scottish natural heritage donella steel patrick haston sharing our oracle e-business suite
TRANSCRIPT
Scottish Natural Heritage
Donella SteelPatrick Haston
Sharing our Oracle E-Business Suite
Scottish Natural Heritage
Today, we will cover:
Who we are
What we are doing
Why we are doing it
How it’s going
Some lessons
Q & A
Scottish Natural Heritage
Health Warning
We’re here to tell you the whole story
The good, the bad and the ugly…
Health Warning - Oracle employees may wish to leave the room!
Scottish Natural Heritage
Who we are
Scottish Natural Heritage
We are a non-departmental public body, advising the Scottish Government.
We look after all aspects of nature and landscapein Scotland – “All of nature for all of Scotland”
Who we are – Scottish Natural Heritage
Scottish Natural Heritage
Our objectives
High quality nature and landscapes that are resilient to change and deliver public value
Nature and landscapes that make Scotland a better place in which to live, work and visit
More people experiencing, enjoying and valuing our nature and landscapes
Nature and landscapes as assets contributing more to the Scottish economy
Scottish Natural Heritage
Donella Steel – Programme Manager
• Previously SNH’s Head of Finance
Patrick Haston – Technical Manager
• Previously SNH’s Software Development Manager
SNH is lucky to have a strong EBS support team, backed up by skilled developers and DBAs
Who we are
Scottish Natural Heritage
What we are doing
Scottish Natural Heritage
What we are doing
Sharing our instance of the Oracle E-Business Suite
Finance, HR, Payroll, iProcurement, iExpenses
Working in partnership
Single support team
Sharing as much of the configuration as possible
No current plans for sharing functions such as Payroll/Accounts Payable
Scottish Natural Heritage
Why we are doing it
Scottish Natural Heritage
Why we are doing it
Save money
Improve the service
Future opportunities
For our partners, it’s a relatively quick, low-cost way of getting a great ERP supported by an experienced team
Scottish Natural Heritage
How it’s going
Scottish Natural Heritage
How it’s going
Changing Partners
Oracle Licensing Challenges
Resourcing the Programme and Projects
Achievements
Next Steps
Scottish Natural Heritage
Changing Partners Since Donella first suggested this several years ago…
We started with Visit Scotland and Historic Scotland Scottish Enterprise and Highlands and Islands
Enterprise expressed an interest Historic Scotland stepped back while they completed
their merger with RCAHMS Highlands and Islands Enterprise decided to retain their
current applications for the medium future The Scottish Legal Aid Board had to upgrade their
Oracle Finance instance to R12 and decided to merge it with HR
We’ve also talked to several other organisations…
Scottish Natural Heritage
Changing Partners
So who are our partners?
Scottish Enterprise and Scottish Legal Aid Board are actively implementing the eBusiness Suite
Visit Scotland are members of the programme board and are looking at options for implementation during 2015 once Homecoming 2014 is complete.
Scottish Natural Heritage
Oracle Licensing Challenges
Oracle agreed to us using BPS licences for the partners
The changing partners and their different requirements meant constantly revising the quotes
It seems that every quote needs to be signed off internally in Oracle back in the US.
Scottish Legal Aid Board wanted to move from perpetual to BPO licences, but Oracle insisted that they pay 125% of current costs
Scottish Natural Heritage
Resourcing the Programme and Projects
Programme team not set up until the Programme was initiated
Struggled to initiate the Programme without a dedicated team in place
Eventually Programme Manager appointed to initiate the programme
Programme team positions open to partners Partner project roles have been identified and resources are being
allocated to these roles We have awarded a contract for specialist support and advice
Scottish Natural Heritage
Achievements
Programme initiated – November 2013
A series of webinars to demo Oracle – January and February 2014
Combined analysis workshops with all partners – March and April 2014
Requirement specifications issued – May 2014
Scottish Natural Heritage
Next steps
Design work due to complete at the end of June Scottish Legal Aid Board
• Build begins in July• User Acceptance Testing begins in September• Parallel Run 1 in October• Parallel Run 2 in November• Go Live in December 2014
Scottish Enterprise• Build begins in February 2015• User Acceptance Testing begins in April• Parallel Run 1 in June• Parallel Run 2 in July• Go Live at the end of July 2015
Scottish Natural Heritage
Some lessons
Scottish Natural Heritage
Some lessons
Be patient Getting started took absolutely ages – no-one would commit without
knowing the costs and timescales, yet without their commitment SNH wouldn’t release people to work on a project that might never happen. You need a senior manager prepared to take a leap of faith.
Believe in yourself Oracle is one of the best ERPs available. It’s not perfect, but it’s a
good product. You have configured it to work well for your organisation. If you can find another organisation similar to yourself, then there’s no reason your configuration won’t work for them too. You can do this.
Scottish Natural Heritage
More lessons
Oracle Licensing Be determined. Keep pushing for the best deal. The bigger the
volume of business you can put Oracle’s way (ideally on the same invoice), the better the discount the local sales team can give you.
Staying Legal In the public sector we have to adhere to some complex EU
procurement rules. We got legal advice to make sure that we did everything we could to minimise risk to ourselves and our partners. We ended up publishing a VEAT notice (twice) to announce our intentions so that we would know of any challenges before we started.
Scottish Natural Heritage
More lessons
Working in partnership means giving up control We’re not entering into a customer/supplier relationship. We are
setting up a joint steering board to make decisions collectively. This means we won’t be able to do as we please with the system without the approval of our partners. We don’t think this has fully sunk in yet within SNH.
Look for opportunities We were delighted when the Scottish Legal Aid Board came along
because they have been Oracle users for even longer than us. We’ve already learnt a great deal from them and we hope to learn more. We’ve also been open to reviewing our processes where the partners have better ones.
Scottish Natural Heritage
More lessons
Senior Management backing Without the support of our Senior Managers, all the way up to CEO
level, this couldn’t happen. We wouldn’t have been able to propose the compromises required to bring the organisations into alignment (technically and business processes). And Donella would not have been released to initiate the programme.
Getting people’s time Everyone has been very enthusiastic and up for change. But few
people have been released from their day job, so scheduling meetings and workshops has been a challenge. With a large project like this you’re going to bump into busy periods like financial year ends, and it’s going to be hard for some key people. There’s no easy answer, so build in a contingency for this.
Scottish Natural Heritage
More lessons
Technical alignment Because we’re all using the same instance, we’re using exactly the
same version. Some of the patches we’ve applied are specific to certain versions of Excel, for instance the Web ADI patches. This means that we all need to be on similar version of Excel (Excel 2010 + 64 bit).
Joining networks We’ve discovered some hidden dependencies on joining our
networks. Once SWAN arrives things will be easier, but at the moment every time we join our network with another, the people we’re already connected to need to be consulted. This has taken time we hadn’t planned for.
Scottish Natural Heritage
Your Questions
