As part of Quest Experience Week (QXW) 2019, ATCO Group’s Sue Shaw and Mark Kennedy shared the experience that ATCO Group had during its ERP and HCM Cloud journey.

Key Takeaways

About ATCO Group

ATCO was originally founded in Alberta when father and son, S.D. and R.D. Southern started Alberta Trailer Hire to provide housing accommodations to workers in Canada’s first oil boom. ATCO has provided products and services in more than 100 countries around the world for the more than 70 years since. The ATCO team provides customers with innovation in the housing, real estate, energy, water, transportation, and agriculture sectors.

ATCO is fueled by nearly 6,000 people and has assets worth $24 billion. It is a diversified global holding company with investments in:

• Structures and logistics
• Energy infrastructure
• Ports and transportation
• Commercial real estate

Structures consists of three business lines that include space rentals, workforce housing, and permanent modular structures. Logistics focuses on operational support, logistics and facility operations, and disaster and emergency management.

Energy infrastructure includes electricity and natural gas infrastructure development and operation, energy storage, industrial water solutions, and electricity and natural gas retail sales.

Ports and transportation encompass port facilities and port operation services.

Commercial real estate involves the management of sellable and leasable office and industrial space throughout Alberta.

Visit ATCO Group’s Website

Why did ATCO move to Cloud?

ATCO’s driving force for moving to the Cloud was the complexity of its legacy E-Business Suite environment. This complex environment consisted of eight Canadian ledgers, five foreign currency ledgers, and three charts of accounts. It was comprised of 20,000 reports, 150 interfaces, 100 customizations, and 50 extensions. The legacy E-Business Suite system was also expensive because the R12 upgrade was double the industry average.

In 2017, ATCO went full force toward the Cloud, following the project scope pictured below.

What challenges did ATCO face?

There were many transformation challenges that ATCO endured when integrating to the Cloud. In relation to conversions, there were 23 billion assets with 450,000 records. There were over 28,000 projects and 75,000 suppliers that needed to be reduced to 30,000.

In regard to configurations, low maturity on automated configuration tools was another issue. In addition, production cutover took eight weeks with 17,000 tasks. Integrations involved over 250 cutover tasks to test the connectivity and every third-party had a different method of connectivity.

There was only one Canadian ledger, two foreign currency ledgers, one chart of accounts, and five business units. There were over 100 custom reports, 150 custom interfaces, zero customizations, and two extensions.

To help with change management, ATCO held over 300 classroom training events and over 200 training manuals, videos, and walkthroughs.

There were also a couple of challenges that ATCO faced with Cloud. The mandatory quarterly updates create new issues and require a considerable time and resource commitment to analyze and test. It is difficult to test, remediate, and deploy new features to 6,000 employees in a two-week window. In addition, not all changes are documented and are only found after updates have been applied. Notifications are also cryptic and untimely.

Finance Challenges

There were five main challenges in regard to Finance:

1. The scope of the implementation was underestimated.
2. The functionality of the Cloud is not quite up to where the ERP environments were.
3. The security model is completely different and has proven to be difficult to understand.
4. Integrations have been challenging, and they are continuing to see transactions dropped from outside systems.
5. Reporting and being able to get the users the information that they require has also proven difficult.

HCM Challenges

ATCO has also noted seven challenges in regard to HCM:

1. ATCO has observed that cloud-based systems appear to be slower.
2. It can be difficult to find the information you are looking for in Cloud Customer Connect and knowledge database.
3. The HDL Loader tool is not very intuitive and is quite misleading.
4. In regard to creating new elements and updating existing elements, the development and configuration of elements is very unreliable and full of bugs.
5. Overall, the product still feels very new.
6. Getting data in and out of the system is very complex.
7. Global transfers are difficult and required over 23 custom OTBIs to accomplish the task.

HR Help Desk Challenges

In addition to several benefits, the HR Help Desk also presented several challenges. HR Helpdesk is native to the CRM Cloud Application, not HCM. Therefore, there is limited visibility to HCM attributes in the HR Helpdesk application. It has a competent but not high-end ticketing system. It is a very new product, and some core features required SRs and patches to implement. Custom workflows can be created if you have a Groovy developer available to assist. OTBI’s limitations are on full display when attempting to build complex service metrics.  The HR Helpdesk is a port from the CX system.

