Telco VEON breaks business silos with Oracle Cloud
The international telecommunications company moves applications to the cloud to build a foundation for growth.
“We’ve been in direct and open dialog with the product development team at Oracle up to the highest level. It’s a big partnership and collaboration.”
Business challenges
VEON wanted to improve how it interacted with customers. To achieve that goal, VEON needed to transform its back-office systems—including ERP, procurement, supply chain management, and human resources—to more effectively deliver the services customers expect.
VEON is a $7 billion-a-year telco headquartered in Amsterdam, with 212 million customers in 10 countries. VEON’s departments ran on legacy systems that kept information in silos, which meant VEON couldn’t add services and otherwise respond to new customer needs as quickly as it wanted.
Data was distributed around the organization, with individual business units controlling access to their pieces of company data. Business units had to request essential information from each other, which slowed down their operations and lowered productivity. For example, supply chain and procurement information was scattered across the organization due to disparate systems, making it difficult to get details and put together reports.
The company’s legacy procurement applications also couldn’t enforce policy compliance or fully leverage negotiated pricing with suppliers. This resulted in goods and services being purchased off-contract or from non-preferred suppliers, thus increasing VEON’s costs.
Why VEON Chose Oracle
VEON chose Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP, Human Capital Management, and Supply Chain Management to provide an integrated platform serving the whole business, rather than relying on siloed point applications.
Before implementing Oracle Cloud companywide, VEON started with VEON Uzbekistan, which has 1,600 employees and 7 million subscribers, doing business as Beeline.
Results
With Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications, VEON created a foundation for growth, efficiency, and disruptive innovation, while also delivering immediate benefits.
In the short term, VEON was able to transform procurement by reducing maverick spending and speeding up purchase requisition approval cycle time by more than 60%. Increased visibility also allows employees across the organization to better understand how their business is operating. For example, Oracle Fusion Cloud SCM gave Beeline the ability for key people across the organization to see supply chain details, without having to ask the procurement team to research and create one-off reports.
Initially, VEON met some skepticism about changing business processes. By involving business leaders in planning and deployment, the team could quickly show real business benefits, building support for the transition.
VEON and Oracle collaborated on deployment, with VEON bringing its industry knowledge and Oracle providing its own business and technology expertise.
VEON is happy with the outcome of its Uzbekistan implementation and plans to deploy Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications to other countries, beginning with Kazakhstan and Bangladesh.