As much as we’re veterans in creating EPM and BI solutions, we’re almost overly enthusiastic about bringing these solutions to our clients in creative and innovative ways. Solving complex business problems, no matter the shape or the size, is what we do, and we love every minute of it. As we’ve came across a variety of different clients over the past twenty years, we’ve noticed some trends. More often than not, when a potential client comes to us, they’ve already bought into adding an EPM or BI solution to their overall set. And this decision has often been the result of months if not years of research and evaluation into what tools work for them in cloud planning and budgeting, particularly as to whether powerful tools like Oracle Essbase can really work for them. And this is the start of a common pattern, as projects get caught in a holding pattern as the project is being scoped out. This can happen for many reasons. Leadership can get cold feet with their resources, unsure whether to handle the project in house or trust a team of specialists. Then, the timeline becomes the next stumbling point. Is this a 3-month, 6 month, or yearlong project, and which timeline best suits the company? Often, just examining the scope of the project can take more time than the implementation itself. Which leads to bigger questions: What do we sacrifice to go online faster? Do we need additional resources to ensure proper implementation? How quickly can we get results?
Our expertise in project implementation alongside our ground-level knowledge of the Oracle suite has led us to create a solution to these common problems. We call them “Solution Accelerators”, designed for Oracle EPM Cloud solutions (specifically for EPBCS, PBCS, FCCS, and OAC to name a few). As opposed to going through an extensive onboarding process and lengthy implementation timeline, we levy our decades of experience to utilize a more standardized approach that can dramatically speed up implementation and allow our clients to go live with their project and start using the results from it quicker than almost anywhere else. That’s a bit of hyperbole, we know. But that’s ok, because here’s the thing: It’s no exaggeration and our Accelerators really work.
How? Let’s start at a common stumbling block, and maybe the most important: Scope. Putting dimensions on a project is a key step to allowing projects to take full advantage of an Accelerator. We’ve all heard the conversation before, which can go along the “We think that we’ll have 100,000 customers in a month, but we could have a million t-shirts sold with our bundle discount for each customer, you know?” But a simple conversation like that can give us some key information and set up the dimensions by which the project becomes defined. Just that phrase can tell us account size, time period, product and product details, to name just a few.
And if a client is unsure as to what the project really entails, that’s why we make a point to bring guidance to their table. Each Promethean Accelerator project is helmed by a member of our leadership team. They aren’t just there for show, either. Our Promethean team leads are ready to help any client at the moment the project starts, focused on getting the right information and dimensions from them and not only ensuring we hit the clients’ critical success factors but also how to achieve (and go beyond) success in their key metrics.
Understanding scope is just one of the many factors that decide how to get a client into the right accelerator – their specific parameters and desired outcomes and expectations also shape. Insight into the inputs required and outputs allow us to place the project into pre-configured, what we lovingly call, dimensional skeletons. These skeletons let us build the rest of the project upon the basis that these dimensions will hold and not outgrow it (at least, not yet). Having those early insights into source data, security levels, potential user base, and calculations (to name a few) makes an immediate effect in not just implementation times but the complexity of the project, allowing us to turn the data into results that our clients’ team can truly use.
Accessing and reviewing those results is another thing we try to make quick and easy for any client. Within the Oracle software used in our accelerators, built-in analysis and reporting capabilities allow reports to be built and demonstrated on the fly. But often times, customers want to use something in a user-friendly format that can be customized and available for their next meeting. Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, or Word based SmartView templates allow us to create the reports in a format made for the end user, customized to the client’s content.
The thing is, with our accelerators there is no compromise in quality or long-term potential. Our accelerators provide a low risk entry point from both a financial and resource perspective but come with something you hardly hear of in our space: Almost immediate benefits. We imagine any client should be able to get up to speed within 6 weeks, with a fully built, automated model ready to go within a week or two later. Pretty fast, if you ask me.
After implementation, we make a point to sit down with our clients and listen to their feedback about the project so far, walk them through the nuts and bolts of the project, what went wrong and what went right, and evaluate the potential for expansion in the future, if needed. Most companies in our space are happy to tell clients that that “Your success is our success.” In our case, we cannot be successful unless you are. Leveraging one of our Solution Accelerators is a sure fire way to take your project from the first conversation to go-live faster than you imagine.
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