Siram improves back-office processes and financial planning with Oracle Cloud

Siram, the reference group in Italy for the efficient management of energy, water, and special waste, supports public and private customers with ecological transformation through sustainable and technologically innovative solutions. Present in Italy for over 100 years, it operates with a team of over 3,400 professionals.

Conforming to corporate cloud strategy SATAWAD—for secure, anytime, anywhere, any device—Siram embarked on a journey to move key business systems out of its data center and onto the cloud. These included a heavily customized ERP on-premises solution, Oracle E-Business Suite, along with some non-Oracle workloads.

Having used Oracle E-Business Suite for more than 15 years, Siram selected Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) based on Oracle’s product knowledge and a trusted partnership. It also considered Oracle Cloud to be the only viable cloud solution to help it modernize applications and IT infrastructure.

“Oracle offered the only real cloud solution. We looked at other alternatives, but didn’t consider them,” says Mario D’Argenio, Siram’s corporate IT solutions manager.

With Oracle Cloud applications built entirely in the cloud, the utilities service provider automated its administration and accounting, purchasing, order management, and contract management activities along with financial planning and budgeting.

Through the scalability and performance of the new applications running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Siram has integrated day-to-day transactional activity with planning and budgeting, doubling invoice processing and reducing the time required for gathering, reconciling, and validating financial data by 40%.

Oracle Cloud ERP procure-to-pay (P2P) and payables-invoice-to-supplier best practices have facilitated invoice approvals by managers, who now deal with all requests by phone or mobile device, reducing error-prone manual work. In addition, Siram implemented Oracle Cloud Self-Service Procurement, which features a punch-out function to allow direct access to product catalogs with prenegotiated prices and shipping costs on supplier sites. As a result, the company has almost doubled supplier invoice processing from 60,000 per year under Oracle E-Business Suite to 110,000 in 2021 with Oracle Cloud ERP applications.

Modernizing P2P processes for the utility company—which involved regular database batch processing—was a key driver for moving to Oracle Cloud. With data automatically consolidated into Oracle Enterprise Database Service from 130 operating units across Italy and easily accessible in Oracle Analytics Cloud, Siram business users now have real-time access to transactional activity and performance management, resulting in greater efficiencies in procurement, inventory, projects, financials, and reporting.

OCI’s Integration Cloud Service automates the handling of the process in Italy whereby suppliers first send invoices to the government, which then redirects the supplier invoice to the buyer.

Migrating to OCI has also given Siram control over costs by providing full visibility into its spending, so the company is no longer constrained by the midterm need to upgrade hardware or software. In addition, Siram has gained full integration of business processes by using OCI to connect Oracle and non-Oracle workloads such as fuel supply management and treasury solutions. Also, the company’s security is stronger with Oracle Cloud Guard, which helps to identify security misconfigurations and unused resources.

Siram has worked with Oracle partner Business Reply since 2006, when the company moved off IBM’s AS/400 platform and onto Oracle databases, middleware, hardware, and applications. Business Reply has been a key partner in rolling out Oracle Cloud ERP across Siram’s Italy operations.

Oracle Consulting led the EPM implementation.