Oracle APEX : The secret sauce delivering business value

Speaker 1

Hello, and welcome. Is there anyone in the audience who does not know why we are here? Do not worry, I think I’m your host. And we’ll help you exactly with that. So my name is Pritam jaipuria, I had sales at dances responsible for growth and business strategy. And I have been associated with Oracle for over 20 years. And today I’ll be hosting the session and introduce a guest speaker or facilitate this for you. A bit about dances advances is a company headquartered in Dallas, Texas, with operations in the US, Canada, and India. Very recently, we expanded in the Nordic Region. And happy to share that with you today that we have expanded operations in Europe as well.bit about the company, I won’t get too much into details. The DNA of the company basically, advances we love of people. So for us is people first. Next, obviously, we admire our customers. And we are really passionate, Oracle technologies, anything to do with Oracle, it ignites an average dime in the company. That is who we are. And the objective of this session, the oracular session, this webinar is a series that is being done, which is being sponsored by dances for over a year now. And the idea is to share knowledge to build a community of Oracle experts and share experiences and learnings from the industry from the businesses so that all of us leverage our expertise better, and help other businesses, other customers, whether they are a developer or a techie or a decision maker, like a CIO or a CEO, they they get helped to make use of their investments and make the use of the digital transformation initiatives. So, so much about advances. Now we’d like to take the opportunity to introduce our guest speaker, very kind of Mr.audit power. He has information technology at a company called huhtamaki. huhtamaki is a global concern global company, which champions and is a leader in packaging solutions. And I will let Odette talk a bit about that in his session. In today’s session in Oracle Apex audit, we’ll touch upon how it helps and how it can be leveraged to expand the capabilities of your enterprise applications. And he’s going to talk about case studies and walk us through that audit is based out of New Delhi, he hits the IT department of huhtamaki obviously been responsible for a lot of transformation initiatives. He has been in this article space for more than 20 years in his past life, he worked at Oracle and has been in leadership positions for quite some time. So he knows the stuff. He has seen that being the kind of a person so we will be hearing from the horse’s mouth so to say. And before we I hand over to audit a question for audit, I feel free to answer this if you don’t even take it up later on. But I was going through your profile and I figured out that you were a commerce student, you became a chartered accountant. And then a CIO just was curious about this journey. Can you just throw some light and jump onto your session? over to you.

Speaker 2

Thank you for the introduction. First of all, a very warm welcome to all those who are participating in this webinar. I hope you have some useful takeaways from this session. I’ll begin with introducing huhtamaki and then come to the journey of you know from become to it. So huhtamaki is a global leader in packaging solutions. We have two lines of packaging one is flexible packaging, which is most of your use on a daily basis. So all the packaged foods that you consume, whether it is pulses, or packaged rice packaged cereals, or the namkeens, chocolates, confectionaries biscuits. So any packaging, which is flexible in nature, which you can bend easily is what we do. And the other part is food and fiber services who run fiber services, if you buy any frozen meat or cut vegetables from the supermarket or you buy eggs, they come in a very fibrous base or a solution or a package. That’s what we make. And most of the paper based products in the quick service restaurants. So takeaway meal in in McDonald’s, for example, or Burger King, that’s also what we do is apply to airlines. So next time you’re drinking a cup of water in Indigo or nowhere, that probably is might be in a paper cup, which is made by huhtamaki. That’s what we do add to the market, we offer packaging solutions for most of the fmcg companies across the globe. We are present in 35 countries. In India, we have currently 16 plants, where we manufacture different products spread all over the geography of India. And we have 22 locations including 16 plants, so six offices, from where we operate on all of them are closed because of the pandemic and we are all working from home. That’s the market Tamaki about myself. As Peter mentioned, I started off on Commerce background finished become from the University of Bombay. And like most other commerce, students started pursuing private accountancy and company secretary. And during my audit days, I used to see the software. So we had also also had a software. And most of the people may not have heard, but those in the accounting profession, there are software by the name of fact, fa CP, which was a very popular accounting package before the likes of tally came in. And we used to use that application in most of our audit clients. And I used to see it was FoxPro base. So I used to see the developers, you know, I used to pick out ledgers and scrutinize everything, take out data manually. And if I had any queries I used to go to the developer who used to on a very small pop up window of the box row was furiously typing some commands and used to get the same data that kind of fascinated me saying that I’m spending so many hours on finding out some information. And here he is typing in a few commands and getting the same thing in a matter of minutes. So that’s where my brush with technology happened. And then I took up my career in various organizations where I was involved in implementing solutions for financial account. So like there was a custom develop PRP on Oracle technologies that was formed 2.5 in those days, developer 2000 with us. When I joined a company called the Global telesystems, which is now called GTL towards a telecom service provider and ISP, they decided to implement, release 11. And I was made a part of that project it to hang the project from the client side. And I think, first that started my consulting career. So having enjoyed doing the year implementation as a client, I moved on to the consulting side, utilizing my accounting skills to bring the best of accounting and technology together. That’s how I left my accounting career behind and started on the consulting side. Interesting. So today, start with our topic of today. What’s the secret sauce of ethics?

