Best for Business or Best of Breed?

The goal is to deploy best practices e-business processes as quickly and effectively as possible while ensuring a quantifiable return on investment (ROI).

The deployment method you choose is critical to your success. Should you adopt the so called 'best of breed' approach or Oracle's approach of reducing complexity by relying on preintegrated, standardized software applications? Below are the differences between the two approaches and the business benefits of the pre-integrated strategy favored by Oracle.

Oracle's ability to save more than $1 billion due to its own transformation to ebusiness has been well chronicled. Other companies can achieve similar success by following Oracle's lead in these key areas:

• Leveraging the internet as a global network and centralizing information, enabling access from anywhere in the world with a standard Web browser

• Adopting new internet-age business practices rather than modifying software to work with outdated business processes

• Relying on integrated, complete software suites that link all company departments into one seamless information flow - from marketing to Web store to telesales to sales to accounting—rather than cobbling together point solutions that were never engineered to work together.

Attempting to manifest the e-business transformation by combining so called best-of-breed applications has obvious inherent flaws: No sooner has the integration project been completed than one of the software vendors releases an update, changing the interface and extending the implementation project. The complications do not end there. Applications designed by different vendors have different interfaces. Even when disparate business applications can be coerced into sharing information, the enterprise lacks a truly integrated e-business environment.

Furthermore, merely linking different applications is not enough. It may enable a company to pass transactions—such as orders and customer information—back and forth, but it does not provide an integrated view of the activities that span both systems. And gaining that view by using pre-integrated software is where companies really begin to enjoy savings.

Oracle's emphasis on implementing standardized, preintegrated, e-business applications runs contrary to the traditional system-integrator methods. Oracle E-Business Suite is integrated out of the box, and Oracle does the work of keeping the applications that way over time. The basic advantages of the Oracle approach are straightforward:

• Begin with a superior database and middleware.
• Simplify IT activities by selecting applications that can be deployed globally
• Deploy applications that are engineered to work seamlessly with one another.
• Avoid customization by using applications that are easily personalized.
• Streamline operations with modern, internet-business-process workflows.
• Adopt industry best practices business flows
• Minimize maintenance issues by working with a single vendor.

A Superior Database and Middleware. When all applications within an enterprise share the same underlying data, the enterprise has a complete view into every transaction—whether it occurs in a back or front-office application. But the single-database architecture requires a superior database, and customers as well as analysts agree that Oracle's database is the # 1 database.
True Global Deployment. Many global enterprises add unnecessary complexity to their operations by distributing the work to local systems. The trouble is, customers must install and maintain the software in every country. Oracle E-Business Suite handles worldwide operations from a global single instance reducing the maintenance burdens while providing the business with better global information.

Streamlining of Business Processes business-process efficiencies result from the built-in, or 'packaged', best practices integration of front-office processes such as sales, marketing, and customer service with back-office processes such as finance, inventory control, and procurement. These tight interactions among business systems dramatically simplify implementation, because they are engineered to fit together. More important, built-in integration enables front- and back-office users to share information
Standardized, Not Customized, Software Heavily customized software may not be ideal for enterprises. In most cases, companies are better off implementing standard applications with best practices business processes that yield a rapid ROI.

Most Business Processes Are Standard. Within most industries, 70 percent of the application deployment is standard and repeatable. Oracle use industry-specific templates for enterprise-software implementations derived from thousands of previous engagements. Based on experience with leading corporations, Oracle helps customers find out where their business differs from the standard approach. Then the consultants use an exception-based implementation process rather than creating a totally custom environment.

Personalization Versus Customization The flexible design of the software enables it to be personalized instead of customized. Companies can personalize the software to address unique business issues without the costly expense of customizing or integrating disparate components. Changes are automatically propagated across the entire Oracle E-Business Suite and preserved when the applications are upgraded.

How can organizations deploy e-business processes quickly and effectively while ensuring a quantifiable ROI? Not by relying on the approach favored by traditional systems integrators. In today's market, with tight technical staffing and application vendors producing upgrades at a furious pace, physically integrating the so-called best-of- breed software applications does not make financial sense. Gone are the days of buying different applications from a host of technology vendors and spending countless months and dollars integrating them. The goal is to obtain working software, right out of the box.
Oracle's approach of pre integrated e-business applications had a proven track record of success. Preintegrated, standardized software provides these benefits to the enterprise:

• Quick installation of software updates with no need for expensive integration projects
• One enterprise wide view of the customer, product or process
• Global deployment from one instance of the software, making all applications accessible globally via a standard Web browser
• Simplified systems and maintenance for IT staff due to the one-vendor approach
• Streamlined business processes
• Better decision-making and business intelligence because of the single-database architecture and preintegrated applications
• Rapid deployment at lower cost