Arby’s Restaurant Group Inc., now part of Inspire Brands, is steadfastly following its guiding principles to work hard, get it done and have fun! For many years, it has relied on the robustness and agility of Oracle eBusiness Suite to manage its Vendors, Procurement Cycle and Supplier Payments. The nature of business at Arby’s demands frequent opening of new locations and remodels. This calls for hundreds of Purchase Orders to be created every day across various departments ranging from simple small purchase orders to large orders for construction projects.
True to its values of efficiency, Arby’s embraced several accelerator solutions from More4apps suite of Wizards to improve productivity in its workforce.
The Oracle Purchasing team utilized More4apps Purchase Order Wizard to use the spreadsheet front-end to create new Standard Purchase Orders in bulk and modify them too. It enabled them to create new orders by importing flat files or by downloading and reusing old Order data. This process was completely owned by business users who could handle changes to the file layouts or new vendor files without involving their IT teams at all. Additionally they had direct and easy access to the More4apps Support team which was able to help them with any issues or upgrades needed with the Wizard.
Arby’s started charting a path to stay ahead and migrate to ERP Cloud. However it soon became obvious the options for loading bulk PO data in a user friendly manner were very limited. Arby’s IT team employed File Based Data Integrator (FBDI) to prepare templates for faster data entry but soon found that it came with many trade-offs including:
Slow – Labor intensive to build data
Not designed for end users, technical expertise needed
Each data section is a worksheet (A total of four sheets to create a purchase order)
No real-time interaction/validation/feedback
While FBDI can handle large volumes of data and comes with seeded data templates, it is not designed for end-users and is quite labor-intensive to complete.
In the meantime, More4apps was making inroads on a path to its own ERP Cloud product. More4apps had started with Wizard solutions compatible with the on-premise Oracle Fusion application appreciating this would become obsolete with the changes in the Oracle architecture going to Cloud Applications. However it was a major stepping stone for More4apps in laying the foundation to a new architecture supporting Oracle’s REST and SOAP web services leading to its new product line, ERP Cloud Toolbox:
The Arby’s team evaluated their data-handling options and summarized their comparison as below:
More4apps has partnered with Arby’s to fine tune their Cloud Applications, easing the transition of Oracle users going from Java based Oracle EBS forms to the new Cloud forms user interface, eliminating huge retraining efforts.
Excel-based mass loading front-end with End User forms.
There were several challenges relating to project management and execution that can act as guide rails for similar projects:
Project Planning
Connectivity and Instance access
Development cycle of a totally new software
Tight timelines to synchronize with ERP Cloud apps go-live
A Project process was put in place :
Project Planning and Milestones
Classify requirements and use cases
Coordinated approach to Oracle Support and Development
More4apps delivered a day early!
Go-live on Cloud happened on time on
1 week into go-live of the More4apps ERP Cloud Toolbox Procurement module, Windows version was missing dlls for one user
First month – no new bugs
6 months – 4 bugs, specifically around project data and bill-to addresses
Arby’s Restaurants migration to Cloud has been a noticed success story. Their holding company, Inspire Brands, has quickly mapped out plans utilizing More4apps’ ERP Cloud Toolbox Procurement module to help users with the transition of more of their brands to Oracle ERP Cloud from eBusiness Suite. Inspire Brands is also planning to roll out other Cloud products being released for Accounts Payables Invoices, Accounts Receivables (Receipts and Invoices), Projects, Suppliers, Assets.
More4apps is working closely to align its release of ERP Cloud products with Inspire Brands roadmap.
We are currently taking expressions of interest on our other planned products (see below) and working as fast as we can to get these to you.
See our website or talk to your More4apps Representative for more details.
