Sweat every ounce of value from your Oracle E-Business Suite asset

In an unexpected move, Oracle has reset the clock on E-Business Suite support and development, extending its life beyond 2030. A recent Gartner report –What Oracle ERP Customers Need to Know About Oracle Cloud Applications– backs this up: “Oracle’s on-premises suites are not at the end-of-life stage. In fact, Oracle receives the majority of its software license revenue from customers paying for maintenance of, and new sales of, its on-premises products.”

Unless you have a compelling reason to move to Oracle’s Cloud Applications, it makes sense to work your E-Business Suite investment. Here’s what you should be doing to get the most value.

Take the long view

Customers tell us that they’ve made significant investments in EBS and its replacement is not a business priority. Oracle’s recent announcements show there’s plenty of life left: a major upgradeis scheduled for 2019 and the current version is already fully supported for another 5 years to 2023.

The rate of Cloud uptake may explain why. Gartner says: “Oracle has approximately 14,000 on-premises customers, and states that it has sold over 5,000 cloud licenses… EBS should be a perfectly viable product for at least the next seven to 10 years. For customers that have EBS and are happy with it, there is no need to rush to replacement.”

Clearly, many customers are taking a cautious approach to Cloud. “Wait and see” is a sensible approach. Why commit to a decision now if it’s not required by the business?

However, if you’re not careful, “sweating the asset” can become “do nothing”, resulting in a system that increasingly doesn’t deliver for business needs. A better strategy is required to meet the following challenges:

• Increasing costs of Oracle support. The costs and challenges of recruiting, retaining and training specialist in-house teams are growing.
• Where a support provider is used, they often don’t deliver proactivity, improvements and value for money.
• Not getting ROI from the system. Often because it’s not being used effectively.
• How do you ensure the system stays relevant and supports a changing business?
• IT departments can get stuck delivering business-as-usual support rather than supporting

Claremont’s Managed Services slashed the annual Oracle support bill by 48% at Global Switch.

Make positive changes

If staying with EBS makes business sense, there are two specific initiatives that can help reduce costs, optimise business processes and improve the experience for users:

• Team changes or re-deployment

It’s essential to ensure you have the right people, with the right skills, to support and develop EBS for the coming years. There is a skills shortage across the whole Oracle EBS market: the skills we have are becoming rarer and more expensive.

Businesses need to re-think the current structure and use of internal Oracle support teams.  Can you attract and retain sufficient numbers of staff with the right skills? More fundamentally, should you be attempting this for an ageing system with a limited lifespan?

If you’re already using a managed service provider (MSP), now is the time to make a strategic decision for the years ahead. Is your current MSP delivering the proactivity, strategic advice and cost savings that would benefit your business? Moving to Claremont, for example, would give you access to a partner with the vision and capability to evolve EBS in line with your business needs.

• Functional optimisation

Whether it’s improving a business process or the user experience, optimising your current system to ensure it continues to meet the demands of your business is crucial. This can quickly lead to tangible benefits, most notably reduced costs and increased user adoption. Our implementations of Applaud Solutions for Oracle HCM have made such significant improvements to users’ experiences, including mobile deployment, that system adoption and data quality materially increase.

Don’t do it alone