Victoria Department of Transport manages 154 integrations with Oracle Cloud

The Australian state of Victoria needed to restructure its transportation organizations to successfully plan, build, and operate an integrated transport system for the growing region, which includes the populous city of Melbourne. The government merged three departments to form a new Department of Transport (DoT) in 2019.

The new DoT needed to integrate IT infrastructure and services to form a unified system, including migrating from legacy Oracle Applications 11i, including Oracle Financials, to an automated system to improve overall efficiency and agility, streamline operations, reduce costs, and improve customer service.

The legacy system was not modern enough to manage new technologies to integrate business data from business applications, improve data management, reduce data entry, facilitate processes, and streamline end-to-end business activity. It required manually extracting and sorting data from disparate sources before publishing for financial reporting.

Adding to the DoT’s challenges was the job of integrating a number of standalone applications, including a third-party SaaS application called Zycus for procurement and contract management, as well as multiple applications hosted on Cenitex, the Victorian government's Information and Communications Technology (ICT) services platform.

Oracle has had a long partnership with the Victorian government, including managing the DoT’s finance systems, which include accounts payable, accounts receivable, financial assets, accounting, and project financial data.

The state of Victoria entered into an agreement with Oracle for cloud technologies, with one of them being Oracle Integration and Migration. DoT decided to leverage this agreement to access the benefits of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to enable the modernization of its technologies.

Moving to OCI enables DoT to embrace a modern financial system and makes it easier to manage and integrate data across business applications. The department now has a common, unified data repository for financial management, which it uses to report on budgets, actuals, expenditures, and balance sheets.

With Oracle Integration Cloud, the department has built 154 integrations across multiple systems, including Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), and Primavera Unifier. DoT benefits from Oracle Integration Cloud standard connectors to Salesforce applications.

Previously, DoT made integrations by writing bespoke program logic to manage file and data validations. However, Oracle provides capabilities to leverage all those data validations out of the box.

DoT procurement users can create Oracle purchase agreements from the Zycus contract management system and through OCI send contract record information to Oracle to facilitate purchasing and invoicing processes. Similarly, DoT integrates other Salesforce applications, including TIMS, using Oracle Integration Cloud.

To monitor and manage these 154 integrations, Oracle built a custom application using Oracle Visual Builder and Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse to ensure only correct data is fed into DoT’s financial system. The application provides dashboards to investigate the health and status of integrations

The DoT financial systems’ security also improved, with capabilities including single sign-on. OCI offers better usability and mobility compared to legacy on-premises infrastructure, allowing users to gain remote access using two-factor authentication.

Using Oracle Analytics Cloud, the department enjoys easy integration, centralization, and data consolidation, resulting in improved reporting and budgeting capabilities. Budget forecasting, previously done offline, is now completed straight out of the data warehouse using the Oracle Cloud EPM planning function.

Automating reconciliation processes ensures improved efficiency and agility of budgeting and planning while saving time and costs. With streamlined processes and best-in-class reporting and analytics systems, DoT employees can now easily analyze, reconcile, and close data to make informed decisions.

DoT collaborated with Oracle Consulting to revitalize its legacy IT environment. Oracle Consulting drew on its expertise in cloud technologies to integrate and migrate legacy DoT applications onto Oracle Cloud. This has given DoT much-needed business agility and efficiency.