Our Digital Transformation to Oracle Cloud HCM – Lessons Learned – Part 4 / Blogs / Perficient

Perficient digitally transformed for success by migrating to Oracle Cloud HCM. To share our story, we invited key stakeholders Andrea Lampert, Michael Zucker, Cathie Meyers, and Mike Grennier to join a panel discussion moderated by Stuart Massey, Principal of our Oracle ERP practice.

As Vice President of People, Andrea is responsible for working across the company to support business goals by driving the implementation of strategic people objectives reflecting Perficient’s commitment to our people and our culture. Michael Zucker, Vice President of IT, is responsible for internally facing technology solutions and infrastructure. Cathie Meyers is Director of HR and Mike Grennier is Director of Talent Acquisition. 

In the first blog post of this four-part series, Andrea and Michael discussed Challenges of Legacy Systems, Guiding Principles, and Roadmap. In the second blog post in the series, we learned about the wins for HR and IT.  Additionally, for the third blog post, we heard about the Deeper Dives Into Our Cloud Journey.  Lastly, for our fourth and final blog post in the series, we will review lessons learned during our HCM cloud journey.

To view the entire panel discussion, click here.

For large projects such as the journey to Oracle Cloud HCM from EBS, what are the notable lessons learned from this implementation?

[Micheal Zucker] Finding that right integration layer such as what would remain and what gets consolidated, were important for us in determining if it was scalable and easy to maintain.  We ended up using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for that layer and utilized the skills coming from our business unit to learn about it.  Leveraging our internal teams was a big benefit and I’m glad we took the time to figure out how to do that the right way.

We also talked about building contingency plans when we go through acquisitions.  The resources are temporarily moved away from their daily work streams, and this causes various delays or interruptions.  For example, this could result in an unexpected delay of a closing process for the financial teams. So building a little bit of that contingency was a good lesson for us.

Additionally, early on, it was important to find the right number of environments from a testing perspective.  This was a good lesson after the completion of multiple test cycles and finding out the need for different test environments to coincide with various testing.

Lastly, since we are a publicly traded company, it was important to make sure that we had the right tax related controls as well as the segregation of duties.  Specifically, those types of role permissions were really important for us to tackle before go live rather than after go live and face some sort of audit constraint.

[Andrea Lampert] We learned many lessons during this journey. We started change management early and often. While we were excited and optimistic, we were also aware that this was a transformational project that would comprise of countless changes. Perficient is spread over 10 countries with a total of 7,500 employees and we had to really understand what was happening everywhere. And it is important to make sure that you involve many people to really be part of this change management.  And if you start early, it will make a big difference in increasing user adoption.

I’ll also say establishing relationships and do whatever it takes to learn how to work together as a team.
This is a stressful project, so it’s not all fun and games. There’s a lot of work to be done in a short period of time by a lot of people who may or may not have all worked together before, so figure out the channels in which people can communicate openly and on a regular basis. And don’t just communicate when you need to but establish the communication so can build dependable relationships when you need them.

Additionally, I’d also say begin with the end in mind.  Challenge the status quo and don’t do something just because you’ve always done it.  Think about what’s possible and allow the Oracle team to help, too.
Whenever we tapped into the Oracle team and said, hey, what do you think about this? It was always helpful, so we didn’t have to decide everything in a vacuum.

Want to know more about ‘Our Digital Transformation to Oracle Cloud HCM’?  Leave a comment or reach out to our Oracle Cloud HCM Team.