“We selected Oracle for a couple reasons. First, we wanted to be on one of the most modern, secure ERP cloud platforms on the market today, but most importantly, we wanted to focus on refining gold and silver instead of having to mitigate IT issues.
— Kevin Braddy, IT Director, Asahi Refining
About
Asahi Refining combines nearly 200 years of industry experience with forward-looking innovation to bring its customers the world’s leading provider of precious metal assaying, refining, and bullion products. Asahi Holdings is a Tokyo, Japan based precious metals recycling (collection, recovery, refinement) company founded in 1952. Asahi Holdings acquired Johnson Matthey’s (JM) North American precious metal refineries, with locations in Salt Lake City, Brampton Canada, and St Catherine’s also in Canada.
6e Technologies was hired to bring in an outside view to merge a large global business with a newly acquired business. The task was to replace a legacy ERP system with a modern, innovative solution.
Challenges
The first task was to tackle how to replace manually-intensive legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) environment—which the company was using for decades as a corporate system—with a modern, integrated system to accelerate report creation and increase financial visibility.
The second was then to manage the ERP footprint across the organization with minimal IT resources to ensure the company can shift its full attention to its core business of refining gold and silver—accelerating business growth.
Execution
Asahi turned to 6e Technologies on scoping the migration project for its Salt Lake City- based Asahi Refining over a one-day workshop. 6e Technologies helped articulate the project challenges and also set very specific success criteria. The 6e team demonstrated a world class knowledgeable approach while keeping in mind deadlines and budget.
6e Technologies worked with Asahi Refining to transition from its parent company’s legacy ERP system onto Oracle Financials Cloud, Oracle Purchasing Cloud, and Oracle Self-Service Procurement Cloud in less than 15 weeks. To achieve this, 6e Technologies performed its internal Rapid Implementation Methodology using Oracle’s Rapid Implementation templates and its own project management expertise. The team used a unique implementation method where the system integrators met with the system users at client site only for requirement gathering, conference room pilots, and go-live. During the duration of the implementation process, the team worked to configure the system and used remote meeting technologies whenever needed. This approach ensured a large savings for the client as the travel involved was minimal. During the last phase of the implementation, 6e Technologies ensured that its team was on site working closely with Asahi Refining, who went live on October 9, 2015 and successfully completed its first month end.
Results
6e successfully transitioned the newly acquired business from Asahi Refining’s legacy environment to an integrated financial and accounting cloud system. This provided the gold and silver refinery’s executive team with real-time access to financial reports to increase visibility into reliable financial data and improve decision- making. Additionally, this allowed Asahi Refining to close month-end books in just three days versus the week it took to complete previously in the legacy environment.
Conclusion
The successful implementation of Oracle ERP Cloud applications enabled Asahi Refining to streamline its procurement and financials process, and provide better visibility into its business operations. The new system ensured enhanced role-based security, better communications, and smooth execution of business processes. 6e Technologies also helped in the seamless integration of various Oracle components and unique industry applications into the new applications, by doing hybrid integrations. 6e Technologies helped to interface data from Asahi Refining’s legacy on-premises system as well as its payroll cloud system into Oracle Financials Cloud— helping the company access accurate reporting. 6e Technologies also converted historical data to provide Asahi Refining with year-to-date comparisons for its financial reporting.
“6e Technologies exceeded our expectations with the Oracle ERP Cloud implementation while seamlessly integrating with our other legacy and cloud systems using Oracle Java Cloud Service and Oracle Database Cloud Service. Its team configured and integrated the Oracle applications and helped map our complex business processes to a world class financial cloud system. We went live with all of this in less than six months
— Kevin Braddy, IT Director, Asahi Refining
