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Strategy from scratch [Computer News Middle East](Computer News Middle East Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) When James Halluk joined Oman Oil Company as IT senior advisor in 2009, the company was only six months old with 17 employees – Halluk was the sole member of the IT 'team' but he had a blank seats to start off it. CEO Salim Sibani tasked Halluk with designing Oman Oil's entire IT strategy, outfitting the new office with IT infrastructure and developing software solutions across the company. "When I arrived our only IT solution was Microsoft Office and we had to basically start from scratch. We had to build an IT solution – both infrastructure and software – for a company that was going to grow rapidly over the next two or three years," Halluk says. "I was the whole IT team. There were three in accounting and we didn't even have a procurement guy. We had our CEO, a number of engineers, an economist, geologist and a lawyer. So we wanted to get the system in and then get the people in as we were implementing. By the time we got to the implementation we had two or three more finance people and three or four contracts and procurement people," he adds. Oman Oil now employs 200 staff and Hullak says will be at 300 by the end of the year. Its annual turnover will be between $1.5bn and $1.7bn, depending on the price of oil and gas. It is now a limited liability company with plans this year to start producing oil and gas, as well as investing in oil and gas assets as it currently does. The IT team now stand at seven. "We were always implementing for the future so needed a vendor that understood when we went live with the solution our volume of business would be relatively small in comparison to the functionality and what we could utilise in the future. We wanted to build with all the functionality as if we were going to be a 200 or 300 or 400-man company in the subsequent years," he says. "A robust integrated software solution was a must from the beginning. We needed something where as continue to add people, the software and business processes are in place so everybody can hit the ground running and we don't have to worry about redefining business solutions and processes," Halluk adds. Vendor analysis Oracle's ERP solution was chosen, Halluk says, following an in depth software vendor analysis that also examined solutions from SAP, Sun Systems and WellPoint Systems, a specific oil and gas accounting package. "The reason why we chose Oracle was because it had a number of applications for the most departments. The strategy was to have the least amount of software vendors as possible. We wanted one integrated solution that fit in as many departments as possible. The biggest consideration, as per our mandate from the CEO, was one solution that fits the majority of the company and everybody can use," he says. "He wanted a solution for everything; contract and procurement, HR, project management, planning and finance – and then the ability to add on it for business intelligence and other software components. Oracle was the easiest, most user-friendly and it fits the most departments in the company," he adds. As well as Oracle, Oman Oil also opted for P2 Energy Solutions (P2ES), which provides solutions to the upstream and mid-stream oil and gas sectors. Following Oman Oil's dismissal of WellPoint in its vendor analysis, PSES actually went on to acquire the company in 2011. "Since we were becoming a producer of oil and gas, and we had a number of joint ventures, this P2ES solution fit in with Oracle seamlessly. It just had to have a fit for specific oil and gas accounting software. P2ES had joint ventures accounting modules, joint billing accounting modules and it had some other specific related oil and gas modules," Halluk says. Due to Oman Oil's lack of IT infrastructure, it pushed through with a fast implementation time of the Oracle solution, which went live in July 2010 less than four months after the selection was made. The initial implementation involved the finance and procurement modules, before further modules were added at later stages. "We implemented five financial modules and five contract and procurement modules, so we had to get moving fast. We implemented Oracle financials and distribution first. The first go live dates for finance and distribution was July 2010 and then the second stage of implementation was HR starting in January 2011 and went live in May 2011," Halluk says. "Along with HR we also implemented Oracle project management. We had to get the finance and procurement modules in first and the foundation, and then we built around HRMS project management. That was the strategic vision, thinking where our company is going to be," he adds. Halluk also had to select a vendor to help Oman Oil implement. It opted for IT software provider Bahwan CyberTek (BCT). "When we selected the people to join they had to have IT software acumen and experience in running a department using a robust ERP solution. We got a pretty good vendor that helped us implement Oracle and knew our business as well. The key in the selection process was the vendor had to have ERP background, and BCT did," Halluk says. Challenges However, Halluk adds the implementation was not without challenges, which mostly came in the form of a lack of required knowledge transfer of the solution to employees. "The biggest challenge was getting people to make time for the implementation. We had to really work with the department managers and convince them to free their staff up. They had to ask their staff to commit to work more – later at night and at weekends – for a period of time. The ERP was of paramount importance and giving it priority was key to our success," Halluk says. "Training became somewhat problematic because we were so busy. There were some personnel changes – some people that had came in then left – and a couple of hiccups as a result. We used the consultants for post-implementation support to ensure that all the modules implemented were used as intended and all the users that didn't get enough training got the training that they needed," he adds. As well as BCT's support, Oman Oil also turned to Oracle for support, which Halluk says it provided well. "For us we knew what we wanted. We had the personnel to implement it on our side and we found a good vendor to implement Oracle. Even Oracle themselves were pretty supportive in advising us of other implementations and giving us support as required," he says. Success He adds the implementation was a success and Oman Oil is happy with its ERP solution from Oracle. "We're pretty happy with our accomplishments and we're able to use the information that we entered into Oracle and use it to make business decisions. The data we have entered in is good, we're analysing it and making business decisions based on what we've entered into the software modules," he says. "Everybody in the company is using employee self-service. We've saved a lot of time and efforts through the solution. We're pretty happy and are looking to build on it going forward," he adds. 2010 was a busy year for Oman Oil's IT operations, as the selection and implementation of the ERP package happened in parallel to the opening of its first and only data centre, which went live in March 2012 after the company moved into its new building. "We just have a single data centre. We moved from our parent company, which was a fairly small location to quite a large office base of about four or five thousand square feet. We use HP servers, cabling and wiring. We had the IP telephony through Cisco and also had some cam ware set up for security and hard locks for access. We had over 10 terabytes of storage so we're already set for the future and we've even added more," Halluk says. "The idea was for the data centre to be scalable enough to add storage as required and build from that. We didn't want to build a big IT team. We thought that initially the ideal was to outsource or have a vendor take care of IT for us so we didn't have to have a huge IT staff. But in Oman outsourcing or hosting services are not available, so we had to rethink that and build around hiring an IT manager then setting up additional servers," he adds. Looking forward, Oman Oil is now looking at implementing a business intelligence solution. "Right now we want to maximise the functionality. We only have two years worth of data so the next step is having something like Oracle business intelligence or some report writing capability. We have two or three years of data to analyse so we want to look into that. We are still sticking with our mandate to be with Oracle wherever possible. So as long as Oracle fit our requirements, it is what we will use," Halluk concludes. (c) 2012 Corporate Publishing International. All rights reserved. Provided by Syndigate.info an Albawaba.com company |