3 separate engagements with Lastminute.com over the course of 8 years.
Oracle Financials Implementation Troubleshooter
I was originally asked to work with Lloyd’s Register due to my previous experience both technically and functionally with Oracle Cash Management modules. Lastminute had implemented Oracle several years ago and brought several acquisitions onto the platform. However, for some of these acquisitions it had proved impossible to reconcile bank accounts since the migration. Over the course of the engagement I identified the root causes and rectified the underlying issues. Essentially I reimplemented Oracle Cash Management in situ and was able to resolve over £25m GBP of unreconciled transactions.
● Detailed technical analysis of historic and on-going cash reconciliation issues resulting from design/configuration issues within AR/AP/Cash Management modules. ● Delivered training, application module reconfiguration and technical solutions resolving historic issues and enabling the client to meet their regulatory audit obligations. ● Client was able to produce timely and accurate bank reconciliations for the first time since implementation of Oracle Financials. ● Provided Oracle Financials expertise in an advisory capacity for a number of parallel internal projects.
Buy out by Sabre and the move to SAP ECC
In 2006 I was asked by Lastminute.com to assist them with a migration of parts of the business onto their parent company’s SAP ECC 6 platform. Having previously demonstrated detailed knowledge of the Oracle EBS data schema and functional expertise with various financials modules I designed and managed the data cleansing and data transformation processes. The overall engagement included:
- Data cleansing & migration lead on a back office systems convergence project. Key challenges met on this project were:
- Defining the migration strategy & processes. Defining & agreeing reconciliation requirements.
- Leading the data cleanse workstream involving many systems with differing data formats and significant yet differing data quality issues.
- Defining metrics against which cleansing success could be measured. Delivering the cleansing function & associated reporting.
- Motivating staff at redundancy risk / notice to work on the numerous manual data cleansing and augmentation tasks.
- Automating complex data model transformations involving the merging and splitting of customer accounts – developing exception handling techniques & processes. Delivered a technical process that provided and audit trail that facilitated & partially automated end-to-end reconciliation and compliance with external audit requirements.
Maintenance roadmap for EBS 11i
- Delivery of a system maintenance / upgrade roadmap and initiation and execution of resultant projects:
- Patching 11i to Extended Support baseline ensuring continuity of tier 1 support from Oracle;
- Database upgrades;
- Platform migration, from Solaris 9 with no failover, to a high availability virtualized Linux platform; and
- Proof-of-concept implementation of Oracle Configuration Manager for increased pro-active maintenance and “management by exception”.
- Designed and implemented Data Lifecycle Management policies;
- Solution Architect and Project Manager for analysis phase of R12 upgrade (upgrade project still in progress at conclusion of contract);
- Provided general thought-leadership to the finance technology group with regard to improving their leverage of their existing investment in Oracle E-Business Suite;
Custom Tax Engine design and delivery
- Delivery of bespoke Tour Operator specific tax & accounting interfaces, spanning roles working as PM, architect and developer replacing legacy interfaces into Oracle Financials. Auditability and demonstrability of tax compliance baked into the design;
Legacy system consolidation
- Project Manager and Solution Architect roles migrating a French subsidiary from Sage Line 500 onto Oracle Financials (11.5.10.2). Ensuring balance between adherence to the shared services model with the need to meet specific statutory and operational challenges particular to that locale;
General EBS technical deliverables
- Delivery of various technical solutions leveraging a wide range of Applications technology including Forms Personalizations; BI Publisher reports; PL/SQL customisations relating to Direct Debit and Credit Card processing;
- Implementation of Web ADI replacing standard ADI and replacing bespoke Excel to Oracle integration solutions through the delivery of custom “Integrators”;
- Test Manager leading the EU finance teams in regression testing of 20+ systems (using HP Quality Center / ALM) necessitated by a move of the server/data farm (~200 servers) from the UK to the US. Having laid down a clear methodology testing was rigorously executed and tracked to schedule and switchover occurred as planned and without any material interruption of service to the finance teams.
AR Integration with Paypal
- Design/implementation of AR/CM integration between Oracle Financials and PayPal;
Automated bank reconciliations
- Automation of the preparation and delivery into Sharepoint (using BI Publisher & Bursting) of month end bank reconciliations for 60+ bank accounts; and
Tax Compliance Project Manager
- Project Manager leading a tax compliance project understanding compliance requirements in European locales and leading the gap analysis against existing back office systems (Oracle and SAP).