The benefits of moving to Oracle Cloud are numerous and I will not go into those benefits in this blog. I do want to provide information to those on-premise customers who decide to move to the cloud native software, Oracle Fusion, (as opposed to Oracle E-Business Suite running in an Oracle Data Center), so that they can be prepared for a new way of doing things.
Besides learning entirely new topics like Dashboards and Close Monitors that weren’t available in EBS, (many items are backported to EBS, but many are not), there are many big picture items that need to be understood for the organization.
Resources that are cloud knowledgeable are in high demand, and likely more expensive for both employees and contract labor. In addition, it may be harder to find someone with the exact release level due to the rapid availability of new versions. In EBS, versions could last years before a new version was available.
Your internal organization will be supporting the applications in a different way, doing much through service requests, as opposed to locating the right individuals with the organization. In theory the costs of all the underlying infrastructure are no longer needed, being bundled into the cost of renting from Oracle.
However, there is still a need for business analysts, and this may come as a surprise to many managers and executives sold on the benefits of cloud. Business users are doing operations, accounting, recruiting, and buying, but they are not systems analysts by nature, and specialists will still need to be employed.
Role Based Security provides the ability to be more granular by leveraging standard jobs, roles and privileges. The Cloud also affords the ability to control access by (book, business unit, legal entity, inventory org, etc.) This eliminates the need for the numerous responsibilities to control access , (for example FA Manager US, FA Manager Europe, etc.). If you evaluate the number of responsibilities that can be eliminated by using data access management, it is substantial for most multi-org companies who are required to segregate data. By applying security attributes to processes and to users, Role based access control (RBAC) can divide up superuser capabilities among several administrators. While this is definitely a plus, organizations will need to plan to think and manage differently. Responsibilities are no longer the quick and dirty way to segregate data.
Quarterly upgrades become a fact of life, and the process will take time and resources to ensure proper testing and understanding of new features. Oracle will apply changes to a Test environment first, then later to the Production environment.
For conversions, there is a lot more rigid control as to what the data may look like. Oracle sets the standards that must be adhered to. Clients who have a lot of history may struggle to adhere to the SHDL, FBDI and HDL formats. While designed to be done by functional as opposed to technical resources, often functional users don’t have those skill sets or bandwidth and they will require assistance.
Cloning instances will require more coordination to properly time a service request to Oracle. Projects have been delayed by improper planning and no internal resource to help overcome the poor planning or immediate need.
For integrations, there may be less capability that what your organization were used to in EBS. For example, in error handling, there isn’t a great way to write back to the cloud staging tables. Some organizations assume that there is real time integration between systems, however, it may be more advantageous to stick with scheduled runs.
Additionally, there are differences between structures and this can be especially more difficult to deal with in a hybrid environment. One real life example dealt with hiring a person in HCM, then undoing the hire. It would be highly likely for the on -premise interface to get a termination without ever getting a hire record.
It is also very important to understand that turning on certain features may result in a surprise bill. It is highly advised to understand the implication of any configuration changes you make to the database to avoid an unexpected hit to your budget.
Cloud can be a great improvement and offer many benefits to its customers, but existing customers that have established practices and procedures will need to include time for proper change management.
About the Author
Mark Clark is Senior Partner at O2Works. As systems integrators, O2Works is often involved in the enablement of SaaS solutions; collaborating, designing, building, and testing logic to get these solutions to work together with Oracle Applications.