Covance is one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive drug development services companies with more than 10,000 employees in 60 countries. Through its nonclinical, clinical and commercialization services, Covance has helped pharmaceutical and biotech companies develop one-third of all prescription medicines in the market today. Covance’s key customers include all of the top global pharmaceutical companies such as Novartis and Merck as well as key biotechnology companies.
An third-party ERP firm executed the original implementation of Oracle Financial Analytics and the original implementation had a number of issues resulting from the ERP vendor’s lack of expertise with packaged ERP analytic applications.
The first major issue was poor end user performance for the custom Financial Analytics reports. KPI conducted an 8 week engagement which improved report performance from over 2 minutes to less than 10 seconds. The second issue was that the ERP vendor had customized Financial Analytics in a manner that was inconsistent with Oracle’s customization methodology. (which KPI’s founders had created as the original architects for Oracle BI applications). This resulted in increased costs to upgrade the application.
Because the founding members of KPI were the original architects for the Oracle BI Applications, Covance asked KPI to re-implement the customizations using Oracle’s recommended methodology and upgrade the application. KPI successfully fixed the failed implementation in a 6 week engagement with use of a blended shore team that utilized resources from the KPI Offshore Technology Center. The end result is a Financial Analytics application that meets user needs in terms of functionality and end user performance, while at the same time having an application that is easy to maintain and upgrade moving forward.
