, OTBI and OBIA) providing real-time and data warehouse based reporting.  Oracle Transactional BI (OTBI) is a real time self-service reporting application delivering content directly off the Fusion Applications database.  OTBI comes with hundreds of pre-built metrics, reports and facts.  Oracle BI Applications (OBIA) is a data warehouse that enables historical analysis and cross-domain insight through a set of prepackaged interactive dashboards, KPI’s and reports that deliver valuable information to your Fusion users and executives.  Both OTBI and OBIA run off of Oracles’ OBIEE foundation which is integrated with every Fusion install.

Oracle has also integrated its industry leading multi-dimensional database into Fusion as well.  While your organization is transacting its day-to-day accounting entries, your data cubes are simultaneously updated in real-time using the embedded GL hyperledger architecture!  Whitespace analysis and data mining are at your fingertips along with financial statements, planning needs and more.  This makes pivot tables and drill downs to any level a snap!

The ability for all users (from operational all the way up to executive management) to have access to information they never had before is what truly makes all of this very exciting.  Their access will allow them to not only enter and look at transactional data, but to perform and observe analysis on that data.  Imagine a world where your entire organization can determine:

• What is happening?
• What has happened?
• Why did this happen?
• What will happen?
• What should happen?

All of this is integrated with the individuals’ day-to-day workflow.  If that doesn’t get you excited, what about the ability to get this level of analysis through a dashboard with BI content on the go? Not through a clumsy web browser, but through native applications built specifically for your mobile device!  Oracle has done a wonderful job integrating true mobility throughout the applications.

There is so much to talk about.  I look forward to sharing additional features in my upcoming posts.  If you would like to discuss what Fusion could do for you, please reach out to me.  Emtec is a Fusion client as well as a preferred implementation partner.  Until next time…

Waterfall implementation methodologies are a traditional proven approach to deploying business solutions. However, with the rapid pace of business and limited staffing, many look for an alternative approach to enable their teams to work concurrently and implement the solution quickly.

An “Agile Approach” enables tasks to be broken down into increments allowing for greater control and the ability to make adjustments along the way.  The key to understanding this approach is noticing how tasks are broken down into smaller activities and numbers of iterations.

The Method

A commonly used method divides the project into key workloads (AKA: work streams) followed by supporting business processes under each workload.  A workload can be either a key value chain activity or similar to a functional area such as; Financials, Sales, Store Operations, Manufacturing, etc.

Additionally, project team roles are aligned with each workload. Each workload will have a lead and subject matter experts (SMEs) for each activity.   Teams then work through each of the business processes in multiple iterations enabling the ability for multiple teams to be working concurrently, thus collapsing the overall project time-frame.    Multiple iterations allow teams work with the application quickly, validate data and process in a timely manner.

A Note of Caution: This approach is not for the faint of heart.  It requires clear guidance, strong management, as well as, leads with good facilitation skills.  It also requires a high level of communication.  Organizations will often implement “sprints” as a way to communicate decisions and status to sponsors and project teams.

Does this “Agile Approach” work?

From my experience, with the right people leading the effort and the workloads being broken down to the right level the approach works successfully.  Things may get a bit tricky when dealing with cross functional areas.  To shrink project time it takes a master in scheduling to align all workload teams – but it can be rewarding if accomplished successfully.  If you’re looking to reinvent a business process, this may not be the best approach as it may increase project time.

Please leave a comment or send me a message if you have feedback from a personal experience or have any specific questions about the agile approach. Until next time..

After conducting numerous initial assessments for ERP implementations and upgrades, we have seen that all too many reporting solutions were not built according to data warehousing best practices. Because of this, upgrading to a new ERP release can be almost as costly as rewriting it from scratch.  If best practices are not adopted at the outset, not only will this reporting system upgrade cost more than it would otherwise but future upgrades will only become more time consuming and costly.

Data warehousing (and other) best practices are imperative to a successful ERP implementation or upgrade. The system cannot be stagnant, it must be able to adapt and grow with the business intelligence needs of the organization. The following five principles should be observed:

1. Separating the extraction from the load in the ETL to simplify upgrading and minimize data extraction and load time.
2. Using an enterprise data model, not a subject specific data model, to minimize disruption when new functionality is added to the data warehouse.
3. Employing conformed dimensions so that, for example, one is dealing with the same definition of a vendor whether in procurement, accounts payable, or project work.
4. Providing tools to maximize user self service.
5. Building metrics and attributes that follow business processes so that results from several ERP’s can easily be combined to provide users consistent views across the organization.

An enterprise data warehouse that is fed primarily by your ERP system (that can grow to include other data silos) can provide you a centralized platform for your enterprise business intelligence. It becomes a one-stop-shop that provides an up-to-date status of the health of the organization at any moment.

Also, having a modular approach in ETL design will ensure that your system can adapt to all future changes in the source system- saving time, money and frustration in the long run.

