I was brought in to Allied Pickfords largely due to my expertise with Oracle Workflow and Database to integrate Oracle’s back office processes with the bespoke mid-office system. This involved layering transaction level integration inside of custom Oracle Workflows. If you were being generous you might say this work predates and anticipates the movement towards the end of the decade towards Integration middleware with graphical UIs to design integration flows. You would need to be quite generous though!
I have had 2 separate engagements with Allied Pickfords. The first included:
- Integration Architect - real-time integration between Oracle Financials & bespoke mid-office systems leveraging Workflow Business Event System & Oracle Transparent (Database) Gateway.
- ‘Management by Exception’ issue propagation & tracking heavily leveraging Oracle Workflow & Notification Mailer technologies – ensuring users are only notified of issues and given the details they require to analyse and resolve.
- Redesign of customer model within Oracle Receivables to better align to fundamental business requirements – reducing customisation & support overhead.
The initial contract was to design and deliver a real-time integration solution between Oracle Applications (AR and AP) and a new bespoke operational system. Given the requirement for real-time operation, I designed an Oracle Workflow based integration solution whereby each item of interfaced data is associated with its own Workflow process. Errors with incoming data are emailed to the relevant users for action. Once the data is corrected the integration automatically proceeds utilising standard workflow functionality. This ensures that the two systems are closely synchronised, even when the data coming from the new system has errors. The loading of data into the Apps tables was achieved using real-time API calls. Whilst undertaking the above I identified that the client suffered from a poorly designed customer model, the result of which was that they had a high number of customisations to standard Apps functionality and custom reports. In conjunction with the heads of AR and AP I completely redesigned the customer model in accordance with Oracle TCA (Trading Community Architecture) best practice. We migrated data from the old model to the new model. This allows the client to gain much greater use from standard Apps functionality, much of which had been rendered unusable or inaccurate under the previous model. It has also allowed them to reduce the number of customisations and custom reports required and thus reduce their ongoing support costs. Furthermore the client was making no use of the business process automation facilities available in Oracle Applications. I have delivered a number of custom Oracle Workflows to automate many of the repetitive tasks performed by the AR department. Much of the automation occurs automatically on the back of the integration. This has significantly freed up the AR staff allowing them to spend more time dealing with clients and chasing outstanding debt.
Several years later I was contacted by Allied Pickfords and asked to help them migrate away from Oracle E-Business Suite. I remotely designed and delivered the necessary data extract and transformation scripts to enable Pickfords to migrate onto the new accounting platform.
- customer and supplier master data
- AP and AR transactions (invoices/credit memos/receipts/payments)
- GL detail and summary balances