Case Story: An Oracle project
A retail subsidiary of a FTSE100 company had installed an Oracle system as a result of substantial and rapid growth in its turnover, with sales leaping from £80m to £800m in two years.
The problem the Peter Charles team was asked to solve was that Oracle had been poorly installed by inexperienced consultants. In many ways, there was not that much wrong with the set-up of the system but by the time the Peter Charles team were called in, there was no clear idea within the organisation what exactly was wrong and what to do next. The first task was to listen hard to understand what exactly the system was supposed to be doing.
The Peter Charles team carefully clarified what Oracle could and could not do, and then implemented improvements in the set-up. The most significant error in the original set-up concerned the reconciliation of the cashbooks. Within three weeks, the first account was reconciled.
When the job was completed, the client commented: "The Peter Charles team was very quick to grasp the complex issues. But they also dealt with the people issues, even when working with people who were under pressure or threatened, they managed to get them on side and back on track."