Frontera Consulting expands globally with help from Oracle
Oracle Cloud ERP and EPM enable rapid growth for Frontera, a consulting firm that combines global reach with boutique customer support.
“Using Oracle Cloud, we were able to scale up the company without additional overhead, and we’ve seen a massive improvement in delivery for our global clients.”
Business challenges
Frontera Consulting needed an applications platform to scale the company’s fast-growing global professional services business. The firm was challenged with an aging, heavily customized ERP system and needed better project insight, improved financial transparency, and reliable data to meet growing demands.
The consulting firm specializes in services that help companies implement Oracle Fusion Cloud applications, combining technology implementation with transforming people and processes. With offices in New York, London, and Hong Kong, the firm combines global reach with boutique, personal services.
Frontera’s previous system was unsuited for its international range. The software was limited to a single currency, but Frontera was operating with five different currencies, and so required five instances of its financial system, with no integration.
The old software made it cumbersome to manage support and implementation projects internationally. Extensive customizations made the ERP platform difficult to maintain.
“Growth in North America, EMEA, and Asia Pacific definitely stretched our existing systems. We had to do something,“ says Frontera CFO Sam Strevens.
Oracle provides us with the ability to move with agility in the marketplace. We’ve been able to deliver more complex offerings without a commensurate increase in overhead.
Why Frontera Consulting chose Oracle
Company leaders realized that Oracle would provide a software solution that would expand the business at an affordable price and provide the benefits of an integrated Cloud ERP experience.
Additionally, Frontera benefits from running the same software internally that it implements and supports for its clients.
Results
Oracle’s project management capabilities cut project costs by 25% and enabled effective multi-dimensional project analysis. The budgeting and forecasting features have been extremely valuable in identifying the most profitable project types, clients, industries, and geographical areas. Oracle Cloud ERP has driven a 50% reduction in invoicing time.
Additionally, the company adopted Oracle Cloud EPM and is implementing new modules within the bundle.
Oracle reduced the time for the company’s financial close by at least 60% and consolidated reporting from all countries into a single, multicurrency ledger.
Frontera realized the value of Oracle Cloud immediately. With improved visibility into project financials and project financial management, the consulting company’s partners are now spending their time effectively, and focusing on the future direction of the business. Role-based dashboards with embedded analytics provide timely insights to empower decision-making. The software reduced billing tasks, leaving project managers free to focus on project analysis.
Additionally, Frontera is seeing massively improved global reporting, with faster availability of global consolidated numbers.
Frontera doesn’t just implement Oracle Cloud for other people—it runs its own business on the applications—which provides valuable synergies. Perspective from Frontera’s own experience helps the consulting company improve customer implementations. And vice-versa: Frontera applies ideas it learns from customers to its own use.
Oracle Cloud’s support for remote work is a big asset. The company executed several major customer deployments, on time and on budget, while working remotely during the pandemic.