Oracle E-Business Suite Peer Forum

The Oracle E-Business Suite Peer Forum offers events, presentations, teleconferences and webcasts targeted to executives from numerous industries including consumer products, chemical, life sciences, high tech, and industrial. Through structured peer networking, members share best practices, survey results, and case study presentations to maximize ROI and improve business processes.

Linking E-Business Suite executives with actionable advice.

The Oracle EBS Peer Forum is a community of executives formed to promote information sharing and longstanding business relationships.

Nathan Tsakiris
Program Manager, Enterprise Peer Forums

  • Teleconferences
  • Clients
  • Testimonials
  • Benefits
  • Past Events

Protecting Critical Intellectual Property in a Global Marketplace

Tuesday, May 11, 2010 Bookmark to my calendar calendar
Teleconference

With increased outsourcing and business collaboration comes increased risk of your intellectual property (IP) falling into the wrong hands. In this teleconference, we will explore techniques Peer Forum members take for protecting their valuable IP in foreign countries and across business partners. How do companies establish clear ownership for IP protection within their organization? What policies and practices are most successful? What changes in company culture must happen for IP protection efforts to be successful? In addition to facilitating discussion among Oracle EBS Peer Forum members, AMR Research will present findings from recent quantitative research on this topic.

This is a member only event. If you have questions, please contact Kerin McGonagle.

Register Now

Technologies for Demand Planning in an Oracle E-Business Suite Environment

Tuesday, June 8, 2010 Bookmark to my calendar calendar
Teleconference

The S&OP process is critical to overall profitability of the business. In this teleconference, Oracle EBS Peer Forum members, together with select Supply Chain Peer Forum members, will focus on the first piece of the S&OP puzzle, demand planning. We will discuss what technologies are best used for demand planning in an E-Business Suite environment,both for determining the statistical forecast, as well as accommodating multiple stakeholder input into the statistical demand forecast. Are the tools suitable from a statistical forecasting standpoint? Do demand planning technologies accommodate appropriate review and adjustment after the statistical forecast is generated? We will also discuss usability of demand planning technologies and how well they accommodate use by sales, marketing, and business unit managers for forecasting input.

This is a member only event. If you have questions, please contact Kerin McGonagle.

Register Now

Partial Client List

Cisco Systems

 

Colorcon

 

Emerson Process Management

 

IKON Office Solutions

 

Motorola

 

NCR Corporation

 

PPG Industries

 

Teradyne

 

The J.M. Smucker Company

 

“Our involvement with the Oracle Peer Forum has enabled us to validate problems and solutions from the perspectives of other users, not the Oracle textbook.  This leads to more practical approaches and better ROI on our IT investments.”
- Joe Harber, CIO, Applica Consumer Products

“Thank you for hosting the summit. It was very well organized and informative. Your work is much appreciated.”
[referring to the 2009 Fall Summit held in Boston, MA]
- Rick Coyle, Manager, Global Business Applications

“Our participation in the Peer Forum is proving very beneficial.  It provides us the forum to talk about deployment of Oracle’s e-Business Suite and other products (Siebel, Hyperion, etc.), and enables us to gain insight into and understanding of other customers’ practices and experiences.  This provides us an element of guidance to avoid issues and pitfalls, and helps us implement best practices.  I would strongly recommend the Forum to other users of Oracle’s application products.” 
- Ivar Rachkind, Vice President, IT, Emerson Process Management

“Great learnings about the complexity of distributed order management.”
- Jack Consiglio, ERP Leader, GE Infrastructure

“AMR’s Oracle Peer Forum’s client-driven agenda assures the topics the forum members cover are strategic and timely.   Since the forum is comprised of senior level peers, the sharing of best practices, lessons learned and one-off networking opportunities provides Ingersoll Rand an invaluable service.”
- Barry Libenson, CIO, Ingersoll-Rand

“Thank you for leading the wonderful conference call today.  I found out things I never knew about Oracle before and have passed some of that information to our Purchasing folks.”
- Bruna Galati , Senior Analyst,  PPG Industries

“The sharing of ideas from a diverse group of attendees, getting to know that others have similar issues, and learning how they’ve been resolved is a very valuable part of this forum.”
- Carl Voiner, IT Manager, PPG Industries

“Networking and finding out how other companies are using Oracle products are valuable parts of the Peer Forum.”
- Bruce Drake, Director IT, Technical Operations, Valspar

