How industrial manufacturing companies are innovating with Oracle
Jake Krakauer, Oracle Sales Strategy and Business Development, Industrial Manufacturing
Innovation in an era of complexity
Managing operations and performance for industrial manufacturers has become an increasingly complex challenge. Companies are faced with supply chain disruptions, the rising cost of energy and materials, workforce recruiting difficulties, and constant time to market pressure. Smart manufacturers are investing in technology solutions to reduce complexity and improve speed, visibility and productivity across the enterprise.
Oracle solutions for industrial manufacturers provide best-in-class capability in finance, manufacturing, supply chain, logistics, HR and customer experience. These solutions help companies innovate faster while reducing complexity and TCO through a single, cross-functional, cloud-based applications platform.
Here are a few examples of how Oracle is helping industrial manufacturers innovate.
Mutual Materials
Founded 120 years ago as a Seattle-based brick manufacturer, Mutual Materials is now a fifth-generation, $100 million company with 500 employees who produce masonry, pavers, and hardscape products in 13 manufacturing facilities. The company serves markets throughout the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia.
The manufacturer wanted to create a more efficient process for communicating product inventory and availability to customers, especially those working in the field. As part of this process transformation, the company envisioned a self-service environment for receiving and fulfilling customer orders.
Following the successful implementation of Oracle Transportation Management, Mutual Materials saw increased fleet utilization, reduced fleet expenses, a strengthening of relationships with customers and distribution partners, better operational efficiency and greater staff productivity.
With the adoption of Oracle Commerce, for the first time Mutual Materials can offer a personalized, omnichannel shopping experience with advanced buy online, pick up in-store ecommerce capabilities. The company also implemented complex pricing scenarios based on certain jobs, pre-negotiated pricing, and general pricing, all working seamlessly to create a curated self-service experience.
“The use of Oracle’s modern technology platform has enabled our 120-year-old, family-owned business to demonstrate innovation to our core customer base.”
ArcelorMittal
Formed in 2006 from the merger of Arcelor by Mittal Steel of India, ArcelorMittal is the world’s largest steel producer—ranked 197th in the last Fortune Global 500. ArcelorMittal produces steel for the automotive, construction, household appliances, and packaging industries, is present in 160 countries, and has primary steelmaking facilities in 17 countries.
In the past, ArcelorMittal managed staffing through decentralized recruitment teams, using a mix of insourced, co-sourced, and outsourced staffing models, including a fully engaged recruitment process outsourcing setup in France. The company sought a sophisticated and comprehensive requisition management system that could cater to its multifaceted staffing needs while also enabling standardization and automation of recruitment processes.
ArcelorMittal turned to the Oracle Cloud HCM suite of HR applications because it needed an enterprise-wide solution for recruiting, onboarding, competence management, learning, succession planning, performance management, and strategic workforce planning. After considering offers from Workday and SuccessFactors, ArcelorMittal selected Oracle Cloud HCM as the most suitable solution.
Oracle Recruiting, part of Oracle Cloud HCM, boosted productivity for the company’s variety of staffing teams, while also enhancing the candidate experience and increasing its competitiveness in the war for talent.
With Oracle Recruiting, ArcelorMittal standardized the recruitment process for a variety of roles—from factory workers and logistics coordinators to sales executives and mining specialists. The common staffing process enabled by its unified platform improved collaboration among recruitment teams while streamlining processes. For instance, recruiters have seen an 80% decrease in queries from stakeholders, while about 90% of applicants from the company’s referral program are hired.
“Oracle was the only vendor to demonstrate an unwavering commitment to a successful partnership. Furthermore, the basics, like those built into Oracle Cloud HCM, were much stronger than those of the competition. Oracle clearly understood how things should work.”
Kubota Canada
Kubota Canada distributes heavy equipment such as tractors, mowers, and excavators for the agriculture, construction, commercial, and residential industries. The company works with more than 130 independent dealers to organize the entire customer journey, including sales, financing, and product support.
