Executive Summary
As part of its growth initiative, the client acquired another company but faced complexity and cost challenges due to continued usage of the target company’s AS400 applications for SCM and finance operations. To address the challenges, the client decided to merge the business operations of the acquired company with its own Oracle EBS application suite. Mindtree assessed and implemented the end-to-end roll out of Oracle EBS services, helping the client achieve 100% business process automation, while reducing maintenance costs and lowering overall manual effort from 40-50% to 5%.
About the client
The client is a leading book publishing and distribution company based in the United States, with operations in more than 10 countries and serving customers in over 150 countries.
The Challenge
To expand its global footprint, the client acquired a company with comparable business operations. The client continued to work with the existing AS400 application of the acquired company for SCM and finance operations. However, as the business model changed and the nature of operations evolved, it presented certain challenges for the client such as increased complexity and maintenancee costs. The client decided to merge the legacy SCM and finance operations of the acquired company with its existing Oracle EBS application suite, enabling unique identification of profit and loss calculation and generating synergies from the integration.
The scope of work involved
- Implementing contract pricing operations.
- Developing an innovative solution to capture shipment related specific customer requirements.
- Conceptualizing new integration roadmap with their existing third party vendor to fulfill individual customer requirements.
- Designing and implementing solution for subscription kind of business process.
Our solution
After a thorough evaluation of the integration and process related challenges faced by the client, Mindtree defined an implementation plan spanning seven months. As part of the implementation, the Mindtree team:
- Merged the legacy Trade Line of Business (LOB) with their existing trade LOB, using unique identification of the LOB for revenue posting.
- Automated their manual contract pricing process, using Oracle’s standard pricing agreement concept.
- Developed new OAF page to consolidate customer’s VAP requirements across LOB and capture customer specific requirements as per the American library standards.
- Introduced integration mechanism to act as an interface between customer requirements and third party vendors for shipment fulfillment.
- Designed and implemented a new solution using Oracle’s Sales Agreement concept for their subscription-based business process, which included handling dynamic changes in their product offerings.
- Automated pricing through enhancements in the form of advanced pricing.
- Enabled alerts and report generation for tracking purposes.
Results
Mindtree’s forward-looking integration solution helped deliver several tangible benefits, reducing maintenance costs through consolidation and delivering superior user experience through a single interface. Automating various processes such as manual pricing manipulation, capture of customer VAP requirements, monthly subscription release and monitoring, led to an overall reduction in manual effort from the earlier 40-50% to 5%.