There are many data warehousing solutions on the market that can either be built or bought.  One such solution is from Oracle.

In the last installment of this blog series, we will look into the features and benefits you can gain from implementing Oracle Business Intelligence Analytics (OBIA) during your ERP upgrade. Stay tuned…

Cash Flow Management

Treasury is not designed to replace Oracle Cash Management.  That application still exists and serves the function of cash forecasting, cash positioning, and bank account reconciliation.  Treasury is intended to manage your investment portfolio including investments and borrowings.   Likewise, it allows you to manage your banking relationships, transactions between companies and banks, and short term / long term cash forecasting.  In addition, you can use Treasury to manage in-house cash between companies within the same legal entity.

Deal Management

You can use Treasury to manage your financial transactions and deals both short term and long term including investments and borrowings.  This management capability allows your organization to better manage results to achieve improved overall operation of your treasury management process.  For Deal Management, Treasury allows you to:

• Create portfolios to manage short term and long term deals that are controlled through deal rate tolerances.
• Create the products you need to relate to the deals you trade in.  Define stocks and bonds.
• Setup your deals and manage them both in terms of risk and record appropriate journal entries to the General Ledger.
• Create confirmation templates that you can send out deal confirmations to the trading parties that you control.
• Manage the settlement process with trading parties using EDI and related technologies.
• Define audit requirements to help manage your internal audit requirements in the corporate treasury environment.

Risk Management

Risk Management is an ever increasing part of corporate treasury and cash management responsibilities; and as such you can use Treasury to drive policy, risk limits, and risk exposure to interest rates, foreign currency, and commodities. Treasury allows you to:

• Define interest rate policy along with limit types and limits monitoring.
• Define global limits to create a decentralized ability to share the responsibility globally for managing your corporate treasury functions.
• Create exposure types and hedging policies to use as another tool in managing your cash and treasury risk.
• Set limits based on counterparty, counterparty groups, settlements, sovereign limits, currency limits, and dealer and utilize that all with workflow.
• Set up brokerage schedules and details to manage your brokerage accounts and relationships.
• Define market data curves and data sets so that you can use that for doing deal revaluations and mark to market evaluations to help manage your treasury risk.

Treasury 11i vs R12

From the perspective of using Treasury in an 11i versus R12 level, there is very little difference.  R12 does utilize the functionality in Cash Management, where the bank account maintenance takes place in Cash Management.  As part of R12, your internal banks should be setup as parties and that allow you to further manage your banking relationships.

In R12 – the bank account control for Treasury is at a legal entity level.  This is different than the bank account control for Accounts Payables and Accounts Receivables where the control is at the operating unit level.

Treasury does not utilize the sub-ledger accounting application functionality that is prevalent in R12 for the other sub-ledgers like Payables, Receivables, and Inventory.  It does continue to utilize a direct interface to Oracle GL (without any drilldown functionality).

The remaining functionality in Treasury is the same from 11i to R12 as it relates to the primary functionality of the application.  So, from an upgrade standpoint, there isn’t any pre or post upgrade considerations required for Oracle Treasury.

A Cool Tool

I hope this quick overview gives you a window into some of the features and benefits of Oracle Treasury. It is a great tool that truly is under-utilized.  Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions, or comment below if you are using Treasury and let me know how it is working for you.

With almost 100 guests in attendance, the Medinah Networking Breakfast celebrated a successful 5^th year.

John O’Rourke, Oracle’s Vice President of Product Marketing, kicked off the event with a keynote presentation – Learn how Oracle’s Management Solutions can help companies make the transition to fusion. A series of 12 breakout sessions followed the keynote covering a variety of topics. With such great topics to select from, guests wished they could attend all of them. Sessions included:

• Hyperion Planning Successes
• Turbo-Charging with Essbase
• What’s new in Financial Close Suite
• Migration to OBIEE
• Leveraging PeopleSoft Testing Framework
• IFM with Hyperion Strategic Finance
• Data Governance (DRM, FDM, ERPI)
• Oracle Asset Management Analytics & Operations Analytics
•  Better decisions through Intelligent Data Infrastructure
• Insight and control with PeopleSoft
• What’s New in Planning
• Healthcare Analytics

Attendees shared their thoughts and comments through our live Twitter feed using our #Medinah12 hash-tag. Those who participated were entered into a prize drawing.

As the event began to wrap-up, guests were thanked for attending and prizes were given away. Attendees walked away with more than just new business cards and connections. They gained valuable insight to some of the latest Oracle and PeopleSoft products from well versed consultants from Oracle, Emerging Solutions/Emtec.  Guests were able to connect with and share their experiences with peers who use the same systems.  From the scenery, to the people, to the food- the entire day was an enjoyable one. We want to thank everyone who attended this year’s 5^th Annual MidwestOracle Hyperion and PeopleSoft Networking Breakfast and we look forward to seeing you again next year.