Kubota’s customers engage with the company through local dealers, Kubota’s website, and several other digital channels, as well as in-person events. This multitude of engagement channels made it difficult to track customer touchpoints. Additionally, these touchpoints produced a large quantity of data, but Kubota was limited in its ability to act on it. Moreover, the data was scattered across diverse systems—from third-party APIs to Excel documents—without consistent tools to collect, combine, and report on it.
To find the ideal marketing automation service, Kubota engaged with different internal teams to audit existing systems and hone in on its exact needs going forward. In total, the company defined over 100 requirements for the desired marketing automation service to be successful. After assessing several vendors such as Salesforce, SAP, IBM, and Oracle, Kubota selected Oracle Eloqua, part of Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience, because it was the only solution that met all the company’s criteria.
Kubota leveraged Oracle Eloqua Marketing Automation to revolutionize its marketing strategy. The company identified the unique journey of each customer across its business channels and consolidated the data from those touchpoints on its central K360 master database. The company was then able to proactively leverage this data to automate and personalize customer communications.
As a result, Kubota gained better insights into the relationship between the company, its dealers, and its customers. Kubota also gained the ability to track the contribution of each marketing channel.
“Oracle Eloqua has helped us build up our customer data, know who we’re marketing to, and utilize that data as much as possible to provide value for our company and for our customers. It has really set us up for the future.”
ECM Industries
Based in New Berlin, Wisconsin, ECM Industries is a global manufacturer and supplier of electrical products. As a private equity-owned company, it’s heavily engaged in mergers and acquisitions as a strategy for supplementing its organic growth initiatives and expanding its range of custom electrical products and solutions. Over time it achieved significant growth with multiple divisions, brands, product lines, and sales channels. However, the company had no consistent way to financially consolidate its decentralized operating units using disparate general ledgers and ERP systems.
The company was running an on-premises version of Oracle Hyperion Financial Management, relying heavily on manual consolidations and manual preparation of cash flow statements. Data was stored in multiple enterprise resource planning systems with no connection between them.
ECM reviewed proposals from companies that were able to provide consolidation software along with financial reporting tools. After a rigorous evaluation, ECM concluded that only Oracle Cloud EPM had multiple modules that would fit its requirements, whereas other vendors offered non-connected, standalone software products.
After implementing Oracle Cloud EPM, ECM gained unified reporting, visibility, and control over multiple acquired divisions with disparate ERP systems and general ledger structures. ECM could swiftly absorb acquisitions from a financial perspective, integrating the company’s chart of accounts and general ledger structure into common financial reporting and corporate governance.
“With Oracle Cloud EPM we have a faster and stronger close process, from ten days down to five. That’s five days gained for analyzing the results.”
Johnson Controls
Johnson Controls transforms the environments where people live, work, learn, and play. With more than 135 years of innovation, Johnson Controls is on a mission to reimagine the performance of buildings to serve people and the planet. The company’s success depends on a differentiated service experience—a formidable challenge considering that it handles over 5 million service requests annually.
After analyzing customer feedback, Johnson Controls targeted two main areas for building a better service experience. First, it wanted to improve access to data and knowledge for service employees, and second, to simplify jobs and best practices to better serve customers.
To accomplish these goals, Johnson Controls needed the best platform to deliver these services, so the company selected Oracle Enterprise Service Management, which includes Oracle Service and Oracle Field Service. The company selected these applications for a low total cost of ownership and improved efficiency, effectiveness, and reduced risk.
After implementation, the company’s sales and service teams replaced siloed applications with a connected platform that delivered an accurate view of data in real time. The company was able to consolidate internal knowledge, take advantage of intelligent assignment and optimization capabilities, and evolve and streamline practices across the organization.
As the equipment that Johnson Controls services has become more complex, field service teams can now access product information for better service outcomes. For example, if a field service technician is working on an HVAC system, Oracle Field Service ensures all parts are accounted for, verifies the best technician for the work, details the fastest route, and gives the technician real-time data to complete the work efficiently. By eliminating wait times and additional trips, Johnson Controls creates a better experience for both the customer and the field service technician.
“Oracle Service and its use of AI makes for a very rich journey and uplifts the role of service technician to a conveyor of change.”
Learn more about Oracle solutions for industrial manufacturing. Download our solution brochure (PDF).