Our client, a service bureau within a larger organization, is looked upon for providing their customers access to a major implementation of ERP. This implementation was half dozen years old and had been touched by several iterations of management as well as technical resources.
A key stakeholder and the CIO decided that based on some past experiences, they would engage Collier IT to help investigate the possibilities for improvement. Collier IT decided to engage the software author in order to gain access to a proven proprietary methodology for just this type of investigation.
Because of the criticality of this ERP system, the investigation touched a large number of people and organizational areas, which can cause stagnation in decision-making. A recommendation to build out a proof-of-concept (POC) environment that could be tested with the exact specifications necessary was accepted by the group.
The architecture selected for the POC was Dell Windows based application servers alongside an Oracle Engineered System (Exadata) database server with network enhancements and SQL tuning. This environment proved to be literally hundreds of times more performant in some scenarios and several areas, such as purchase order/invoice matching that had been failing, completed within client processing time and backup windows.
The client ended up purchasing and going live with the recommended solution and along with Collier IT staff, utilized Oracle Database and Real User Experience Insight (RUEI) software to quickly track and repair some early problems that can come up with this type of large and complex system.
The solution is implemented, certified and in production use. On the first day of deployment, email feedback from the system users indicated that the system was so fast that they were confused about whether the system actually working or crashing!
(It was working and the client presented the success story at Oracle Open World 2013)