A Houston-area Oil & Gas Refining and Marketing company turned to Vantage Solutions to transition from a custom-built customer auto-draft solution to standard functionality within the Oracle E-Business Suite.
The Challenge
Our client:
- Auto drafted customer bank accounts via ACH to settle sales invoices as an industry standard practice
- Wished to leverage their existing software investments to replace the Energy Trading and Risk Management (ETRM) solution which was performing auto draft functionality
- Created a custom auto draft solution in Oracle E-Business Suite years ago patterned after the ETRM solution for a different segment of their business
- Wanted to evaluate the custom Oracle solution to see if it would be a candidate to replace the auto draft functionality of the ETRM solution
The Solution
We:
- Focused on the requirements instead of replicating the ETRM and custom Oracle solutions
- Satisfied the requirements using Automatic Receipts standard functionality in the Receivables module of the Oracle E-Business Suite
The Results
A standard functionality solution that:
- Often processes over 100 daily auto drafts for over 1,000 sales invoices contributing to over $10M in auto draft deposits
- Was minimally customized to automate the daily processing, format the customer draft notices, and transmit the bank files
- Is a candidate to replace the custom Oracle solution for the other segment of the business
- Exceeded the benefits and capabilities of the ETRM and custom Oracle solutions
Benefits include:
- Virtually no custom code to maintain and no software defects to resolve
- Ability to dispute invoices in Oracle to prevent them from auto drafting
- Full visibility of the automatic receipt transaction and accounting throughout the selection, creation, remittance, and reconciliation processes
- Simplified bank reconciliation with Oracle being the system of record for both receipt creation and reconciliation
- Ability to auto draft any Oracle invoice
- Centralized maintenance of customer banking information and draft notice communication details in the Oracle E-Business Suite customer master (no separate/duplicate data masters)
Our Philosophy
- Standardize, don’t customize
- Focus first on requirements, then solutions
- Begin with the end in mind