Implementation of Oracle Fusion Cloud for VenuesWest
- Industry Government
- Capability Cloud, Enterprise Applications
- Customer VenuesWest
The Western Australian Sports Centre Trust, trading as VenuesWest, is a Statutory Authority responsible for managing, operating, maintaining, and promoting the State’s facilities.
VenuesWest owns and manages Western Australia’s best sport and entertainment venues on behalf of the State Government. The VenuesWest portfolio currently consists of 13 venues including the RAC Arena, and Optus Stadium.
VenuesWest collaborates with other public and private organisations to provide integrated, sustainable services for the benefit of Western Australians. Approximately six million people come through VenuesWest venues each year.
Opportunity
In recent years, VenuesWest had been through an enormous amount of change that had seen it double in size and nearly quadruple its number of patrons.
As part of the agency’s wider digital transformation program to modernise its legacy IT, financial, and operational systems, it identified an opportunity to introduce a new solution that would help it manage its procurement processes, asset accounting, and project accounting in a more efficient, collaborative, and intelligent way.
When the project was first conceptualised, VenuesWest was using three different applications including Ungerboeck to manage bookings, a Facility and Events Management System (FEMS), and a PoS (Point of Sale) system to process and manage its Purchase to Pay Processes.
Despite being used practically for processing invoices and processing credit card payments, the previous system was not providing any additional benefits to the agency. It was incredibly slow, clunky, and unhelpful, with little reporting capability to help with budgeting.
As a result, VenuesWest was facing some significant business challenges:
- Revenue from Ungerboeck would be posted as a manual journal entry into the financial system, and it lacked an intuitive and connected process.
- Lack of automated journal entries into the Empower payroll system resulted in high manual handling of journal entries and processes.
- Banking reconciliation was a labor-intensive activity and involved manual entries.
- Lack of smart solutions in credit card reconciliations resulted in labor-intensive activities.
- Lack of an interface to automatically process the revenue journals into General Ledger (GL) from PoS transactions.
Solution
Along with the above drivers, VenuesWest, was being directed by State Government to move towards the Cloud. This presented a compelling business case to move to Oracle Fusion Cloud.
With ambitious go-live dates, VenuesWest chose us as its Oracle implementation partner, with our Team working collaboratively with Oracle to ensure the successful delivery of the solution on-time and on-budget.
Four months after the project started, VenuesWest went Live with its Oracle Cloud Fusion (SaaS) Financial Management Solution.
As a result, VenuesWest now has:
- An intelligent cloud-based solution with all the required Financial Management capabilities including Management Accounting and Payroll, plus the ability to integrate with existing solutions.
- An interface to automatically process the revenue journals for PoS (Point of Sale) transactions into Oracle Fusion’s General Ledger.
Outcomes
Glenn Nordsvan, Chief Financial Officer at VenuesWest said one of the things that gave Oracle a clear benefit over its competitors was its flexibility to integrate with other systems.
“NRI ran us through a demo of their own Oracle Fusion Cloud solution, and really blew us away with the integration piece and how easy it was to get information in and out of Oracle.
There were tight deliverables on this project and the fact that NRI were able to deliver, is a testament to the team’s knowledge and agile methods that ensured decisions and changes could be made quickly,” Mr Nordsvan said.
With NRI as the implementation partner, Oracle as the product vendor, and the VenuesWest team working collaboratively; the launch was delivered smoothly.
“We had just four months to go-live and most of that time was during the Covid-19 lockdown period.
“I’ve always measured the success of a project like this by the number of complaints and we haven’t had any.
“What we are seeing so far is that it’s very easy to get information out of Oracle…we’re anticipating really dragging it out, not just for financial reporting, but for KPI reporting, board reporting, and very importantly, for external reporting to our partner government agencies,” said Mr Nordsvan.
This readily available information will mean VenuesWest can make better procurement decisions, consolidate its suppliers, and improve its processes.
VenuesWest also confirmed that so far, overall procurement processing speeds have been improved – with some processes such as requisitions, down to 30 seconds where it previously took up to four minutes.
“From the perspective of this solution, it is really about making our internal users happy and ensuring they are able to spend their time evaluating the organisation and not processing transactions, we are already starting to see this play out.” Mr Nordsvan said.
NRI ran us through a demo of their own Oracle Fusion Cloud solution, and really blew us away with the integration piece and how easy it was to get information in and out of Oracle. There were tight deliverables on this project and the fact that NRI were able to deliver is a testament to the team’s knowledge and agile methods that ensured decisions and changes could be made quickly.”
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