The Feature

Conversation with the Team from PPM Energy

March 6, 2008 on 9:40 am | by Marian Crkon | In Conversations | |  Print |  Email

Last fall, I had an opportunity to spend some time in beautiful Portland, OR, assisting a talented group at PPM Energy with their calendar changes in Oracle Applications. PPM energy builds and manages wind turbines and sells alternative energy. I invited two of their key Oracle users - Lori Thibodeaux, a financial systems manager, and Kevin Kosub, a senior business systems analyst, to a have conversation about their lives with Oracle. Read on for few excerpts below.

Marian: Let me start by asking what Oracle products/applications does PPME currently use?

Lori: We use the full Financials suite, including iExpense and iProcurement, Inventory, Enterprise Asset Mgt (EAM), Project Costing and HR. We are also using Discoverer for adhoc reporting.

Were you involved in picking Oracle EBS? Why was Oracle chosen over other ERP solutions?

I came on board after the selection of Oracle was done. However, I do know it was picked over other solutions because of the ease of implementation. We implemented Oracle in about six months.

How would you describe the original implementation? What were your main lessons learned?

I would describe the implementation as fast and “vanilla”! We did not have time for any customizations. The lessons learned were we wish we had a better grip on our business processes before configuring the system. We have made quite a few changes and enhancements to configuration post implementation.

Did you take the same approach to all applications? Were some applications or processes easier to implement than others?

Project Costing was the hardest to implement.

You did not have to think too long about that one…

Mostly because of all the set up decisions that need to be made.

If you had three recommendations for other people implementing Oracle EBS, what would they be?

Make sure you have a good executive sponsor for the project. One who has the authority to set down expectations and resolve disputes.

Make sure the business users are invested and integrated into the project. If their days jobs can be backfilled, even better.

Get a good consulting partner with expertise across the Oracle apps. It is best to have people who understand the processes from cradle to grave and how they flow through Oracle.

Speaking about users, how did they accept the new system and the change in general?

In our case they didn’t have a choice. Our parent company sold off the division that hosted the applications we were using.

Kevin: Users were learning the business processes as well as the system.

The EBS applications are sometimes criticized for being overly complex and not very intuitive. How did you make sure people learned the new tools quickly?

Lots of training and as much documentation as we could put together in the short time we had.

We had some cases where we didn’t have enough business insight to our new processes to drive the configuration appropriately upon initial set up. Later once the insights were gained we had to make tweaks to configuration, which were easy in some instances and painful in others.

Which processes or functions posed the biggest challenges?

We are still suffering from the lack of user training, especially in Projects and procurement. Projects has been problematic because we do not have a [ready process in place] real system savvy super user.

Procurement has been problematic because of some bad configuration decisions at the time of implementation. We were initially set up to accrue upon receipt for expense items - a bad decision!!! This has created a reconciliation nightmare! We changed over to accrue at month end about a year ago.

Additionally we had users who were wearing two hats for configuration responsibilities, as well as performing normal operations.

One pain point I have is the procurement hierarchy maintenance. Our hierarchy is based on HR Positions. Unfortunately, it is policy in our HR to change positions fairly frequently. When they do this, the old position stays in the hierarchy without a person attached. I have to go re-add the new position to the hierarchy to fix it.
I have been told, and I believe it, this issue has been addressed in R12.

Kevin, I know you have some experience with SAP too. How would you compare it to Oracle?

There are both positives and negatives with both of those ERP systems. All of the SAP environments I was a part of were heavily customized. There were a lot of changes to custom development and SAP had sophisticated tools for migration between development environments. SAP seemed to have better out of the box reporting capabilities as well.

On the other hand, SAP can be overly engineered and be difficult to configure.
Oracle is relatively simple with the user interface and out of the box configuration, which is a positive for a mid-size company Security administration is also much simpler in Oracle.

Are you planning to stay on 11i, upgrade to R12, or wait for Fusion?

I like some of the changes I see in R12, like the SLA engine. Not having to log into each operating unit separately is very nice! I also like that they are getting rid of the client version of ADI. It is high maintenance! I also like the look and feel of R12.

I would like to start planning for an upgrade to R12. However, our new parent company is running SAP. We may be forced onto SAP in the next couple of years. Fusion is probably not in the picture for us. From what I have seen, Fusion isn’t a viable option for anyone in the near future. I think it is years away.

I see a lot of positive changes with R12. It would nice to simplify our sub-ledger configuration and maintenance as well as enhance some reporting capabilities.

Are you referring to BI Publisher? Or reporting in general?

We are currently using XML Publisher for report output. I look forward to expanding our use of this tool.

Well that is an option but a lot of existing DBI-like dashboards are standard with R12. We are also considering other tools like Noetix to supplement our reporting options.

Let’s switch gears just a little. I know you are very active participants in the local OAUG activities. What can we do better as a user community?

I try to go to activities as they seem appropriate. I like the NWOUG conferences. It is a good networking event.

I am relatively new to the OAUG. From what I have seen, it is a positive experience

What Oracle resources (Metalink, oracle.com, podcasts, conferences, etc.) best provide you with the information you need?

Metalink is a good resource, however, the search capabilities could be improved.

Metalink is a staple. It takes some time to figure out how to maneuver through all the info out there. [Our colleague] Keith has had 10 years of experience with it, so he is pretty good at finding things.

Sometimes I spend more time searching than reading relevant information on my issue.

I am still learning. As a manager in my previous jobs, I didn’t search Metalink very much. Now I need to and I find it a little challenging to get to the right information. I have used Google as a search tool and sometimes have better luck there.

Oracle University classes are also a good resource for learning new products.

Oracle.com is a sales site. I don’t go there for hard information. I haven’t ever used podcasts. I went to Oracle World last November. In my opinion it was way too big. I ended up networking only with people from Portland, which I didn’t have to travel [to San Francisco] to do.

Yes, I agree. Oracle University’s training is very good! We have had trainers come up to Portland to put on classes just for PPM employees. This worked out very well!

Thank you so much for your time and opinions! This was fun!

Thanks.

Thank you, bye!