Welcome to Cloud Chronicles: Real-World Global Transformations. In today’s podcast, Megan Testani, VP of Marketing and Business Development at Project Partners, discusses the key considerations when planning a migration to Oracle Cloud Applications or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure with three organizations.

Megan Testani, Project Partners: First, let’s speak with Wino Verschoor, the Director of Applications for Vanderlande Industries. Wino, what were some of the key considerations when moving your JD Edwards environment from i-series into Oracle Cloud Infrastructure?

Wino Verschoor, Vanderlande: Yeah, for this project, we had to convince our internal stakeholders. From their perspective, we were moving from hardware type A to Type B; “What’s in it for me? It’s risky. Why should we do it?” There was also a lot of risk of delaying this project. But I wouldn’t say I liked those terms. So, I wanted to do some terms like enabling the business for future growth.

Then you have that conversation, take your stakeholders along that route, and get buy-in. We convinced them it was needed, and then we could start the conversation about getting the resources to make them available. Of course, we needed the business resources to help us with that knowledge about their processes, and we needed them for testing and UAT. So, we took time to invest in that step to get them along.

Megan Testani, Project Partners: Thank you, Wino. Next, let’s speak with Randy Martin, Director for Financial Applications Strategy and Innovation at AtkinsRéalis. Randy, you moved your EBS environment from on-premise to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. How did you make sure that all stakeholders were aligned when you were planning this migration?

Randy Martin, AtkinsRéalis: So, I think our primary stakeholders were finance and operations. And most of the, you know, this upgrade and this move into OCI was a technical effort. It wasn’t the experience for the end user, and it didn’t dramatically change at all. It’s just a URL change for the applications to a different location. I think from the user perspective, the experience was pretty seamless. We had to do some testing. So, we had to organize that with our stakeholders. We tested before and after the upgrade.

But the main message, for me, was that it was a largely seamless process. It took us six months to lift and shift that environment and do the major upgrade from 11i to 12.2.9 and OCI, and it was about as smooth as you could expect.

Megan Testani, Project Partners: Thank you, Randy. Now, let’s hear from Jochen Rahm, the CTO for PROMATIS and the program manager for PRODINGER. Jochen, PRODINGER was upgrading its system to a cloud application and moving its on-prem system into OCI. Can we dive into what planning two separate migrations looked like and how they ensured the stakeholders were aligned?

Jochen Rahm, PROMATIS: Yeah, I think one of the requirements, also from the stakeholder, was that we should impact the business as little as possible. But I think everybody knows about that. Such big projects and digitalization strategies usually also significantly impact business. This is why we decided to keep Oracle E-Business Suite during this preparation. We engineered that to stand up processes and enhance the Oracle Fusion application. For example, they have a lot of customizations in the shipping and transportation areas. We chose to use OTM Cloud with EBS, which means we have a hybrid model. This environment was also what we aligned upfront with our stakeholders.

We also started with some quick wins. So we also started, for example, with an EPM. So, planning and budgeting the cloud projects upfront is important because it has no big impact on the full digitalization strategy. It also showed the first successes, which was very helpful from the change perspective. We started with some quick wins that showed the success of the Oracle Fusion Application and helped to further the project when the big load started.

Megan Testani, Project Partners: Thank you, Johan. Now, let’s speak with Laurence Cauchy, the Enterprise Performance Management Center of Excellence Director for AtkinsRéalis. Laurence, you moved your on-premise Hyperion environment over to Oracle Cloud EPM. What was that planning process, and how did you ensure your stakeholders were aligned?

Laurence Cauchy, AtkinsRéalis: The primary stakeholders for the EPM was the finance community. We have a diverse finance community. So, to ensure we were making the right decisions for building the EPM solution, we had workshops with the finance community and all the affected regions. We also did some data-gathering sessions to see how they used the tool we currently had, which reports they were using, and what they were doing with the data.

After that, we designed a vision for the EPM tool based on the workshops and the data gathering. This ensured that what we were doing aligned with what the finance community needed from the tool. We then had key considerations for the tool. Our primary considerations were that we wanted the tool to be user-friendly and suitable for legal and management reporting. Additionally, we wanted it to be easy to maintain and develop in-house. Reporting capabilities were also essential because we didn’t want people to do manual reports on the side. We had that a lot in the past, and we thought EPM was an excellent solution to remove that from our reporting.

Megan Testani, Project Partners: Thank you. Laurence. That wraps up episode two of Cloud Chronicles: Real World Global Transformations.

Join us for Episode 3, where we’ll discuss the challenges encountered during the migration process and how these organizations overcame them.

Did you miss Episode 1? Click here to listen in.