About IIS

A preeminent educational publishing empire turned to IIS to architect an order-to-cash system across 50 business units. IIS created unified financial system that met the unit's individual needs and improved financial decision making at the highest levels. Importantly, the ability to quickly access current data also allows the company to communicate more effectively with Wall Street and demonstrate their financial acumen.

IIS was tapped by one of the world's largest publishers to architect an order-to-cash (OTC) system to handle more than $2 billion dollars of yearly sales in the education market. The client sold books, toys and educational technology in an unusually large number of distinct distribution channels throughout North and South America, Asia and the United Kingdom. These included retail outlets, school- and home-based continuity programs, sales to individual schools, school districts, libraries, television networks and discounted sales to literacy non-profits.

Internally our client realized that they did not have a system sophisticated enough to handle the order volumes for a company of their size that had grown to more than 50 business units, many of which were acquired with legacy systems. The result was a series of segregated business silos that were incapable of consolidating financials efficiently or leveraging customer information effectively across the organization.

The out-dated technology could never support the sales level they currently enjoy let alone scale for the future. They were overdue for a centralized Internet Protocol (IP) infrastructure with a unified financial system that would meet the individual needs of their business units and provide the tools for improved financial decision making at the highest levels.

Further, there were external pressures. Wall Street analysts, shareholders and institutional investors expected that an industry leader be nimble and able to react quickly to financial intelligence to stay competitive. They also expected to see quarterly results reported in a more timely fashion.

The client had been an HP customer but their experience had been limited to the desktop level products and smaller servers at the point they embarked on a sophisticated initiative to deploy an enterprise-wide system. Clearly their hardware and software needs would have to be completely reevaluated and they were open to the possibilities of working with whatever combination of vendors could provide the best order-to-cash system. With the OTC system would come the capability to generate timely consolidated financial statements at the end of various reporting periods.

Comprehensively addressing the IT needs of 50 business divisions and senior management.

For IIS, the challenge of architecting a complex system of this size was compounded by the fact that they were working with a highly fragmented organization. While responsible to an IT evaluation committee, IIS also considered the divisions as their clients. Whether those were trade publishers, packagers of books for the school and library market, magazine publishers, marketers of educational technology products, videos, television programs or toys, each of our client's business groups had different priorities in terms of financial management and reporting.

IIS embarked on a project that was more than constructing a reliable IT system at a good price. It was really helping their client reengineer how they process the transactions that lie at the heart of their business and how they track profitability. The larger goals included demonstrating superior management abilities to the financial community with reduced response time and greater flexibility in financial decision-making.

Before any hardware partner was selected, there was an extensive due diligence program to choose an enterprise-wide software suite. The client's fulfillment and accounting needs were considered across business units and cross-referenced to the features and processes of the leading software solutions. Those individual analyses were then broad stroked across the entire organization to see which package proved the best fit covering everything from order taking and fulfillment, warehouse management, distribution and CRM, each of which is critical individually but collectively represented the life blood of the company.

Myriad spread sheets later, the second phase of due diligence began, confirming with the business units that everything they had told the evaluation committee was true and that all their needs were genuinely covered.

The goal was to avoid software customizations whenever possible that would add to the cost and time-to-market. From a feature/function standpoint the Oracle Financials e-Business Suite was the appropriate choice. But the data in terms of Store Keeping Units (SKUs), order volumes and data representing end-of-day to end-of-year (and everything in between) was larger than what had previously been handled by any Oracle client. With no baseline references to assure IIS and the client that the software could do the job, Oracle went into high gear to demonstrate how robust their solution could be.

Larry Ellison, Oracle's chairman, joined his engineers and worked with IIS' technical team to run a series of benchmark tests that pushed the volumes sky high to prove the Oracle suite could scale to the levels promised. The benchmarking procedure also provided an opportunity to run the Oracle software on alternative hardware platforms to see which would offer superior performance.

The IIS and HP partnership offers the benefits of working with a fully-integrated team of account managers and technical architects to plan the benchmarking tests. The group had the experience and technical prowess to do sophisticated capability planning and match it against projected architectures on the HP platform. Beginning in early 2005, a very formal set of heavily-scripted benchmarks was developed and tested over a nine-month period with live data running on Oracle's software. Each test conducted with IIS ran for four to five weeks on equipment provided by HP, using 50,000 square feet of an HP facility in Cupertino, California.