“Nice job on the forum [teleconference].  It is definitely a worthy topic as seen by someone immersed in this for the past year!”
- Alan Lamb, Oracle Relationship Manager, Xerox

Benefits

  • AMR Research expert analysts draw best practices out of interactions
  • Peer experiences promoting good decision-making, maximizing ROI, and improving process effectiveness
  • Education and development opportunities for your team without the travel expense
  • Unlimited participation at all levels of your organization

Deliverables

  • Executive In-Person Summits: Members can send 2 attendees to each of the semiannual Executive Summits. These are highly interactive, in-depth sessions that focus on specific topics published ahead of time.
  • Monthly teleconference calls: Members receive unlimited access to all scheduled Peer Forum Teleconferences. Each 90-minute teleconference brings together peers in their community for an open discussion on a predetermined agenda.
  • Bi-weekly newsletter: Members receive the Peer Forum Newsletter twice a month. Detailing all new and pressing information pertaining to the Peer Forum, it is AMR Research's primary means of communicating with members, including asking them for input and sending invitations for participation in Peer Forum activities.
  • Written key findings and lessons learned from summits and teleconferences: Shortly after each teleconference and Executive Summit, AMR Research will publish a summary of the major discussion points and findings.
  • Member-to-member peer networking to address specific questions or needs
  • Member-driven agendas refreshed every 6 months

Advanced Planning Systems for Oracle E-Business Suite Shops

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Please join AMR Research Analyst, David Aquino, as we discuss Advanced Planning Systems for Oracle E-Business Suite Shops. This is a cross-forum teleconference with Oracle and Supply Chain peer forum members.

Within the overall sales and operations planning (S&OP) process, supply planning is an important sub-process for matching demand with the capability to deliver profitably. In this teleconference, Oracle EBS Peer Forum members, together with Supply Chain Peer Forum participants, will discuss what technologies are used for effective supply planning. We will discuss how supply planning technologies accommodate production of inventory plans and capacity plans. What techniques have members used for successfully calculating inventory levels across nodes as well as for determining capacity and material requirements? Lastly, we will discuss scalability, usability, and functional strengths and weaknesses of advanced supply planning technologies.

Fusion Middleware Strategies

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Fusion Middleware is gaining prominence in E-Business Suite shops as it becomes Oracle’s preferred method of developing customizations and integrations. This teleconference will explore what members’ experiences are using these tools. What are the skill set and training implications for your staff? What specific parts of Fusion Middleware (Application Integration Architecture, Business Process Management, Collaboration, Content Management, Data Integration, Developer Tools, Identity Management, Portal, User Interaction, and Enterprise 2.0, Service-Oriented Architecture) are used? We will also discuss whether members are converting from non-Oracle middleware technologies to Oracle middleware technologies and what the experience is like.

Organizing a BI and Analytics Center of Excellence

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Most centers of excellence (COEs) are built around specific technologies. Increasingly, companies are asking whether they should expand to include appropriate business expertise. In this teleconference, Peer Forum members will discuss techniques for establishing a BI and analytics COE to optimize use of BI technologies. What roles, skills, and organizational structure should be established? How do you realize the value of the COE quickly? What COE funding models are most effective? What metrics strategy should be established?

E-Business Suite Configuration and Replication

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Configuring an E-Business Suite template from which new instances can be implemented traditionally has been a complicated and manual process. This teleconference will explore how companies with multiple instances generate new E-Business Suite instances, how these instances get implemented into new businesses, how companies deal with changes in processes and upgrades.  In addition, we will discuss techniques for building and managing a repository of standardized information (software configurations, test scripts, code templates, and training material) to be used during implementations to save time and enforce standardization. Lastly, we will discuss tools and technologies that help.

Oracle Peer Forum Fall Executive Summit

November 10, 2009

Peer Forum Insights

The Oracle E-Business Suite Peer Forum Executive Summit is an all-day in-person networking event where members will discuss these strategic Oracle E-Business Suite topics:
· Upgrading to R12: Experiences and Challenges
· Planning for Fusion Applications: Town-Hall Meeting with an Oracle Executive
· EBS COE Organizational Structure and Staffing: What headcount is really required?

Project Portfolio Management in a Large-scale E-Business Suite Environment

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Peer Forum Insights

How do others manage multiple projects in a large-scale E-Business Suite environment? What prioritization and governance processes have companies put in place to manage the project portfolio? How do you balance multiple projects into one comprehensive portfolio? What organizational structure ensures effective project governance?  What methodologies (i.e. Stage gate) are used? What documents are used to communicate project status with the business? Best practices in ensuring that projects come in on-time and on-budget?