Speaker 1

Absolutely, that we are all waiting for you. Let’s get started. Definition secret secrecy behind that. This Give me a minute, I will share my screen and give me a minute. And while it is doing that, a few rules. I’m sure all of you are aware of this, at least one year of experience all of us have. All of us will be muted. And if we have questions, you can post your questions in the chat window. We’ll be monitoring that. And if time permits, we’ll answer some of those, if not requirements that will get back to you with the responses to be near or something.

Speaker 2

So once again, if I will Good evening everyone. So today I will be presenting how we have leveraged Oracle Applications express or Apex for short as it is called, and how we tried, we have successfully resolved business applications and needs, which are not directly available in the IRB. So, we took a strategic decision that rather than making a lot of custom forms and custom processes and workflows inside Oracle using the native Oracle technologies, let’s look at something which is faster, easier and more modern if it doesn’t mean that Oracle is primitive, but a more modern technology to use, which can be plugged in and easily available workable with Oracle e business suite, we use Oracle EBusiness Suite as the choreography. And we looked around for the modern Zoho platforms as they are called. And we zeroed in on Apex being a natural extension of the Oracle Technology, we did look at a couple of other options as well. But we found Apex to be pretty easy to use, easy to deploy, easy to develop and easy to adopt.

Speaker 2

just a bit about our landscape with a very, I would say a very complicated diagram. As you can see, at the heart of the story. At the heart of the applications is our Oracle e business suite. And there is a periphery of a lot of other applications that we use, some are connected, some are disconnected, and huhtamaki in India has grown by making a lot of acquisitions till date they’ve made six acquisitions. With each acquisition came its own set of applications. And that’s why you see a heterogeneous mix over here, most of the applications that you see here, so these 1234 This is the world’s largest TRP, which we use, which I call Microsoft Excel, I’m sure everyone in the world uses that most of these applications that you see here are retired now and everything is getting consolidated into Oracle and Oracle technologies. So these are the apex applications which are built around the ones which are colored in the red box. Some of them are integrated in a two way communication with the AARP. Some of them have a one way communication and some of them are standalone with this is going to be the genesis of what I’m going to cover in today’s presentation. So as I mentioned, currently, we have a set of standalone applications and a set of integrated applications integrated the year. I’ll be covering each of them in a bit of a detail with what has been the use case and what is the business function that it caters to when one business problem did resolve. So, just a little bit on Apex in case people are not aware of the application of we it is capable of having Single Sign On integration in our case, we are using VMware and the Oracle SSO login so our ad ID is our single sign on there is no username password, you simply click on the URL and then you are logged in. So that makes it easy for the user and easy for the admin to maintain. Because there is no password reset, there are no forgotten password requests etc. We have built role based access for every application and as for the business requirement, so this flexibility of defining different roles in the application and administering which role has got access to which function is something similar if you can say like we have the menus and functions type of feature in the Oracle er p so we’ll try to adopt the same here and if we were very successful in doing that virtually free of cost in terms of software license when I say free of cost, in case any enterprise has bought the Enterprise Edition any any company which buys the Enterprise Edition of Oracle license, you are free to use this application for development and production both there is no additional license cost for using Apex provided you buy the enterprise edition of the applicant of the database. And most of the companies who opt for Oracle er p go ahead to buy the Enterprise Edition. In case you are not an Oracle EBS user but you are using you are using Oracle Database as a technology, you can still go ahead and use apex. As I mentioned, local data enables faster development and deployment we have a couple of examples that are included on on how fast we can develop and deploy. talent pool availability is not a challenge. We all know that India has got a rich availability of Oracle technology resources. So anybody who’s who’s well versed with Oracle Technology, whether I call it forms reports, or PL SQL can very, very easily adopt to using the apex platform. It has a lot of more goi built in, rather than you know the plain old writing of long drawn PL SQL procedures. And the market in India, we have currently 2500 users across all our locations that I mentioned, who are actively using the apex applications along with the EAP application. So I’ll just go deeper into the application one by one. In case y’all have any questions, please feel free to put your questions on the chat window, the q&a window will take up the questions at the end of the session.

