May 4 2005
Oracle today announced that 3,800 engineering and construction companies are increasing business efficiencies, using the Oracle family of solutions, which includes Oracle, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards applications and technology.
In a separate announcement, issued in Munich, Germany, Oracle stated that HOCHTIEF, a leading international construction service provider headquartered in Essen, Germany, selected Oracle E-Business Suite, an integrated family of business applications that collects, processes and shares information from all lines of business. HOCHTIEF will integrate its subsidiaries' IT operations into the corporate group and expects to significantly reduce its annual operation costs.
Growing operational complexity, limited visibility into critical information and increased project risk are common issues facing these firms. Consolidation within these industries places broader responsibilities on each firm. And, at the center of these changes are continually growing repositories of information on job histories, productivity, employees, customers and resources.
"Oracle is committed to providing the engineering and construction industries with solutions and technologies that deliver quantifiable business results," said John Wookey, senior vice president, applications development, Oracle. "Our products have created new flexibility and streamlined operations to help many top-tier companies remain competitive in the face of industry changes. As a result, 8 of the top 10 'America's Most Admired' engineering and construction companies run Oracle applications."
The Shaw Group, Inc. is pleased with its Oracle JD Edwards implementation and optimistic about the future of Oracle's acquisition of PeopleSoft. "We are very comfortable with the Oracle engineering, construction and manufacturing solutions, which map well to the current demands of the engineering-and- construction industry," said G. Patrick Thompson, Jr., senior vice president and chief information officer, The Shaw Group, Inc.
In 2003, Shaw implemented JD Edwards Financial Accounting, Project Management, Web-Based Self Service Time Entry, Human Resources, Payroll, Equipment Management, Subcontracting, Purchasing and Billing to process $3 billion worth of business with more than 30,000 open projects for 8,000 users and 17,000 employees in less than a 10-month period.
"Oracle's integrated approach to product development helps protect our investment and will enable us to migrate to incremental solutions from a single vendor at a pace we set. We're pleased that Oracle is involving its customers in developing products, which leverage the best of Oracle, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards in an integrated world-class ERP system never seen to date. The information-technology efficiencies created will be essential to keeping up our pace in a global marketplace."
Streamlining Back-Office Operations
Suffolk Construction, a leading general-building construction firm, recently went live on Oracle E-Business Suite. The company selected several financial management applications, as well as human resources and project management solutions to help save money and time managing their back-office operations.
"We chose Oracle E-Business Suite to help improve our overall processes and procedures, streamline reporting and increase data sharing within our organization," said Mike Azarela, executive vice president and chief financial officer, Suffolk Construction. "We are starting to see return on our investment and have already minimized the time we spend managing our back-end processes. The net result is more time and resources to serve our customers' needs without cutting into our margins."
Creating Competitive Advantage
CH2M HILL provides engineering, construction, operations and related services to public and private clients in numerous industries on six continents. Founded in 1946, the company's growing range of integrated services enables its 10,500 employees in about 165 offices worldwide to take any industrial or public works project from concept through planning, financing, design, construction, operations and maintenance.
CH2M HILL manages about 8,000 projects at any given time, many extremely complex. A single monthly invoice, for example, may be for as much as $10 million and have between 300 and 500 pages of supporting documentation. And because CH2M HILL is a major federal contractor, it is subject to especially stringent audits by the federal Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA), which performs all contract audits for the Department of Defense, so it must be able to produce extremely detailed records of all transactions. The firm implemented Oracle E-Business Suite to manage its financials, projects and human resources more efficiently.
"Oracle's solution is simply the most powerful one on the market," said Jim Butt, IT director, CH2M HILL. "It is flexible, it is scalable and it gives us an edge in our very competitive industry."
Leading the Engineering and Construction Industries
For engineering and construction firms, the world is changing rapidly. Progressive project-delivery methods such as design-build are now becoming more mainstream. With the expanded lines of services and broader responsibilities that these progressive methods deliver comes a much higher degree of accountability -- to an unprecedented number of stakeholders.
To help companies meet such challenges, Oracle delivers pre-integrated business applications, including key functionality designed with recognized engineering and construction enterprises. Only Oracle offers a unified data model, so customers can integrate information across geographies and functional areas to write targeted proposals; enable project collaboration; control project execution, manage assets and procurement costs; and provide facilities maintenance services.
Oracle offers complete, integrated solutions for the engineering and construction industry. As a result of Oracle's commitment:
- 19 of the top 25 "Top 400 Contractors" in construction run Oracle applications
- 15 of the top 25 " Top Global Design Firms" run Oracle applications
- 8 of the top 10 "America's Most Admired" engineering and construction companies run Oracle applications
- 8 of the top 10 of "America's Most Admired" homebuilding companies run