Taylor Corp. replaces legacy back-office systems with Oracle Cloud Applications

Under an ambitious four- to five-year project dubbed Horizon, Taylor is replacing most of its on-premises back-office systems—85 of them in all when you count different versions of the same system, some of them no longer vendor-supported—with Oracle Cloud Finance, Procurement, and Supply Chain Management and Manufacturing applications.

Until Horizon, each of the company’s 86 independently operated subsidiaries maintained its own legacy systems, including the likes of Lawson, Baan, and Monarch, as well as custom-developed systems and a few mainframe systems.

As a result, Taylor lacked a centralized view of its units’ customer, supplier, and financial data across units. For example, one of Taylor’s five multi-unit enterprise groups currently has customer information sitting in 16 different systems, making it difficult for the group to cross-sell products across business lines. Taylor units sell everything from printed wedding invitations, brochures, and consumer-product labels to digital marketing services.

It was also costly for Taylor to manage those outdated systems. And many company processes were manual, thus slow and inefficient.

Taylor also evaluated SAP and Microsoft applications to replace its assortment of legacy systems, but it chose Oracle mainly because of the maturity of the Oracle Cloud Applications environment and its tight partnership with Oracle Consulting.

Taylor’s main goals with the Horizon implementation were to:

• consolidate and standardize data and processes to make more timely and informed customer, financial, supplier, and other decisions.

• modernize and automate previously manual processes, which were costly and time-consuming.

• reduce the technology debt accumulated from having to manage outdated legacy systems.

• ultimately make it much easier for customers to do business with the company across its different units.

Taylor projects that Horizon, when completed, also will yield $20 million to $30 million in total cost savings.

Before wave one of the Horizon standardization effort—a global rollout of Oracle Cloud Financials applications completed in January 2022—Taylor’s finance teams typically needed a couple of weeks to assemble a consolidated view of outstanding accounts receivables across the company. Now that data is available for executives to act on in real time.

And now that Taylor is live on a global instance of Oracle Cloud Procurement, it can negotiate better volume discounts with approved indirect suppliers, while end users can get approvals and execute orders for such supplies with a couple of simple email clicks.

One expected benefit of Taylor’s upcoming Oracle Cloud Supply Chain Management and Manufacturing rollout is to give the company better, more-timely data on the profitability of each product and customer.

Key to the success of Horizon is Taylor’s relationship with implementation partner Oracle Consulting. Its transformation services team created a comprehensive change management program for the application rollout, one that goes beyond communications and training.

The starting point is a discussion of the standard way each Oracle Cloud application is designed to manage a process—say, invoice matching. The Oracle team asks: Why won’t this work for you? How is it different from what you’re doing today? The team listens to the answers and helps Taylor manage around them.