Case Study
Doctor
 

 
Oracle E-Business Custom Application for a Leading Importer of Fashion Accessories
Client Leading Fashion Accessories Importer
Project Oracle E-Business Custom Application
Executive Summary:
A leading designer, marketer and distributor of brand-name fashion accessories sought to modernize its mission critical financial accounting and operational applications, and selected Oracle E-Business Suite (formerly Oracle Applications) as its chosen ERP platform. Aviana planned, designed and implemented Oracle Apps and a custom front-end order entry application for this client, and also provided ongoing performance monitoring and application tuning services.
What Was The Problem ?
The financial management infrastructure at the company was fragmented, complex and costly to maintain. Data was not standardized, resulting in many different databases making disparate interpretations of business data. Corporate purchasing, accounts payable and asset management were managed manually, resulting in time-consuming delays and discrepancies.

Fragmented internal systems are not unusual in a company that experiences rapid growth. Visa experienced double-digit growth for several consecutive years as it applied its successful marketing programs to each designer line, and stimulated sales in a growing and increasingly fashion conscious market.

All this growth led to a severe breakdown of the company's ability to handle its operation in a cost-effective manner. To support anticipated growth from new brands, the company has been making significant investments in new computer technologies and business systems, and has hired additional mid-level management.

The company's internal systems were unnecessarily complex or grossly inadequate and utilized few of the advantages that technology can bring to an enterprise.

Oracle's E-Business Suite was (EBS) the chosen solution.
Why Aviana & Oracle?
The Aviana team's expertise with Oracle products and its ability to coordinate with Oracle (as an Oracle Certified Partner for over 6 years) was a critical factor in the company's decision process. Also, Aviana's functional knowledge of the services/logistics sector, and its reputation of bringing in projects on time and on budget were decision factors.
In this opportunity, Oracle was competing against the top names in the enterprise software business, but was the only vendor that could deliver the quality of products and breadth of knowledge the company demanded to move into the world of e-business.

"We picked Oracle because the Web technology employed by the products were two years ahead of the competition," said the company's CFO, when the decision was announced. "We liked Oracle's vision of e-business and the depth of knowledge of the Oracle staff. And I felt Oracle had an excellent grasp on global enterprise systems, which was very reassuring."

The resulting implementation turned the company's cumbersome, outdated desktop procedures into Web-based Oracle solutions that met management's demands for all roles and processes. Oracle Financials automated the company's old organization and created a more agile system capable of accounting for the impact of financial activities on a global scale. Accounts payable was transformed from a cumbersome manual process into a streamlined system that automatically checked invoices against outgoing payments and requested review of any discrepancies via e-mail. Oracle iProcurement helped automate the requisitioning and purchasing system by streamlining the entire purchasing process and implementing a self-service model to increase processing efficiency. The custom Order Entry bolt-on application worked wonders for the widely dispersed sales force, etc.
Aviana's Solution
The company selected Oracle E-Business Suite (formerly Oracle Applications) as its chosen ERP platform, as it sought to modernize its mission critical financial accounting and operational applications. Aviana planned, designed and implemented Oracle Apps and a custom front-end order entry application for this client, and also provided ongoing performance monitoring and application tuning services.

The custom Order Entry System is based on thin client (web) technology, and functions as a complementary extension of EBS (a "bolt-on" module), that provides custom functionality that is not otherwise available in the standard EBS package.

The schematic below depicts the major components of this application.
Benefits to Customer
Prior to implementation of the new ERP Application and the bolt-on order entry system it was getting difficult to manage the company's rapid growth.

Oracle Financials provided an integrated set of industry leading financial management and accounting applications that provided the company with complete process automation and effective financial/management information. Oracle Financials modules implemented at the company: General Ledger, Payables, Receivables, Global Consolidation System, Assets, Cash Management, Treasury, Financials Intelligence, Sales Analyzer, and Balanced Scorecard. As a result, the company:
Automated back-office processes and reduced its finance and accounting costs, cut IT costs, and improve operational efficiency - direct improvement of bottom-line
Replace manual, disjointed regional practices with automated, global, workflow driven processes
Increased processing efficiencies with a web-based, self-service model
Gained a competitive advantage across the supply chain by using the EBS and custom Order Entry system
Improved cash-flow by cutting average number of days to issue an invoice by 33%, and collections, for an accounts receivable reduction in excess of 28%
Improved overall operational performance with Enterprise Asset Management
Simplification of system and process complexity resulted in increased productivity and reduced internal expenses
Established a platform for future e-business infrastructure
Ability to potentially re-assign resources currently performing manual entry and processing tasks to performing more analysis and decision making functions.