Oracle offers package for mid-sized businesses

The Jakarta Post, Beijing

Oracle Corp. will expand its reach to cover medium-sized business in the Asia-Pacific region by preparing a new package that will enable mid-sized companies to implement key business flows of the Oracle E-Business Suite, such as Customer Orders to Cash Receipt or Purchase Order to Invoice Payment.

Available as a pre-installed solution, the new offering can be implemented either in-house or as an outsourced service, the company announced during Oracle World in Beijing.

This new offering will help partners deliver integrated and configured processes that are essential to running a business, such as purchasing, selling and shipping, inventory management, cash management, budgeting and financial reporting, it said.

These integrated pre-built processes will allow mid-sized companies to move from several fragmented departmental systems to a single, integrated system, thus reducing working time and costs.

The decision to enter the middle market is supported by huge potential in the market. China, for example, has 1.8 million mid- sized companies, including 360,000 in export and import businesses.

Indonesia, too, with 105,000 small-and medium-sized companies, or 97 percent of the total number of its enterprises, is a potential market for the special package.

Frank Prestipino, vice president for Supply Chain Marketing, denied that the decision was due to saturation in the upmarket.

"On the contrary, it's complimentary to our upmarket business," he said.

Oracle E-Business Suite, a complete set of business applications that runs entirely on the Internet, is a modular software that enables companies to purchase one feature at a time. The applications in the suite are built on a unified information architecture that consolidates data from Oracle and non-Oracle applications and allows a consistent definition of customers, suppliers, partners and employees across the entire enterprise.

"It is also complete and configurable enough to avoid customization. There is almost zero customization for over half of the our customers," Ron Wohl, Oracle's executive vice president for applications development, said during a presentation on the software.

There are now around 2,000 E-Business sites in over 100 countries around the globe, said Wohl.

Customers of the software include Citibank, Hanwa Chemical Corporation and Jebsen & Co. Ltd.

The software's latest generation, the E-Business Suite 11i, was introduced two years ago and has now entered its seventh version. Today it has around 350 customers in the Asia-Pacific region, or nearly 25 percent of global customers, with another 500 in the process of implementing the software.

Ming Pang, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Project and E- Business manager at Jebsen & Co. Ltd, said the software helped facilitate flows of information among the company's various departments and divisions, at the same time allowing delegation of authority and responsibility.

"In the past, for example, it took 16 working days to complete the monthly report because each department in our company used different systems. By using Oracle 11i, we have been able to reduce the working days to four," she said.

Also, as information and data are available online and at real time, they are accessible to everyone and the company's top management is able to delegate some of the authority and responsibilities to the middle management, she added.