In various industries around the world, enterprise leaders are increasingly relying on digital processes and data integration to gain business insights that enable faster and better decision-making and growth. To keep up with this pace, leading enterprises are shifting their ecosystems to the cloud. Among several benefits, cloud transformation is helping them drive business efficiency, improve data visibility, attract talent, gain a competitive advantage and improve customer experience.
Apollo Hospitals, one of India’s largest healthcare organisations, is an example of how investing in cloud transformation can represent a pathway to business agility, efficiency and growth. Headquartered in Chennai, Apollo Hospitals is a multispecialty hospital network with over 10,000 beds across 73 hospitals, over 5,000 pharmacies, more than 300 clinics, 1,100+ diagnostic centres and 200+ telemedicine units. In essence, this large enterprise handles critical life outcomes, is geographically spread out across a vast territory, and encompasses a multitude of lines of business. Combined, these factors add tremendous complexity to Apollo Hospitals’ finance reporting.
In 2023, Apollo Hospitals reached the realisation that in order to improve patient experience across the enterprise, reduce month-end closure time and capture superior business insights, it needed to transition out of its legacy Oracle E-Business Suite EBS system and invest in a modern cloud platform to support business growth. Apollo Hospitals chose to embark on this transformative journey with Oracle and PwC to implement an integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) system capable of managing new business models.
During the Oracle CloudWorld Tour Mumbai on 14 February 2024, Apollo Hospitals’ CIO Ashokkan Somuveerappan spoke with PwC partner and Oracle Practice Leader Saumyendra Bhattacharyya about their cloud journey. He highlighted three relevant factors that stood out due to their cloud transformation:
- The importance of change management to realise the impact of the solution: For Somuveerappan, without deep change to business process, the organisation can’t fully grasp the business process transformation. ‘You must be able to tell your workforce how this solution will make their tasks more effective,’ he said. ‘Those are questions you must have in mind to take your workforce along the journey. This means that you need to be ahead of learning what the business processes will look like [in future].’
- The complexity of multiple business integrations into the ERP system
- The importance of an implementation partner to help guide the organisation through such a complex process: ‘Implementing Oracle Fusion in our organisation was a nine and a half-month journey, and we had to educate close to 800 users across the enterprise.’
Rajiv Pillai, CFO of Lighthouse Learning, shared the challenges his organisation faced when, in 2021, it decided to embark on a cloud journey with Oracle and PwC. Lighthouse Learning, a network of k-12 educational institutions that combines over eight brands, impacts the lives of nearly 175,000 children daily, and employs 15,000 people across India. ‘We started our Oracle journey right during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. While most organisations avoided investing in a major technology transformation at the time and focused on surviving instead, we saw the crisis as a great growth opportunity,’ he said.
During the session, Pillai also talked about the strategic investment made by Lighthouse Learning and how Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) enabled the organisation to gain the flexibility and scalability they sought.
‘As we looked at many solutions and the landscape, we analysed the criteria and our needs. What mattered to us was scalability.’ Throughout the implementation, PwC provided Lighthouse Learning with consulting support that began with the analysis of key issues under four main areas, proposed automation solutions to drive efficiency and identified a long-term managed services path to unlock sustained success.
The OCI implementation was completed in September 2021, and Pillai shared the organisation’s business outcomes from the cloud transformation. ‘We doubled our network since then, and Oracle’s technology has allowed this process. Supporting our growth was key to this implementation,’ said Pillai.
Oracle Fusion – accelerating enterprise outcomes
At the forefront of cloud technology, Oracle has the breadth of capabilities, proven success in the market and a well-established alliance with PwC to deliver end-to-end transformation that allows enterprises to achieve lasting business value. With Oracle as the enabling technology, PwC empowers business leaders to make strategic choices that drive measurable performance improvement throughout their cloud journey.
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