Brickworks boosts business agility with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Industrial manufacturer consolidates financial operations and optimizes supply chain by moving to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

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With JD Edwards EnterpriseOne running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure we have laid the foundation for leaner enterprise operations. We have strengthened our disaster recovery strategy which enables us to ensure that all our applications run without disruptions. We now spend less time on monthly management reporting and have optimized our supply chain across Australia and the United States.

Jeremy FoxCIO, Brickworks

Business challenges

With business operations across Australia, manufacturer Brickworks wanted to improve financial management by streamlining processes and producing accurate reports for better-informed decisions.  Brickworks was relying on a 25-year-old heavily customized enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that did not have a common data source to support accurate and timely reporting. 

Brickworks had difficulties in performing Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) processes efficiently to generate reporting due to the insufficient bandwidth and high costs associated with incoming and outgoing networking traffic. The legacy hardware also required costly and lengthy maintenance that amounted to US$1 million a year while the company struggled with scaling its infrastructure.

To increase data security and protection from cybersecurity attacks, Brickworks required an infrastructure solution that would offer comprehensive security features, ensure high availability of its enterprise applications, and guarantee business continuity in case of a disaster.

Lastly, the company sought a solution that would easily integrate with its on-premises sales, payroll, and supply chain management applications for optimized business operations. Brickworks considered a cloud-friendly, elastic ERP system to support its enterprise applications, including financials and supply chain, with on-demand scalability.

JD Edwards EnterpriseOne running on OCI supports our growth with higher performance and stronger security.

Jeremy FoxCIO, Brickworks

Why Brickworks chose Oracle

Brickworks decided to deploy Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) because it had all the necessary features to unify and optimize business operations in Australia.

To increase its business agility, the company sought detailed reporting capabilities. Elastic scaling, comprehensive security features, and easy integration with in-house applications were also decisive factors that led Brickworks to choose OCI.

Brickworks deployed JD Edwards EnterpriseOne running on OCI to achieve better scalability, flexibility, and an improved security posture. This laid a strong foundation for efficient enterprise applications and business continuity.

Results

Brickworks

Brickworks unified its enterprise operations on a single ERP platform by deploying Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne on OCI for its Australian business. This also has laid the foundation to move the United States JD Edwards instance to OCI in the future. 

With JD Edwards EnterpriseOne running on OCI with Enterprise Database Service supporting 1,000-plus active users, Brickworks decreased the time for server procurement, delivery, and installation. Taking advantage of OCI’s on-demand scalability, the company can add more IT resources—computing power or storage—using one-click provisioning. As a result, the manufacturer can help ensure high availability of its enterprise applications, including during peak usage times, and is more agile to support business growth.

With JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Financial Management, Brickworks gained a single source of truth for all financial processes, enabling it to reconcile accounts significantly faster than before. By improving the efficiency and accuracy of its financial statements, Brickworks eliminated any risks associated with this process. The finance team also obtained the ability to drill down to transaction level for error identification and produced final audit trails for regulatory compliance with ease.

To facilitate the communication between its ERP as well as third-party sales and retail applications, OCI FastConnect provided a dedicated and secure connection over trusted endpoints. Through consistent performance and low latency, Brickworks ensured real-time ERP synchronization for its field operatives who accessed JD Edwards EnterpriseOne in real-time with their mobile devices, allowing for a leaner process.

Brickworks optimized supplier relationships and created a flexible, resilient supply chain with JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Supply Management. Using the supplier self-service feature, Brickworks improved supplier collaboration by allowing suppliers to securely access quotes, review purchase orders, and view inventory information.

From a security standpoint, Brickworks tapped Oracle Cloud  data centers in Australia for its JD Edwards EnterpriseOne instances and its disaster recovery site. Both regional data centers have single availability domains. Brickworks used both regions—one as a primary site and the other as a disaster recovery site.

The organization also adopted Oracle Data Guard to deliver a maximum availability architecture, helping to ensure 24/7 availability of its enterprise applications in case of an unexpected outage of the primary database.

Partners

To deploy Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Brickworks collaborated closely with Oracle Platinum Partner DXC Technology to ensure a smooth journey. “DXC was a true partner for us, and the deployment has been very successful considering that we went live during COVID. It was just remarkable, and it has been a great achievement,” says CIO Jeremy Fox.

Published:November 29, 2022

About the customer

Founded in 1934, Brickworks is a publicly traded Australia-based manufacturer of building materials. With 17 brands under its umbrella, it sells bricks, pavers, masonry blocks, precast concrete panels, concrete, terracotta roof tiles, and more.