Recently, Perficient digitally transformed for success by migrating to Oracle Cloud HCM. To share our story, we invited key stakeholders Andrea Lampert, Michael Zucker, Cathie Meyers, and Mike Grennier to join a panel discussion moderated by Stuart Massey, principal of our Oracle ERP practice.
As Vice President of People, Andrea is responsible for working across the company to support business goals by driving the implementation of strategic people objectives reflecting Perficient’s commitment to our people and our culture. Michael Zucker, Vice President of IT, is responsible for internally facing technology solutions and infrastructure. Cathie Meyers is Director of HR and Mike Grennier is Director of Talent Acquisition.
In this first blog post of a four-part series, Andrea and Michael discuss the Oracle Cloud HCM migration – the Challenges of Legacy Systems, Guiding Principles, and Roadmap.
To view the entire panel discussion, click here.
What were some of the key challenges you experienced working with multiple on-premises legacy systems?
[Andrea Lampert] Our systems were antiquated. When we analyzed the downstream impact, it was huge. We didn’t have global process standards. Our user experience suffered. The multiple disconnected on-premises systems required enormous manual effort to bridge the gaps to ensure the smooth running of the business.
[Michael Zucker] Licensing was a big issue for us leading to our cloud platform decision for a high-growth company like Perficient growing via acquisitions over the past 10 years. We were paying for licensed growth in two metrics from Oracle, revenue as well as people. The opportunity to move to Oracle Cloud allowed us to consolidate into one metric which was very favorable.
We had multiple systems from a legacy perspective. We were pulling information trying to connect to other cloud-based products as our acquired companies were leveraging cloud-based platforms. That created a lot of challenges for us in keeping the data consistent and well-integrated.
Where did you begin? How did you get HR and IT on the same page in terms of goals and objectives?
[Andrea Lampert] I spent a lot of time thinking about beginning with the end in mind. We needed to align on what’s most important. What are we trying to achieve? What are our expectations along the way?
We developed a set of guiding principles that would help us lead the way in decision-making and how we were going to take on this project. We refer to those four guiding principles all the time, really throughout the project.
The first was to be intentional. Have we optimized out-of-the-box functionality? Are we really thinking about not just the way we do things today, but about what we want our future to look like? And the expectations that we have that a system will help enable a great process for us.
Another was to be simple and intuitive. Is it easy for people to use? Can we really think about being simple and minimizing complexity for every user?
The third was to focus on the future in everything we do. Will this help us scale?
And then using a global mindset. We had disparate systems around the globe with people on different systems and now we want to follow a similar process, but it also means that our best practices could come from anywhere. How do we involve all our folks from around the globe to ensure that what we’re building is going to work for all of us?
Roadmap
Perficient’s digital transformation journey from Oracle E-Business Suite for our accounting and human capital management processes started with a global design phase. Our team of Oracle experts proposed a four-phased approach. This would allow us to get to ROI faster while reducing disruption and risk.
We built a global template for deployment considering not only what we were going to deploy first, but also the subsequent phases of the implementation. This entire phase ran for two to three months. A concrete foundation to support all business units, countries, and processes was taken into account. We orchestrated everything with the help of key subject matter experts across the 10 countries involved. We adhered to our guiding principles and focused on taking advantage of out-of-the-box solutions where possible.
The global template led us to validate the deployment roadmap, leading with Oracle Cloud GL and financial reporting, followed by Oracle Cloud HCM in the US and then Oracle Cloud Financials and HCM for the rest of the world.
Part 2 of the blog series places emphasis on the wins of IT and HR during the migration process and how they were achieved.
