Company
Brent London Borough Council
Industry
Public Sector
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A local council authority in Greater London, England was faced with a major migration of customer records to their new ERP system Oracle ERP Cloud. The Borough is home to around 335,300 residents with the population expected to rise by 2041 – translating to around 3,900 extra residents per year. The Council is using More4apps to manage all their data cleansing prior to moving to the Cloud.
By the time staff at the Council heard about More4apps they had already contracted a third-party company to extract and load their master data to the Oracle Cloud ERP. An area of concern was the quality of the data they would migrate into the new system. They knew that it was important that the data they started with was as up-to-date and as accurate as possible as it would provide the foundation and starting point for their system.
They considered a few options before selecting More4apps:
“90% of the reason we opted for a product like More4apps was to minimize the amount of coding required to be done by the System Integrator (SI) and to keep the migration as simple as possible. We basically cleaned up the source system ourselves and had the SI write some very simple code to migrate the data, thus greatly reducing the inherent level of risk of this process.”
“The organization calculated that using the Wizards resulted in a 98% reduction in the time taken to complete the master data deactivation project compared to performing this task manually. They estimated that it saved 4 or 5 months over the period of the project...”
The Council used More4apps’ ‘Custom Query’ functionality to determine which customers and suppliers had not been active for 3 years or more and then confirmed that these had no open transactions. They then defined additional rules to identify other records to be disabled.
When this process was completed, they performed a full review of the selected records and made any required adjustments.
The final selection amounted to 15,000 customers and 17,000 supplier sites: these were all quickly disabled using More4apps Wizards. They calculated that using the Wizards resulted in a 98% reduction in the time taken to complete the master data deactivation project compared to performing this task manually.
They estimated that it saved 4 or 5 months over the period of the project, covering the entire process: selection of the suppliers and customers to deactivate and update in Oracle EBS.
Another significant benefit to the business is that the finance team knows that it can rely on the customer and supplier data in the Cloud being up-to-date when the migration is complete.
In addition to deactivating suppliers and customers, the Council also wants to use More4apps’ Wizards to correct and standardize details against their customers and suppliers before migrating master data to the Cloud. This cleansing project is still in progress for the Customer master data.
“When you have 100,000 customers or suppliers with address details to review, it’s much easier to do that using the spreadsheets provided by More4apps than it would be to do it in the application, one record at a time.
You can copy and paste and use standard Excel functions against the data, like vlookups in the spreadsheet to analyze it much quicker than you could through the front end of the application.”
For the Council, it was important to make the tool as easy to use as possible as it would be the end-user that was inputting and amending the data. The idea that this could be done in the familiar environment of a spreadsheet made sense as end users are responsible for cleansing all customers and suppliers prior to the migration. Here are a few examples of what they are currently using More4apps Wizards for:
The team is convinced that More4apps is helping them speed up their migration to the Cloud while mitigating the risks, as Scott mentioned “We are moving less data and cleaner data.”
The only regret for Ringo, who is about to retire, is that he hadn’t encountered this tool earlier in his career!
