“We adopt anything new very quickly,” says Ajay Kumar, senior director of quality and compliance at Photon Interactive.
That practice has stood Photon in good stead with a growing list of high-profile customers for its retail-oriented mobile applications—which, the company says, are responsible for more than 150 million consumer interactions a day among customers and employees of organizations across North America, Europe, and India. “We create digital experiences for the Fortune 100,” says Michael Levine, vice president of marketing and business development. “We make our customer’s customer go ‘wow’ and work as our customers’ innovation partner of choice.”
The company’s agility was put to the test, though, when, Photon set about upgrading its IT infrastructure with an ambitious implementation of two cloud-based mission-critical systems, Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Cloud and Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) Cloud—both at the same time. The project serves as an object lesson in the groundwork and cultural adjustments needed when companies initiate a cloud move, no matter how ambitious.
Growth Requires Mature ERP System
To create these award winning digital experiences which demonstrate the latest in mobile experience and consumer engagement, the company employs 3,600 designers and engineers spread across four geographic areas: India, Indonesia, the Netherlands, and the United States. Yet up to a year and a half ago, Photon was using an ERP system which had been sufficient to meet its requirements when it was a smaller company, but which Photon had to upgrade to meet the challenges of the rapid growth that it faced.
In 2012, for instance, Photon upped its employee population by 70% while at the same time its revenue grew by 65%. Growth like that “brings a lot of pressure on the entire ERP system,” Kumar says. Photon needed mature IT capabilities—scalability, of course, but also easy upgradability and, in particular, automatic integration with its other enterprise systems including project and sales management—which the earlier system couldn’t provide. “It’s built for smaller enterprises and we needed to move to a system which could support the size to which we were growing to,” Kumar says.
Related: A Unified ERP and HCM Solution
Rapid growth also strained Photon’s employee recruitment and management capabilities. After making the most of a homegrown HR application for several years, in 2008 Photon implemented Taleo’s cloud-based recruiting system (now part of Oracle HCM Cloud).
Indeed, Photon jumped into the cloud early on. It was one of the first customers for Google’s corporate email system, Kumar says, and in 2010 it switched over an on-premises customer relationship management (CRM) system to a cloud-based point solution.
But its on-premises ERP system was holding it back. Photon wanted “something better,” Kumar says, something that would give the company the enterprise interconnectedness it was looking for and “where everything happens automatically”—something that was “very, very hard to achieve with the earlier system.”
ERP Upgrade Brings Neighbors Together
Photon knew it needed help. A local services firm didn’t work out, so Photon sought out a firm with wider experience and found NTT DATA, which is based in Tokyo but has offices around the world, including in the same building in Chennai, India, where Photon has one of its major delivery centers. “That made it easy to interact with them,” Kumar says.
Photon was set on using Oracle HCM Cloud, but still undecided on the ERP cloud. For one thing, Photon wanted to run the new systems out of its offices in Chennai, but at the time Oracle didn’t have localized versions of its cloud ERP apps. Given NTT’s Chennai presence and global experience, “we knew we could successfully implement this,” says Swaminathan Natarajan, senior director for Oracle delivery at NTT DATA.
Also, Photon had an aggressive schedule for its two implementations, looking to have everything completed by the end of 2015, so the company “would be able to deal with the expanding business concerns in a timely fashion,” says Natarajan.
Related: Finance and HR Is a Marriage Made in Cloud Heaven
The consulting firm had done simultaneous on-premises implementations of ERP and HCM, and separate cloud ERP and cloud HCM projects, but never implementations of the two cloud systems at the same time. Such a “time-bound” project would have to be run in parallel tracks—“very challenging,” Natarajan says.
Due Diligence and Detailed ERP Upgrade Roadmaps
NTT DATA’s due diligence and detailed roadmaps helped convince Photon the cloud ERP services would work. For instance, Photon needed to be sure Oracle Cloud services would support the integrated workflow it was looking for with its other systems, including its custom-built project management system and its cloud-based point solution. So Kumar’s team worked closely with the NTT engineers. “We analyzed how the APIs [application programming interfaces] would be used” to interconnect the systems, he says.
NTT DATA had only about two weeks “to educate [Photon] on what to expect for this kind of project from their side and from our side,” says Jayanta Samanta, vice president for Oracle Services at NTT DATA. The firm conducted three-day “pre-implementation workshops” to discuss “decision-making factors that may cause delays—and [how to] avoid those delays,” he says. The localization work on the Oracle ERP Cloud apps was “done manually, thoroughly tested, and then implemented” in that time as well, Natarajan says.
Photon and NTT DATA started implementation in June 2015. The applications were up and running successfully by January 2016.
Change Management a Challenge in Any Project
One of the project’s big challenges was what Kumar characterizes as “a change management issue.” The on-premises ERP system had been customized in specific ways the users were dependent on, and it took time for them to get accustomed to the cloud services’ more standard business processes.
The company did a good job promoting the new systems’ selling points to its employees, using a “why this makes your life easier” appeal, Kumar says. In particular, CFO Ram Charan Sesharaman and his team’s hard work in that regard helped the project “sail through,” he says.
And while there was a learning curve for Photon’s employees in using the new ERP system, the company’s experience using its Taleo system “made our lives a little easier in terms of HCM,” Kumar says.
Efficient Procurement, Faster Hiring
The new systems are having an impact. “Not even a year since we went live, and I can see a lot of changes in terms of the way we work,” Kumar says. One big change involves not having to write manual interfaces between enterprise systems, which means “we’re able to do some things faster—procure faster, hire faster,” he says.
Another benefit in terms of hiring has to do with the systems themselves. “Potential employees look at what systems the company is using,” Kumar says, and the cloud is a selling point with the tech-savvy talent Photon seeks.
Photon is looking to move more enterprise systems to the cloud, such as its ID and access management application as well as its “entire IT services function,” Kumar says.
Related: Your Complete Guide to Modern ERP