Effective Master Data Management: Governance, Processes, and Best Practices

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Peer Forum Insights

Managing your company’s master data is an important, yet challenging, function for IT executives.  In this teleconference, members will discuss how to solve the MDM problem.  How does one organize? What processes and governance should be established to ensure business data is clean and properly maintained on a regular basis? What roles should be established? Does ownership of the master data belong in IT or should it be with the business? Who is allowed to enter and change the master data? What have members’ experiences been with Oracle master data hubs? What third-party products are being used?

Minimizing Planned Downtime Windows for EBS Production Systems

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Peer Forum Insights

Previous Peer Forum discussions have raised this as a critical operations issue for companies running large instances, particularly of ERP. This teleconference will drill into further detail by examining the exact durations of a set of predefined activities for the planned downtime window. Tools and techniques for squeezing the duration of this window to an absolute minimum will be examined.

 

Support Models for Global E-Business Suite Deployments

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Peer Forum Insights

As companies build out their businesses globally, the support model for the E-Business Suite and surrounding applications becomes more complex. In this session, members will discuss best practices for managing large global instances of E-Business Suite, organizational structures that work, and techniques for consolidating multiple support departments into a global application support model. What are best practices for performance monitoring, enhancements, tuning, downtime, and disaster recovery? How are Peer Forum members handling cultural and regulatory differences and local languages? How can companies ensure good service at the least possible cost?

Best Practices Implementing Oracle Business Intelligence and BI Publisher

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Peer Forum Insights

More and more E-Business Suite customers are finding that OBIEE is becoming an integral part of their strategic application footprint. This teleconference will explore architectural issues and members’ usage of Oracle’s BI technologies. What is the appropriate architecture to scale as transaction volume grows? How do you handle operational data reporting of the production system? How do members poll the business to understand what business intelligence means to the business community? How do you determine and manage the business’s expectations around BI? How are members leveraging the latest features of BI Publisher and what legacy applications can be eliminated by its use?

Structuring the E-Business Suite for Business Flexibility

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Peer Forum Insights

Maintaining an ERP application architecture that enables business flexibility is an important challenge for most CIOs. In this session, executives will discuss steps they are taking to structure the E-Business Suite environment to enable rapid business cycle changes. We will also discuss how members are keeping current with their ERP investments while at the same time avoiding time-consuming, large scale business cases and major business transformation initiatives.

Oracle's BI Strategy: Town Hall Session with Paul Rodwick, VP Product Management, Oracle

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Peer Forum Insights

Over the years E-Business Suite customers have acquired various business intelligence products (DBI, Express products, Hyperion, Siebel Analytics, Cognos, Business Objects) and this has left members wondering how all these applications should fit into their strategic BI architecture. For this summit, we will invite an Oracle executive responsible for BI for a town hall style session to explore: 
• Which products should E-Business Suite users invest in now to ensure they are not wasting money while at the same time positioning themselves to take advantage of Oracle’s future architecture?
• What elements/capabilities of the above referenced applications will be incorporated into the future Oracle BI releases?
• What is Oracle’s overall BI strategy?
• What is the relationship between reporting elements, data-warehousing elements, and performance management elements?  

Oracle Peer Forum Spring Executive Summit

May 27, 2009

May 27th Oracle EBS Peer Forum Summit Format Changed to Teleconference Sessions

Due to numerous requests from members to participate in the summit session topics, despite having their travel restricted, AMR Research has decided to open up each summit session topic as a teleconference and to cancel the in-person summit planned for May 27th in Scottsdale, AZ. This allows more clients to participate which ultimately increases the overall value of each interaction.  In addition, since the Peer Forum members rated these topics highly in our voting, we wanted to ensure that everyone had the option to participate.

Write-ups from the Summit sessions to be published soon...please stay tuned.

Benchmarking E-Business Suite Infrastructure: Virtualization, Storage, Processing

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Peer Forum Insights

At the fall 2008 executive summit, members expressed interest in participating in an Oracle EBS Peer Forum survey to identify the platform technologies in use at other members companies and how virtualization is being utilized to reduce infrastructure costs. The results of the member survey will be discussed in the teleconference. Are members using virtualization to reduce the cost of server infrastructure? What are pitfalls/best practices for using virtualization? In a growing organization, what are ways to leverage the current infrastructure to minimize the cost of growth? What are the best ways to add more users to instances while at the same time reducing data volumes?

