Specializing in the global sporting goods industry since 1989, JR286 is a leader in the manufacturing and distribution of branded and licensed sports accessories. A successful entrepreneurial business with the vision to become the premiere accessories company in the industry, JR286 needed to take their IT infrastructure – especially its finance capabilities — to a whole new world-class level of functionality. JR286’s business has been growing at a record 40%, year over year, to meet the demand for this explosive worldwide growth and expansion JR286 needed to take a whole new approach to the ERP needs. They chose Apolis’s Managed Services team to lead the way.

CHALLENGE

JR286 was running on Oracle e-Business Suite Rel 11i utilizing the entire Financial suite as well a heavy footprint of MFG & SCM. Operating under an “extended support” contract with Oracle ended up being difficult and extremely expensive to maintain. The company was manually converting text-based financial statements to Excel, with no drill down capabilities within those statements to the underlying journal entries for reconciliation.

JR286 was also facing the costly and extensive business disruption that come with replacing aging hardware for their EBS stack, which was required for their planned upgrade to Oracle R12. A forward thinking CIO and his executive team made a budget driven decision to get out of the data center business and trying maintaining their own complex ERP applications. The company wanted to take full advantage of extensive new features and functionalities available in Oracle R12.

SOLUTION

Apolis was chosen because it was able to quickly understand and address JR286’s unique needs and requirements; Apolis has a long and successful track record of Oracle ERP implementation, and upgrade migration projects. Apolis committed key internal management resources to sponsor the project and ensure a successful on-time and on-budget experience. The unique approach taken was to upgrade and migrate Oracle EBS to Amazon Web Services: mitigating risk was the underlying driver, along with eliminating the double testing that individual projects would require.

Apolis got to work with a phased migration project plan, allowing different business groups to get trained and begin testing and sign-off on their areas limiting overall business disruption and downtime. The move to AWS allowed JR286 to focus on their business growth and work hand-in-hand with Apolis to migrate their entire Oracle footprint to the cloud. After a successful upgrade and migration go-live, JR286 asked Apolis to take on the daily EBS Managed Services support requirements delivered by its global support team. This symbiotic relationship enables JR 286 to continue their overall business growth that drives them as a market leader.