Apolis implements Oracle ERP Cloud in a short 7-month time frame for Real Estate Leader 

When you are a US-based real estate leader experiencing a surge of market growth, you need a financial solution that manages all aspects of your rapidly expanding business. The Rancon Group chose the Oracle ERP team at Apolis to help them increase productivity, decrease costs and streamline financial activity. The results speak for themselves. 

The Rancon Group is an integrated network of real estate-related companies and divisions formed to provide an array of services for buyers, sellers, developers, investors and owners of real property. After the financial downturn of 2008, The Rancon Group saw its business evolving. The company moved up the value chain, developing its assets by managing infrastructure projects—spanning resort, hotel, and winery developments.  

The Scenario 

To scale its enterprise operations up, The Rancon Group needed a financial solution that would enable it to manage all aspects of its expanded business. When business started growing, the Rancon Group felt the need of a financial solution to help it manage all aspects of its expanded business. The solution needed to start simplifying, standardizing, and accelerating the financial processes for more than 100 legal entities.  

The Group needed a more flexible reporting tool that would enable it to get critical information in the hands of its management team for quick decision making. Moreover, when they moved into the new line of business, they wanted a solution to get information to its professionals in the field. 

The Rancon Group chose Apolis as its Oracle implementation partner. The Apolis team implemented Oracle ERP Cloud in a short 7–month time frame to help Rancon group to leverage Oracle ERP Cloud’s robust functionality as well as the reliability, scalability, flexibility, and cost benefits. 

Apolis Solution 

Apolis implemented Oracle ERP Cloud to help Rancon group to modernize its business and get a 360-degree view of their entire organization with expanded reporting capabilities. With the cloud solution in place, The Rancon Group could now derive better and near real-time information from its accounting data—such as individual company cash balances, a process that previously took up to two hours.  

Rancon group worked with Apolis to design an approval matrix that routes invoices based on the entity and authority level with which it is associated as well as a scanning solution that will allow it to eliminate the need to exchange paper invoices across offices. Speaking on The Rancon Group experience with Apolis, Steven Van Houten, CFO, The Rancon Group said: “We purchased Oracle ERP Cloud in April 2014 and began the project in July. Working with Apolis, we went fully live on January 1, 2015.”  

Business Benefits 

• Accelerated the monthly financial close by 55%—from 22 days to 15—delivering more accurate information and affording the finance team more time for analysis 
• Cut an additional five days from the financial close cycle by leveraging treasury automation tools for bank requisitions 
• Supported nearly 100% business growth—and diversification into new sectors, including a winery and self-storage facilities—over 3 years, while adding only 2 members to the accounting team (a 25% increase)
• Reduced the number of manual journal entries required during the financial reporting process by 80% thanks to premade templates within Oracle ERP Cloud
• Leveraged process automation to achieve a 30%-40% reduction in time-to-pay for invoices, improving cash management  
• Cut average processing cost per invoice by approximately 50% 
• Delivered timely and accurate visibility into loans and cash flows thanks to the ability to create entity-level financial reports in seconds, versus two or more hours
• Accelerated and improved accuracy of vendor information updates from hours to seconds thanks to a single chart of accounts 
• Positioned Rancon to optimize profitability with more effective cash management of long-term real estate development projects—which can require more than $100 million in land improvements and construction costs  
• Deployed the solution in just seven months and benefitted from continuous improvement of Oracle Cloud without the costly and time-consuming upgrade processes associated with traditional on-premises implementations