Civil engineering giant Balfour Beatty is using a core
team of end-users to facilitate the roll-out of Oracle eBusiness
Suite across its diverse businesses.
The team has so far implemented Oracle across a quarter of the
company in a programme that began 18 months ago, delegates at the
Oracle Summit were told.
Ajey Sharma, chief information officer at Balfour Beatty, said
the team comprises a group of end-users who were involved in the
first implementation. They are joined by a project manager, key
users and a business process owner, all from the business unit
where the Oracle ERP system is being implemented.
Sharma's strategy for the roll-out is to run a single instance
of the Oracle ERP system, with business units connecting to a
central datacentre over leased lines. Balfour Beatty is in the
process of upgrading this network to an IPVPN that complies with
QoS 6, a quality-of-service specification.
The company is implementing the finance, project, HR, payroll
and purchasing functions in Oracle eBusiness 11.5.9. The
application uses the Oracle 9i database and runs on Sun Solaris
servers.