Speaker 2

So this customer centricity is an application that was created when government announced the lockdown. And our CEO wanted to record the act of customer centricity are somebody who went an extra mile to get customer delight or fulfill any customer requirements. And on a review meeting on Friday afternoon, the CEO said that it will be good to have you know, we can maintain this in Excel. But it will be good to have an application which will help record all these acts and which will be freely available to any employer huhtamaki. So this way, we pay my team build this application over a period of just two days over a weekend. So it was that simple, where it captured. And okay, it was a simple application, which had about 12 to 14 fields that somebody had to enter or select from a drop down. However, the agility that it gave us that you know, on the last working day, somebody said something and on the next next week, we were ready with the application is big, it gives you a lot of speed to develop and deploy applications. We use Apex as our VIP helpdesk. So any anybody having any issues, some urara being faced, or some records stuck in interface or somebody wanting to ask how do I do this, somebody wanting data extract whatever may be the case, we follow the helpdesk ticketing method, and we use the apex application to build the helpdesk. And this one also integrated with Outlook to send notifications for every step of the ticket which was logged so particularly getting logged. Resolution being provided ticket being closed the it was all integrated to send the notifications to every user. And it helped us to gather all the details for our ITC and IFC compliance when we audit to take place on an annual basis. While this tool was used for three years, in 2021 start we had to retire this tool because huhtamaki has globally migrated to an ITSM tool. So now across 35 countries there is a single address tool and our yellow e RP helpdesk has migrated to that tool, but we sure are missing this simplicity and ease of use for this year. Our Business Excellence is nothing but the productivity improvement projects that are run in a manufacturing setup. It is also it also goes by the name of TPM which is total productivity management. Prior to building this application, we had about 250 users of TPM and V as it is called and everything was being done in Excel, every project that was being run so the life cycle of the project is for about three to six months. And the productivity enhancement and efficiency gain is monitored for the next 12 months after the project is completed. So on an average 15 to 24 months is the lifetime for a project to sorry, 15 to 18 months is the lifetime for a project. And to monitor all this in a spreadsheet was humongous amount of effort. So at every location that the user is to spend four Mondays in trying to get his excel sheet together. And in the central office in the head office, there was a team of two people who used to collect everything and spend another four, Monday’s each in trying to bridge all excels together, and work out all the charts and bi pie charts, diagrams and all other data to present it to the management. So we got together with a big team, we filled out a complete specification document, put in a complete business requirement, and we build this application from ground zero. And this application has been so well built now that currently which is getting used only in India, but huhtamaki has actively started looking at deploying this application globally to all the 35 countries where it operates. So as we speak, we are in discussions to adopt and scale up this application to 35 countries all over the world, across all continents. This application is also integrated with Outlook. And it is also helpful for all the various manufacturing based compliances and audits that are conducted by productivity and efficiency improvement agencies that we work with.

Speaker 2

The next one is five years. So five years is the thewell known Japanese technology of productivity improvement. This also again is a project management tool for all fibers initiatives, which looked at improving the personal and work related efficiency of every employee. And this is a similar application, which is built like the Business Excellence, but it has its own specific use case. And it caters only and only to the fibers initiatives. capex approvals. So this is a favorite of every finance department, every year budgets are created. But when the budgets need to be spent, there is an elaborate paper trail which is created where a capex approval notice filled out and the user and as a god signs, then it goes through an approval process of operations, and then the finance department. And once everything is signed, then the system entry start. So the capex approval process application, sought to digitize all these details, and eliminate the paper trail which we were successful in doing. So as you can see, this is a workflow based tool. And we have a matrix of approval define integrated with Outlook for email notifications again, and any spend which anybody who intends to make has to simply come to this portal, enter the proposed capex and submit it and then the workflow takes over. And this also contains the budget. The screenshot is small. But what you see here in this top right hand corner of the screenshot is the total budgeted amount, current project amount balanced project amount. So we also have kind of built a little bit of capex budgeting into this too. This is currently standalone, but we are working on integrating this with Oracle purchasing, so that once the capex is approved, it can push the information to the buyer for procreation. This is a tool which is used for documentation of all standard operating process procedures. You can call it more of a document, document version maintenance tool. So for every function in huhtamaki, there is a defined process as per quality standards as for ISO and different versions of the document as they keep enhancing need to be maintained. So this was traditionally being done using you know, create a file server, map the shared drive and keep posting the documents in file folders over there. It gave the challenge of an audit trail because in the end, it is a Windows shared drive. So anything can happen. So we needed security of the document, we needed a trail of Who has created and updated the document, etc. So that’s where we decided to use Apex and we built this tool to maintain the different versions of so it’s kind of a BMS. But the business calls it DMS. The document management system, but people who are familiar with the coding processes, we use v ms to check in and check out our code which appends your versioning to the code. So, this is something similar to that manner. So, this was the list of standalone application. Now, I will quickly walk you through the integrated applications, we have built an application called price panel. So, typically in Oracle yapi whenever you use purchasing, you have to enter So, if you’re using advanced pricing for purchasing, you have certain limitations in terms of defining the price for an agreed set of items. Let’s say for example, I want to buy I want to buy at the inventory category level or one segment of the category level, this kind of control on pricing is not too user friendly and straightforward when I use Oracle purchasing. So, we built this application where we enabled one attribute a custom I would say inventory category called as price panel category which will attach to every item that we created in Oracle and those categories were then used for pricing here and using forms personalization, whatever was the value which was entered in the price panel here for price panel essentially if I need to