Click here to view a slideshow of images from this year’s event:

What we (Emtec) have observed , and the point of this blog is; in most cases (physical, logical and business process contextual) understanding of the data is left to the interpretation of varied groups throughout an organization.  There’s recognition within business units; a project took longer than it should have done and within IT; a number of the efficiencies of the ETL tool or the BI platform were not realized. Frequently, these concerns are elevated to senior management and ‘harsh words are exchanged and blame is assigned’.

In order to turn data into a corporate information asset you must create data governance around how the organization Manages and Consumes data by embarking upon an Information Management Center of Excellence (CoE).  The CoE would address the problem of projects that run over budget,  outlined above, by defining common business rules, which is the combination of BPI (Business Process Improvement) and the data elements supporting the BPI.

We believe that the Information Management CoE is most effective when the group launches with a core group that accommodates the current state of information maturity and evolves over time to reflect a more mature future state of your information management practices.  We believe this can be achieved by understanding where in the maturity model your organization stands and then begin your journey from there.

Let us introduce an Information Management maturity model comprised of the following 4 levels…

1. Initial – When beginning the CoE journey, start with a single subject area associated with a recent Information Management project such as a Data Warehouse implementation.
2. Managed – The 2^nd stage of maturity is to broaden the scope of the CoE to include multiple disciplines/subject areas such as all of Information Delivery including; Business Intelligence, ETL, a Data Quality project or a Master Data initiative, etc.
3. Enhanced – The 3^rd stage of maturity is achieved when the CoE has constituents that participate from both IT, who are the technical data stewards and Business stakeholders who provide business process context as well as data ownership to the CoE.
4. Visionary – The 4^th stage of maturity when all information is seen as a trusted corporate asset. All data is governed throughout its lifecycle from transactional systems… to operational data stores… to data warehouse & data mart… to end-of-life as archived data.

Adopting this maturity model will allow you to develop the necessary controls, policies & procedures to reap the rewards of being an information-driven organization, and to create competitive advantage from your data.

We intend to build on this theme of a CoE maturity model in a Thought Leadership Whitepaper to be published in the next couple of months.  We welcome your comments and feedback, and anyone providing feedback will receive an advance copy of the Whitepaper.

Until next time.

There is a common misconception that Remedy ARS is itself slow since so many administrators and customers have experienced this problem. Further, when these problems are discussed with other administrators it reinforces these misconceptions.

However, this is false. Remedy is not inherently slow. I have seen as many environments that have been performing well as those with performance problems. This begs the question what is different between these environments? What is causing all these performance problems which are perpetuating this myth?

Answering these questions in depth would require a detailed analysis of each specific environment to determine the basic limiting factors, bottlenecks, and analyzing the use and data volumes. Yet, in the majority of cases I have seen- the underlying culprit has been the database.

When a Remedy ARS Administrator starts to analyze a performance issue, the tendency is to work from the top down. This is a perfectly acceptable method to troubleshoot a performance issue. It will first rule out performance issues on the client.

Next they check the mid-tier and finally they will check the ARS application server. If these components are causing performance problems it is usually easy to spot. High memory usage, high CPU use, a large number of memory hard faults are all easily checked and provide a clear indicator of a performance problem. It is possible to have performance issues in the middle tiers beyond these types of issues. However, these limitations are generally not reached until there are very substantial loads from hundreds of concurrent users submitting tens of thousands of tickets each month.

At this point, analysis usually stops. One of two things will occur next. Either the administrator blames the problem on the ITSM applications or on the underlying Action Request System simply being inherently slow. Alternatively, they will open a ticket with support because ITSM and ARS are having problems.

In reality, what is usually occurring is latency at the database layer. For many Remedy Administrators the database is simply a black box where ARS stores all of its data. This is not the case, as the database is the single most important component in determining performance for any ARS application, including BMC Remedy ITSM.

Remedy ARS performs many queries for each action. Looking up a single record of data is a minimum of two database queries and can potentially be many more depending on the type of action being performed. In particular ARS is built on metadata for storing the structure of ARS applications. This metadata structure results in many small database queries occurring very frequently. When these frequent small queries are combined in with larger core data queries- even a minor delay or latency in receiving a response from the database will have a significant impact on the overall performance.

Analysis of the database performance and removing the bottleneck is a complex task and requires a set of skills that most Remedy administrators do not possess. This is why it is extremely important for Remedy administrators to work closely with their database administrators.

The following tools are available to help improve the database performance:

• Monitoring the database
• Maintaining indexes
• Sizing the database servers and storage
• Increasing database storage I/O

When these considerations are overlooked or neglected, the database will continue to degrade and age. Storage arrays will fill up, data files and indexes will become fragmented, or usage simply grows beyond what the database is able to satisfactorily manage.  Any one of these problems can significantly impact the database performance hereby causing performance problems with Remedy ARS.