Energy and Infrastructure Business Adopts Scalable Solution to Enable Rapid Growth

A growth-oriented midstream energy and infrastructure company recognized a need to identify the gaps between its desired future state and best-in-class processes. To meet organizational goals, leaders chose to work with Huron to optimize and streamline operations using Oracle Cloud solutions.

After being acquired by a global private equity firm in 2019, the pipeline company’s leaders realized that their accounting, finance, and operational processes and technologies needed to be modernized.

A decentralized application ecosystem resulted in a lack of communication and coordination between dozens of disparate systems. Which thereby required efforts to manually duplicate, research, move, recalculate, and reconcile the organization’s data. To reduce these largely manual processes, the organization knew it would need to invest in its automation and technology strategies to improve data visibility and reduce costs.

To achieve its goals, the organization sought an adviser with deep experience and expertise in implementing and maintaining sustainable, modern digital capabilities who could help execute this major project in less than 24 months.

After much consideration, leaders chose to work with Huron to identify the people, processes, and technologies that would best position it for future growth. Recognized as an industry leader and known for its successful collaboration with other peer organizations, Huron was a perfect fit to lead the work that needed to be done.

After working with Huron to vet several different cloud-based solutions, the pipeline company determined that Oracle best met its needs for a single, robust technology platform that would expand its capabilities and ensure long-term value.

As part of the larger project to implement the Oracle platform, the team focused on several primary focus areas.

• Quick wins: To address key pain points while the project was ongoing, Huron’s team of experts provided recommendations to simplify the company’s existing organizational design and technical architecture.
• Current-state assessment: Huron also led more than 130 workshop sessions to analyze functional business processes and gain an understanding of the organization’s current state.
• Business case for change: To create a strong business case (with a projected return on investment) for the change, the project team developed clear rationales for the proposed solutions. This included a 10-year total cost of ownership analysis.
• Vendor analysis: Huron experts’ deep digital expertise came into play when they helped the pipeline company evaluate the pros and cons of different vendors.
• Multiyear application road map: The project team also worked together to create a multiyear application road map that would provide the basis for the company’s technology strategy going forward.
• Implemented a single cloud-based platform: The one-year project included the implementation of Oracle’s enterprise resource planning (ERP), financial consolidation and close, account reconciliation cloud service, enterprise performance management (EPM), and enterprise data management (EDM) solutions.
• Incorporated change management: Huron provided the tools and guidance to help leaders prepare the business to implement new systems and processes, emphasizing best-in-class change management strategies from the start. Leaders were also proactively trained to manage the new solutions, guaranteeing sustainable business processes post-deployment.