Oracle Partnership

12 January 2017

Radius have recently signed a deal to implement Oracle’s latest cloud based software platform. Following a relationship of over 20 years. The new platform will continue to drive the business forward internationally allowing the business to increase productivity, lower costs and improve controls.

“We’re moving from being a fuel card company to a technology-driven business,” says Dave Roberts, CIO at the UK-based company, which operates in 13 countries across Europe and Southeast Asia. ERP Overhaul: From Homegrown to Oracle Cloud “We need to focus IT on growing our business technology rather than on maintaining infrastructure,” says Dave. In particular, the company needed to overhaul its core financials. “We’re forecast to grow as much in the next few years as we have in the last 25 years,” says Lisa Broad, group finance director. “Our homegrown, on-premises financial and billing system can’t scale with our long-term growth trajectory.”

For Radius, the answer was Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Cloud, which neatly matched the company’s requirements list: functionality, reliability, and cloud-based scalability. Radius purchased financials, procurement, expenses, and inventory modules and plans to integrate the platform with an Oracle Cloud Marketplace billing software product called Ad Orb, to create a fully integrated financial and billing system.

“It fits in with the IT strategy to move away from on premises as much as possible,” says Dave Roberts. “As we shift from a CapEx to an OpEx way of thinking, cloud has an advantage.”

Radius also used Oracle Cloud Marketplace to find design and implementation partners for the initial design stage of a multiphase global ERP rollout, which will take between 18 and 24 months.

The most time-consuming aspect of the project lies in figuring out how to migrate the company’s complex billing practices, which vary in accordance with differing national commercial deals and financial regulations. “Oracle ERP Cloud combined with Oracle Cloud Marketplace add-on software for billing provides a ready-made base solution for these complex requirements,” says Lisa Broad.

“The environment is already there—we had an infrastructure layer ready days after signing the order,” says Dave Roberts. “The complexity lies in how we configure and integrate data from our on-premises system. If this were a greenfield site, we’d be up and running already.”

Oracle Accelerated Buying Experience****Expedites Purchase

While the data configuration is complex, the purchasing experience was just the opposite. Radius took advantage of Oracle Accelerated Buying Experience, a service that makes it simple and fast for customers of all sizes to order cloud services.

“We found it to be quite an easy and streamlined process—a few clicks and it was done,” says Dave Roberts. “It allowed us to focus on things like architecture and design and how we were going to move the business forward rather than on administrative work.”

Radius expects similar efficiency once the company is fully live on the platform, as the company offloads maintenance tasks such as software upgrades and software patching to Oracle. “Scalability, flexibility, and reliability are the big-ticket attractions for us—we know we will always be on the most up-to-date version of the software and the infrastructure will grow as we need it,” says Dave Roberts.

Given Radius’ current growth rate, those big-ticket attractions will prove very important indeed. “Oracle is giving us one platform all under one roof” says Lisa Broad. “As we move to new countries and bring up new offices, having a system like that will help us to mobilise a lot more quickly.”

Article Source: Forbes.com

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