After each test came a quality assurance program, including performance analysis, regression testing to address issues from either a software or hardware standpoint, make adjustments and finalize for production.

"The IIS and HP team were uniquely talented, creative and focused throughout the project."

One of IIS' largest responsibilities was to size the environment for the volume of data and the number of users during peak periods, not just in the short-term but recognizing what kind of processing power and storage can be easily upgraded to serve the long-term business needs. The balance of performance and price was a delicate one as the test data volumes were driven up, IIS needed to find the best architecture that scaled to the volumes our client required through examination of different combinations of CPU and throughput. The peripheral applications were required to work efficiently with the accounting applications that included business intelligence and data warehousing and the ability to query between them.

Value-added solutions through a full IIS, HP and client partnership.

IIS proved through assuming responsibility for these rigorous tests what they provide as a value-added reseller in architecting the right solutions. Working closely with HP and the client evaluation committee, IIS demonstrated that it is about more than sales, it is truly a trusted long-term partner with a deep understanding of business process needs. IIS was skilled at understanding, and presenting to the evaluation committee, the nuances of the hardware architectures under consideration as they projected solutions for seven or eight different hypothetical growth scenarios.

IIS is known for its meticulous attention to the total customer experience and they focused on making these high-level and high-stakes decisions as clear and informed as possible. The client appreciated receiving IIS solutions proposals that included highly detailed spreadsheets with technical drawings providing clear visual depictions. This attention to detail was balanced by a business summary with focused pricing ramifications that clearly differentiated the choices inherent in each solution under consideration at an executive level.

"All we ever needed to do was pick up the phone and IIS could make anything happen no matter how short the time-frame."

The level of detail and preparation work performed by IIS is legendary and they left nothing to chance in their analyses and recommendations. Their greatest responsibility is always to provide the assurance to the client that the right choices are being made at the right investment level, and these investments are considerable. This client was very driven by Return on Investment (ROI), so the IIS cost-benefit analysis was geared to meet their decision criteria.

IIS's experience and professionalism provided the client evaluation team with the confidence that they:

• were choosing the most efficient system configuration for the best price
• were presenting the board of directors an accurate budget for a full deployment
• knew the system investment would scale for various growth scenarios
• had performance guarantees from their vendors
• were not putting their current business in jeopardy during the migration

The Superdome solution proves the most powerful platform for change.

IIS and HP won the engagement and the client moved forward with installations at three data centers. The system was based on four HP Integrity Superdomes, as well as HP rx 8640 systems, employed primarily for disaster recovery, testing and development purposes. IIS and HP also provided xp 12,000 disk arrays, SAN equipment and communications gear. Part of the IIS service was facilitating the financing negotiations that allowed the client to lease HP hardware on extremely favorable terms.

IIS helped create a phased deployment of the existing business divisions, building in the ability to add new business units to this architecture in the future. The first business division went online in 200X and was chosen for the volume of its transactions and its large Internet sales component.

IIS' dedicated training teams worked closely to get everyone up-to-speed and fully familiar with the new technology they would be using. An effective knowledge transfer program ensured that the system administrators were comfortable with the improved business processes and procedures.

The result was a more efficient and competitive publishing company, able to understand its challenges, opportunities and profitability in a way that was never before possible. Now for the first time:

• up-to-date financial information can be consolidated in short order at every level up to the CFO and provide the tools for more effective fiscal management.
  
  
• a fully functioning order-to-cash system with performance resiliency is integrated with the provisioning of the company and procurement of everything within the company from pencils to brokering time on printing presses.
  
  
• the cost of producing products, warehousing, distributing and selling is clearer, division leaders can make better decisions about how to deliver product at the right price, track their clients needs and better serve them.
  
  
• available capital can now be seen so management can prioritize the use of cash on hand.
  
  
• there is a significant improvement in logistics management, in getting the product through the order and fulfillment process. Previously large batch runs in customer order fulfillment were taking up to 10 hours a day and IIS helped reduced that time by 50%.
  
  
• Wall Street no longer can complain that the client is slow to react to the financial elements of their business, and reporting results a quarter behind their competitors. IIS was therefore instrumental in helping our client demonstrate to the financial community that they were an agile competitor in responding to business changes and opportunities.

IIS is known for its ability to build consensus among the many constituencies that must be served in a project of this scope. It was lucky to have an extremely experienced leadership team on the client side that was able to remain completely neutral and focus on what was best for the company today and tomorrow.