Speaker 2

explain in layman’s language, this is nothing but the contracted price which is entered with our vendors. Now you can say I can use Blanket Purchase agreements, fine, but Blanket Purchase agreements does not work on category or a part of the category and that’s the challenge it was only at the item level. So, we created this application where the category or a part of the category could be used. And it gave me the flexibility to either do it for a list of suppliers at one goal or a list of items across locations at one go. And we used personalization in the purchase order form to gray out the price unit price value and we used to get picked from this application here. And one common attribute of Apex is it is workflow enabled. So, all the applications that you are seeing have got built in workflows for processing the data are rebate nodes. So, this is typically I would say an application built for giving credit to a customer whenever we have any quality complaint or any incorrect billing done. If the price is incorrectly overcharged to the customer or any material a short sheet or whatever may be the case where a credit needs to be passed on to the customer. This application is built which is integrated with Oracle receivables for automated creation of credit note. So, what happens is whenever intends to give a credit pass on a credit to the customer creates an entry and there is a matrix of approval based on the amount based on the product based on the plant there are about six attributes that the workflow goes in the route of approval. Once it is approved and finally finished, finally approved at the push of a button it gets created as a credit note in Oracle receivables. Earlier this was again a paper based trail where your credit note application used to be filled out with a lot of papers being attached. And then that paper is to move from to the physical world from table to table, person to person getting approved. Once this application was gotten, we were able to keep the papers aside and everything was happening through the electronic media it asset management. So this is an application which is built for the IT team. And essentially this is used for monitoring, maintaining reporting, and more and accounting of any asset which the IT department uses including our desktop and laptops provided to the users. So tool to maintain it assets integrated with FA module. And we have also built a 1d barcode printer along with this so we typically print the asset serial number in the barcode and we stick it on top of the laptop and that is used for inventory track. as well. So, whenever a new laptop is purchased the my team comes here and creates an asset and it sends a notification to the finance guy, he puts in the date placed in service and then it goes and creates the assets in the FA book. Prior to this it was manual. So, we had to give in an asset commissioning form it used to go to accounts they used to then create the assets. So, as you can see, most of these applications are built at digitizing the work methods eliminating human work and minimizing use of paper flow