SCM Challenges

There were five main challenges in the area of SCM:

1. The Requisition and Transfer Order are not linked to each other.
2. There are issues requiring extensions for PO PDF for emailing POs to suppliers.
3. Email many times ends up as spam.
4. ATCO configured only one Procurement BU based on the ATCO Shared Services structure in 2017.
5. There is not a mass requisition line uploader.

Application Security Challenges

Although there were several benefits, ATCO noticed significantly more challenges in relation to application security. It is difficult to identify what seeded job roles and their associated privileges map to what license. There are conflicting recommendations on whether to use seeded or custom roles, and there aren’t any read-only roles.

The data access management is confusing customer reports and self-service analysis. There is no ability to future date or end date role assignments or accounts.

There is also no ability for Security Administrators to mass select roles for removal.  There isn’t a report that captures all Oracle accounts in the environment.

Finally, there is not a way to see who is using what part of their assigned access.

What benefits have you noticed since moving to the Cloud?

There are numerous benefits to utilizing the Cloud in general terms. The mandatory quarterly updates provide new functionality and fix issues. There are no more monolithic upgrades. In addition, accessibility is phenomenal in the fact that over 6,000 people are able to participate. The film strip and taskbar make it intuitive and easy to navigate from one responsibility to another. There is also a consistent look and feel across streams and modules. The consistent availability allows for very little unplanned downtime.

Finance Benefits

Three main benefits that ATCO noted in regard to Finance with the Cloud integration,

1. The month end close by Ledger/Asset Book is a major time saver.
2. Common processes and procedures across the company/application have simplified and standardized what used to be very disjointed and complex.
3. Moving from Oracle EBS to Oracle Cloud was very easy because the concepts didn’t change.

HCM Benefits

ATCO has noted over eight benefits to the Cloud integration in regard to HCM.

1. The global database acts as a “one-stop-shop” for all ATCO HCM data.
2. ATCO has aligned processing across all the companies since there is less customization than before.
3. The evolving system encourages critical thinking and innovation.
4. Personalization and configuration are readily available to users.
5. ATCO has learned to appreciate the HDL functionality, especially when mass updates are required in a short amount of time.
6. People are able to see and maintain their data, which is vital.
7. In regard to integrated solutions, HCM modules use data from each other.
8. Being able to manage a personal profile and time off as needed has proven beneficial.

HR Help Desk Benefits

ATCO noticed several benefits of the HR Help Desk with its integration to the Cloud.

1. It enabled the employee resource center to move from a shared mailbox to a ticketing system.
2. The existing OTBI subject areas enable deployment of basic service delivery metrics.
3. The customizable notifications and workflows have proved helpful.
4. The knowledge base supports the HR staff, and articles can be made available to end users.
5. The 19c upgrade was seamless and even resolved some existing defects.

SCM Benefits

There were also several benefits observed with regard to SCM.

1. The dashboard on the Inventory Management homepage lets you see everything going on within the organization.
2. IM and Procurement have primarily the same functionality as old EBS.
3. One Item Master and one Supplier Master for the company simplifies data management greatly.
4. Cloud OTBI SCM provides versatile tools like analysis, report, and dashboard for data analytics, benchmarking, and decision-making purposes.
5. This new system has been a great tool to get the companies more aligned using the same processes.
6. The Sourcing module is brand new to ATCO.

Application Security Benefits

There are also many noticeable benefits to Application Security. Seeded Roles are provided, although they still need to be evaluated for SoD conflicts. The roles, privilege names, and their associated descriptions are fairly clear as to their purpose.

What is the current state at ATCO?

ATCO’s Cloud integration is a continual process and journey. Along the way, ATCO’s process maturity has been improving. The team is currently working on business process simplification and standardization with no customizations and minimal manual processes. Additionally, they are working on system supports shared services across the entirety of Canada. ATCO is also working on developing business training to ensure that there is business process understanding and optimal system usage.

ATCO’s developed system centers of excellence include Finance, Human Capital Management, Supply Chain and Project Portfolio Management.

In the end, the move to ERP Cloud and HCM Cloud was the right decision for ATCO. The team believes that Oracle is leading the way in SaaS applications and that the product functionality is strong and always improving. The tools and processes are still maturing. ATCO encourages other customers to join user groups and Customer Cloud Connect to work with other customers to help Oracle improve their offerings.