Internacionalización carvajal

Oracle Customer Case Study

Grupo Carvajal S.A. Integrates Procedures and Reduces Costs with a Single Platform
“The strict methodology we’ve developed to implement Oracle solutions has enabled us to design a global technology model for the company’s groups, something that didn’t exist at Carvajal before. We’ve also been able to integrate and standardize the company’s centralized businessprocedures.” – Pedro Felipe Carvajal, Vicepresident of Corporate Strategy, Grupo Carvajal S.A. In 1904, Manuel Carvajal Valencia and his two sons printed the first page of a weekly paper on a rudimentary press in Cali, Colombia. Little did they imagine that a hundred years later, the company they had just founded would be a multinational Latin American enterprise, with operations in 18 countries. Thetransformation of Grupo Carvajal S.A. to a multinational corporation demanded that the company replace dispersed and obsolete legacy systems with an IT infrastructure with flexible, scalable, integrated applications to support the company’s growth. “Every business in our company had its own independent IT platform. Although we could share information, the applications had very poor user interfacesand weren’t flexible enough to adapt to the company’s needs in every country,” said Eduardo Carrasquilla, director of IT Infrastructure at Grupo Carvajal. The company also needed to integrate the financial procedures of 160 separate businesses in a Web environment, to make it possible to quickly and easily replicate and deploy applications throughout the organization. In 2003, when Grupo Carvajalstarted optimizing its technology, it relied on the integrated Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Business Intelligence, and Oracle Hyperion applications. This enabled it to replace separate systems, integrate and standardize financial procedures, and replicate and deploy a single IT model throughout the organization.

Grupo Carvajal S.A. Cali, Colombia www.carvajal.com.co

Industry:
IndustrialManufacturing

Annual Revenue:
US$1.8 billion

Employees:
24,000

Oracle Products & Services:
Oracle Database Enterprise Edition Oracle Real Application Clusters Oracle Financials Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning Oracle Inventory Optimization Oracle Purchasing Oracle iProcurement Oracle iSupplier Portal Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Hyperion Financial ManagementCopyright © 2009, Oracle. All rights reserved. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Published March 2009

Oracle Customer Case Study

Key Benefits:
Replaced obsolete, inflexible systems Integrated and standardized administrative-accounting procedures in eight of the company’s 12 businesssectors Reduced administrative operating costs by US$4 million per year Consolidated purchasing procedures, saving US$7.3 million Reduced costs for administration and control of inventory by 7%

Integrating Financial Procedures in a Single Platform and Improving Operating Efficiency Since implementing a unified IT platform of Oracle E-Business Suite applications, Grupo Carvajal has benefitted byconsolidating administrative-accounting information and administrative processes in eight of its businesses. For example, it eliminated manual processes and reprocessing of information in Excel spreadsheets for monthly closing, accelerating the time for closing from 13 days to 5 days. The company also accelerated the time required to generate consolidated financial statements under internationalaccounting norms, from six months to one month. This capability facilitated critical decision making at the corporate level. In addition, Carvajal improved purchasing efficiency by consolidating purchasing procedures throughout the group. The convenience of recording and following purchases online helped save the company US$7.3 million annually. “We’ve achieved significant savings in purchasing,...