Speaker 2

ncms is a customer complaints and quality complaints module which is built now this is a very large module and is still undergoing enhancements. This module caters to any kind of quality complaint externally from the customer and internally from one department to the other No, because we are we are a process and evil organization, the product goes through a minimum of four processes and a maximum of eight processes. So, damage can quality issue can arise in any of the process, but it may not be applicable to the current process in which it was detected it can be attributed to any previous process. So, to log quality issues internally this application is used and if there is a quality defect reported by the customer this application is used and any quality defects if you need to pass on to the customer a credit this application is integrated with the rebate node application that you saw previously. In case there is a quality product quality related issue a complaint number here is mandatory in the rebate note application This is also a module called copper. So those in the manufacturing space would know it stands for corrective action and preventive action. So until unless a copper is not entered, this workflow will not be complete and there is there is a aging analysis which is carried out as to how long the complaint is open and why there are so there is a tab applicable even for the complaints monitoring, planning and scheduling. So this is a this is an application which we have been building for the last one year. Why one year because we have been building it part by part by part. So a bit of a history huhtamaki had made four attempts to implement an out of the box supply chain planning tool, including Oracle ASAP. But because of very unique business issues, if I have to say, getting a straight fit for all our planning requirements was an uphill task. So the team and business decided that if we cannot use an out of the box solution or off the shelf solution, let’s build our own. And that’s where this planning and scheduling application was born. So currently in the current shape that we are running, this is more of a scheduling execution tool, where I use the current orders on hand, and I schedule them for production. So if anyone has used Oracle production, production scheduler PS, if you remember, if you’ve used it, it allows you to drag and drop your sales order lines or your production orders across your machines across your ships, we build that up, we actually build that application functionality using Apex where my scheduler production scheduler can just drag and drop up and down the schedule and across the machines. And right now we are backwardly integrating this to give us the forecast. So whatever who is going to be the forward planning for the next next month, there’s going to be an input from the sales team on what’s the forecast sales order for next month. And we will be using the bond to generate the MRP for that forecasted order. And then we’ll get into the execution mode. So this is the part that we are developing, we’ve developed the scheduling part, and it is well being used. So in some way we can say that this application is, you know, in the form of an ACP and MRP and production scheduling all three put together. It’s a very large application. And it’s it has a lot of data and multiple users. The ultimate output that we get from this, the analysis that we get is we get to know what is the plan versus actual production. So we have planned production for, let’s say 24 hours, but are actually produced for only 22 hours. So where did we lose two hours. That’s the kind of analysis that we get from this application. Plus it is, it is a, you know, a real time dashboard, where anybody who has access to his order can get micro level status of the job. So when he logs in, and he selects his order, he would actually be able to see how much of the order is produced under which manufacturing process and how much balance is left. And by when he will be able to get the order dispatched. So that’s known as the promise date.

Speaker 2

Next is a very interesting use case for apex, we are actually using Oracle Apex as a bi application. It sits since this is sitting in the same schema of our yarbydatabase, we have created like we call it materialized views, which keep getting refreshed every half an hour from the AARP. And we have sales. We have collections, receivables, inventory, manufacturing, procurement, analytics, and sample development. So this is our r&d and samples that we give to our customers. All these are refreshed at every half an hour, and is available for viewing to each and every person to whom the access is given. So as you can see here, this is our sales one. So this is for the month, it shows what is the daily trend of my sales. And the purple line that you see here is a daily run rate required to meet that target for the current month of sales. And the dotted line that you see here is the run rate. This is also I think this is up to date of let’s say 20 to 10 days or left, if I need to meet the target. This is the level of daily sales that I need to achieve. This is another dashboard which tells me what is my budget, what is my rolling forecast, what has been my actual and the interesting part is here, what is my gross margin, which is VA and what is my gross margin minus direct resources cost, which is my contribution. So all this information was available. So since we are an OPM enabled organization, the information that you see on this dashboard every half an hour was only available to business. At the end of the month, when we used to do our inventory closing run the OPM process, create accounting and post to GL. That’s when all these amyas is to get generated. But using Apex we have been able to generate this from a period of 30 days down to 30 minutes. So every 30 minutes, the dashboard gets refreshed and the information is available to the user community. And we’ve built a lot of fancy pie charts, bar diagrams, and a lot of other information, which is easily accessible and can be used for effective decision making a word of another word on this BI dashboard, this has been used in India and we are now rolling this out to other huhtamaki locations who are running release 12 of Oracle. So, whatever applications that you see here, for example, this BI dashboard application, it can be easily replicated to the other huhtamaki sites because the business the structure and more of the database related values remain common for us even though the instances are separate. So, deployment of a prebuilt application here is very easy to be used at any other site. And we have we have built this Wcm stands for working capital management Wcm So, this was a very specific project that we did, where we wanted where the business wanted to improve again productivity, improve inventory turns improve working capital, they wanted to release cash etc. So our project team was put in place and besides having regular domain experts, there was a need to have visualization of data. So that the problem to be analyzed in more detail and a work plan could be established with very specific objectives to be met. So it my DSO was at At, for example, using analytics of receivables, which is receivable analysis, the target was to bring down 80 to 75 in the next four months, for example. So all these dashboards that you see here are using data from the year P, and giving a lot of an analysis to the user or the project team to take corrective action and achieve the KPI for the project that has been set up. So while I have mentioned these areas, in every area of the project, there are a minimum of five to six dashboards or these data charts which have been built.