B2B/B2C E-Commerce Using iSupplier/iStore

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Peer Forum Insights

What technologies are E-Business Suite customers selecting to power their e-commerce initiatives? For companies standardizing on E-Business Suite’s iStore product, what level of integration is available out of the box versus how much has to be developed internally? Does iStore provide an easier path to order management, inventory visibility, and, ultimately, customer satisfaction? For B2B applications, what best practices are being defined around how to safely let suppliers/customers into your systems? How are real-time data sources such as EDI or POS data streams being leveraged?

Enterprise Content Management and Document Imaging Strategies

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Peer Forum Insights

ECM systems are a crucial consideration for EBS users when enhancing, and optimizing business processes. Without a comprehensive document management and imaging strategy, however, companies are often left with inefficiency, redundancy, and conflict. This discussion will explore ECM strategy and its role in supporting key business strategies. What technologies do companies use, and how do they interface with EBS? What role does Oracle’s Universal Content Management (formerly Stellent) play? Best practices in gaining user support? How does an ECM strategy help address compliance and risk issues, like e-discovery?

Supply Chain Planning Systems

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Peer Forum Insights

Many Peer Forum members are evaluating the supply chain planning options, with the majority considering and/or implementing Demantra. This teleconference will explore the following questions: What are E-Business Suite customers using for advanced planning and supply chain management systems? What are member experiences with Demantra in terms of scope, cost, and scalability? What is the ideal integration model back into the E-Business Suite, and what are the lessons learned in doing so? What is Oracle’s product roadmap around Edge Applications?

Exploring Fusion Middleware, Oracle's Platform Technologies and Service Oreinted Architecture (SOA) Teleconference

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Peer Forum Insights

Many E-Business Suite companies have been using best of breed EAI, BPM, and SOA technology from Software AG (WebMethods), Tibco, IBM, and BEA for years. Now Oracle is building its Fusion Middleware more deeply into the E-Business Suite technology stack and building its Application Integration Architecture (AIA) on this quickly evolving capability. Fusion Applications will be even more closely linked to the Fusion Middleware. This session will explore members’ options for adopting the new middleware technology. We'll discuss:
  • What is the Fusion middleware strategy?
  • How does the BEA acquisition fit in?
  • How Oracle’s platform technologies relate to the E-business Suite?
  • Challenges in implementing SOA in an E-Business Suite environment? 

Oracle EBS Peer Forum Fall Executive Summit

November 12 - 13, 2008

Peer Forum Insights

 

Oracle Patch Release Management: Best Practices for Deploying Patches and Managing Interdependencies Teleconference

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Peer Forum Insights

Deploying E-Business Suite software patches is an inevitable, often dreaded activity for the enterprise application team. Increasing concern around governance and regulatory compliance (e.g. HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley) has pushed enterprises to gain better control and oversight of their information assets. Given Oracle’s software distribution model, it isn’t going to change anytime soon, so managing patches needs to be a core competency of your team. This teleconference will explore best practices for selecting and implementing patches, managing the complex interdependencies between them, as well as ensuring proper regulatory validation.

Managing the Complexity of Oracle Licenses to Avoid "Surprise" Financial Hits Teleconference

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Peer Forum Insights

Ensuring proper software license compliance has become a burdensome challenge for many E-Business Suite customers. Oracle Corporation’s 30+ acquisitions in the last three years, coupled together with mergers and divestitures in client organizations only compound the problem. This teleconference will explore how members manage the plethora of licenses as Oracle acquires new technologies. What are the best ways to stay in synch with license updates? What are the best tools for consolidated reporting on license usage? These questions will be discussed in addition to hearing members’ techniques for ensuring effective utilization of purchased licenses.

The Role of the Successful Outsourcing Program Management Office (PMO) in Offshoring and Outsourcing Teleconference

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Peer Forum Insights

As IT cost pressures escalate, outsourcing and off-shoring continues to be in the limelight for most companies. One of the key challenges for the sourcing executive is organizing internally to successfully manage the vendor engagement process, while at the same time establishing effective internal shared services centers. This teleconference will explore the common issues members face with IT and BPO service providers, service-level metrics development, and vendor relationship issues. Members will discuss common activities for their respective outsourcing PMOs, the typical reporting structure, and ways to ensure a continually healthy relationship outsourcing relationship.