Oracle offers package for mid-sized businesses

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.