Building a global application to ease partner data creation and maintenance in the Oracle ecosystem
A Texas-based Oil and Gas multinational with $5Bn+ in revenues comprising multiple business units (BUs) in rig technologies, completion and production solutions, and wellbore technology was experiencing difficulty with customer and supplier data creation and maintenance. Partner onboarding processes were running on the manual mode, which detracted from the partner experience and cost expensive manual hours for the business. Moreover, each business unit followed its own processes, compounding the complexity. Our client had faced these challenges for a long time and wanted to create a multi-faceted solution to address these issues.
We were engaged by the client to help them implement Oracle Trading partner hub and migrate their partner master data. We built a global application to help them address these challenges in partner operations. This new application served as a foundation for standardizing processes across all BUs and inject automation to boost efficiency and improve partner experience. Implementing this application helped the client ease customer and supplier MDM governance, save thousands of hours of manual effort and reduce onboarding times. See how we helped them get there in detail below.
The Challenge
1. Inefficient manual processes for collecting and cleansing partner data
The O&G industry is an asset-intensive one, composed of multiple players in the form of suppliers, partners, and end customers. Our client conducted operations across 500+ locations and engaged with numerous partners in their day-to-day operations. To onboard these customers, our client's teams manually sent out questionnaires to the partners, which led to significant back-and-forth, delays, and manual effort. This also led to a suboptimal partner experience. Once this data was collected, it had to be cleansed manually by our client's teams, which added to the partner onboarding time.
2. Repetitive creation and consolidation of partner data in enterprise systems
An asset-intensive business deploys multiple enterprise technology systems to orchestrate operations across various functions and business units. In the case of our client, multiple applications, enterprise resource planning deployments, and analytical tools were leveraged for operations orchestration. The supplier, customer, and partner data, which was manually collected and cleansed, was then consolidated and synchronized with these information systems manually, which led to delays and inefficiencies within day-to-day operations.
3. Lack of standard practices across business units leads to complexity
With the lack of adequate process guardrails, each BU within a multinational organization tends to evolve its own practices and processes. A 160+ years old organization, our client's BUs were following their own processes for creating and maintaining partner information. This lack of standardization led to disparate partner experiences and generated complexity in partner data governance.
The Solution
1. Creating a global application for creating and maintaining partner data
Our team realized that the client needed a global application that would request, create, and maintain partner data. We collaborated with our client's teams to prototype and then build a simple and easy-to-use request application that the client would use to onboard its partners. This data would be channeled to Oracle TPH, which would then become a single source of truth (SSOT) with regard to customer, supplier, and partner data across all sites, functions, and units. We also cleansed, rationalized, and migrated existing partner data to Oracle TPH while ensuring zero disruptions in operations for our client.
2. Standardizing partner data processes across all business units
Standardization is the hallmark of operations management excellence in most scenarios. Before implementing this application, each BU followed different partner data collection and maintenance processes. Post-implementation, we standardized these processes across each division across business units, which reduced operational complexity, and minimized delays and lack of clarity on partner onboarding SOPs.
3. Leveraging automation to speed processes and deployment
Finally, we leveraged automation to accelerate configurations and setups in Oracle TPH using our RPrIm accelerator. We implemented the solution with 100% automation across multiple tracks, including Procurement BU, BU functionals, Assignment of BU to users, questionnaires, payment terms, payment methods, etc., which led to a rapid deployment. In addition, we also implemented a bot to send partner onboarding questionnaires from a secure client account instead of the default Oracle agent.
The Impact
Through this engagement, our client has reimagined its partner operations from the ground up, and our unique deployment methodology powered by accelerators helped them save thousands of person-hours. Bringing the benefits of standardization, master data management, and automation to our client's partner operations, we have helped them advance their digital maturity levels with technology decisions that promise long-term value. Here are key highlights of the benefits we delivered to our client:
- Oracle TPH now serves as an SSOT for all partner data across the organization. This brings consistency to other enterprise systems like ERP, analytical platforms, CRM, etc., which orchestrate operations on a daily basis.
- Oracle TPH eases governance of partner master data and helps maintain high data quality at the source.
- The global application is now leveraged by all BUs to onboard suppliers, customers, service providers, and partners across all sites and locations, which has resulted in improved partner experience.
- Injecting automation into onboarding processes and eliminating manual effort has significantly reduced the supplier onboarding times across the organization.
- Accelerated deployment using our RPrIm tool saved 5,500+ hours of manual efforts and costs for our client and ensured an errorless and speedy implementation.
The success of Birlasoft's engagement with this multinational O&G organization was the result of years of deep tech expertise, collaborating with leaders in the O&G industry, and strong experience in the Oracle ecosystem. We not only helped our clients overcome some key challenges but also helped them realize the long-term benefits of automation in MDM implementation and migration while achieving operations excellence through a minimally disruptive transformation.
