SKYGEN cuts financial close to only 10 days using Oracle Cloud ERP and EPM
SKYGEN retires costly legacy system and improves planning and reporting with Oracle Cloud ERP and Oracle Cloud EPM.
“Oracle Cloud ERP/EPM provides a flexible automated solution for planning and forecasting purposes across our business, both horizontally and vertically. The biggest breakthrough—through improved reporting—has been to catalyze the advancement of our financial culture across the company.”
Business challenges
As a healthcare innovator, SKYGEN USA improves healthcare benefits management via intelligent automation, solutions-driven services, and analytics and risk management applications. Given the company’s projected growth, managers realized that the Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains ERP and business applications would be inadequate for future planning and reporting. The company found that Great Plains was unable to provide all the real-time data sharing capabilities the organization required to enable managers to rapidly adapt to changes in the market.
Managers also lacked direct visibility across the business, while report generation could take weeks. Most crucially, various company units found it impossible to get information about profitability. This situation was hampering the company’s ability to grow quickly and expand its service offerings.
Additionally, because financial consolidation processes were disconnected, SKYGEN needed subledgers to link more tightly with the general ledger. The company had no common interface or means to access the numbers, and analysts required embedded tools to enable swift account analysis and financial reconciliations.
To better connect the entire company and help it gain greater flexibility, the SKYGEN team decided to look for a powerful enterprise resource planning and enterprise performance management platform.
Speed to information was key to our go-forward decision with Oracle, as was the ability to anticipate and react quickly to changes in the market.
Why SKYGEN USA chose Oracle
SKYGEN management decided it would retire Great Plains in favor of Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP and Oracle Fusion Cloud EPM running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). There were a variety reasons the team made this selection, but among the most important were Oracle’s scalability and technology sophistication.
Company leaders knew that Oracle Cloud EPM would enable broad planning across the company—from finance to supply chain to sales and beyond. The Oracle Cloud ERP suite featured embedded artificial intelligence, making it an industry-leading platform with advanced financial and operational capabilities.
Also, Oracle offered a project costing module, which would support SKYGEN’s plans to accurately track customer and project profitability—something that had been impossible with Great Plains. The company was also impressed with Oracle Cloud ERP order management and subscription management workflows. The application would also provide a holistic view of finances across the business.
Finally, as a projects-based company, SKYGEN also needed to adopt the Oracle Cloud ERP project management module so that managers could connect the most appropriate employees to projects, gain visibility into overall project activities, and better support corporate goals.
Results
Moving to Oracle Cloud ERP and EPM offered a variety of benefits. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) powered the stack and provided enhanced enterprise-level scalability, performance, and reliability for SKYGEN end users. With Oracle Cloud ERP’s integrated ledgers and embedded finance analysis and reconciliation tools, SKYGEN executed its financial close in just 10 days. Additionally, management received current updates on profitability—including by project and customer—across the business. The Oracle Cloud ERP Project Management module supported time and expense workflows that integrated with SKYGEN’s other IT systems.
Overall, improved data and reporting tools allowed the finance team to easily share financial and key performance indicators with other SKYGEN departments. With demonstrably reliable data, the company benefited from a single source of truth, through one standard and streamlined Oracle interface. Managers gained a better grasp of actual business performance—including budgeting processes and the status of suppliers and vendors.
Oracle streamlined and optimized the decision-making processes overall. This helped to position the finance department from a provider of accounting statements to a trusted advisor for the corporation. Using these Oracle Cloud applications, SKYGEN management and operational teams cooperated to advance the overall business.
Partners
Oracle partner Grant Thornton played a key role in helping SKYGEN migrate to Oracle Cloud ERP and EPM. SKYGEN’s back-office systems—now powered by Oracle Cloud—better align with the company’s position as a leading technology provider for its clients, the nation’s largest healthcare insurers.
About the customer
SKYGEN USA is a professional services firm that enables business efficiency in healthcare. The company provides healthcare applications, benefits administration, and data analytics to 45 million members.