As the economy moved into a recession, last year’s Black Friday was particularly dismal for many retailers who, in anticipation of the usual holiday rush and ignoring any leading economic indicators, had stocked up on inventories. Last year’s lesson was remembered this year, and Black Friday profits – although weak – at least weren’t dragged down by the costs of excessive year-end inventories. View the original Blog post: http://www.eprentise.com/blog/trends-and-technology/old-dog-new-tricks-how-gartners-pattern-based-strategy-impacts-oracle-e-business-suite-customers/ Website: www.eprentise.com Twitter: @eprentise Google+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+Eprentise/posts Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/eprentise Ensure your data is Complete, Consistent, and Correct by using eprentise software to transform your Oracle® E-Business Suite.

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Old Dog, New Tricks:
How Gartner’s Pattern-Based
Strategy Impacts Oracle®
E-Business Suite Customers
an eprentise white paper

2. Old Dog, New Tricks: How Gartner’s Pattern-Based Strategy Impacts Oracle® E-Business Suite Customers
Copyright © 2014 eprentise, LLC. All rights reserved. www.eprentise.com | Page 2
© 2010 eprentise, LLC. All rights reserved.
eprentise® is a registered trademark of eprentise, LLC.
FlexField Express and FlexField are registered trademarks of Sage Implementations, LLC.
Oracle, Oracle Applications, and E-Business Suite are registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation.
All other company or product names are used for identification only and may be trademarks of their respective owners.
Author: Helene Abrams
Published: December 16, 2009
www.eprentise.com

3. Old Dog, New Tricks: How Gartner’s Pattern-Based Strategy Impacts Oracle® E-Business Suite Customers
Copyright © 2014 eprentise, LLC. All rights reserved. www.eprentise.com | Page 3
As the economy moved into a recession, last year’s Black Friday was particularly dismal for many retailers
who, in anticipation of the usual holiday rush and ignoring any leading economic indicators, had stocked
up on inventories. Last year’s lesson was remembered this year, and Black Friday profits – although weak –
at least weren’t dragged down by the costs of excessive year-end inventories.
But our collective memories are relatively short. Already new mortgage-backed securities are being sold,
this time on the backs of first-time home-buyers even as Dubai World sends jitters through the financial
community. Are we able to recognize the weak signals that will eventually turn into tsunamis, but well in
advance, so that we have time to react? Or are we still relying on the tried and true lagging indicators,
quarterly sales reports and performance reviews?
And even if we recognize the signals and know what we need to do in order to stay competitive, will we
be able to adapt quickly and then sustain the ability to respond for the next time when conditions change
yet again?
Dealing with Change – Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks
Gartner maintains that companies need to be proactive in reacting to changes and recognizing the early
indicators and patterns that can provide visibility into potential future opportunities and threats. These
early-warning predictive patterns are increasingly coming from outside the enterprise, driven by an
interconnected society and changes that are outside the control of an enterprise. As the investors in Dubai
World seek funding, US corporate executives worry about the impact on their already fragile economic
recoveries and how deliveries passing through the busy United Arab Emirates ports will affect their just-
in-time supply chain. Earlier Sense and Respond systems and Business Intelligence systems did not focus
on the transactional data in ERP systems that might reveal indicative patterns of future changes and help
executives make fact-based decisions. Further, Yvonne Genovese, Gartner VP and Distinguished Analyst,
identifies several factors that inhibit the ability to predict and adapt to change in ERP systems. Genovese
maintains that, even when exceptions are recognized in an enterprise, there is “siloed visibility” meaning
that the exceptions are not shared across different organizations. Additionally, the lack of transparency
and the presence of conflicting data often result in conflicting patterns, and finally, ERP systems by their
very nature are not flexible enough for decision makers to change the business processes in order to react
to and change the pattern quickly (and not a 3-year reimplementation process).
Gartner identifies three component parts of Pattern Based Strategy: Seeking, Modeling, and Adapting.
Seeking and Modeling
To better prepare for the future, Gartner suggests that organizations should proactively seek out patterns
that are relevant to their businesses beyond the ones traditionally monitored such as economic indicators,
emerging markets, and channels and customer preferences. Instead companies should expand the scope
of their environmental analysis to leading or weak indicators and monitor not just information but people
and processes as well, looking for patterns that will let them detect changes early. Gartner identifies
several current and technologies that are instrumental in identifying patterns including Predictive
Analytics techniques and Business Intelligence systems. After patterns are identified the next phase,
according to Gartner, is analyzing the information by developing models that will help organizations to

4. Old Dog, New Tricks: How Gartner’s Pattern-Based Strategy Impacts Oracle® E-Business Suite Customers
Copyright © 2014 eprentise, LLC. All rights reserved. www.eprentise.com | Page 4
assess risk and decide on courses of action. Again, Gartner identifies supporting technologies to model
and interpret discovered patterns. These include forecasting tools, Corporate Performance Management
(CPM) systems, and Operation Planning and Modeling tools.
Adapting
Although seeking patterns and modeling possible outcomes are essential steps in decision making,
Genovese cautions that the final phase in a pattern-based approach to strategy building, adapting, is just
as important, though supporting technologies are not as readily available. Unless constraints are removed
in the adapting phase, organizations that perfect only their seeking and modeling skills will fail. Gartner
also cautions that organizations need to remain agile in their ability to adapt to ever new and as yet
unknown conditions. Unanticipated events bringing new opportunities won’t wait for business processes
that are hard-wired to technologies to slowly evolve over time, nor will an organization’s competitors.
Consequently, businesses will need to build an appetite for agility that permeates every corner of the
organization, including IT. In spite of identifying the importance of using transaction data to help predict
patterns, Genovese doesn’t delineate the methods for making the core of the transaction systems, ERP,
more agile, and doesn’t include ERP as an adaptive technology. Using an example of three-way matching,
she does identify that the cultural aspect of getting diverse parts of an organization in a room together
through functionality of an ERP system has broken some of the communication barriers and has been an
enabler of integrating business processes.
Impact on E-Business Users
There are several imperatives to support a model of adapting to change within E-Business Suite. First,
there needs to be a single source of enterprise-wide truth to establish transparency and eliminate the
presence of conflicting data. Practically speaking, that means that all differences within and among
supporting systems must be identified and reconciled. Differences between supplier terms across
organization units, differences in how aging buckets are defined, or differences in recording a voided
check mean that there are different business processes that contribute to false positives or unverifiable
conclusions. Maintaining different instances regionally or by business unit limits the ability to seek
emerging enterprise patterns and to determine the factors that impact other parts of the organization and
results in the inability to share information – Gartner’s siloed visibility. Finally, a two or three-year
reimplementation plan to move to R12 fails to meet the speed criteria needed to turn the ship around and
react to newly discovered patterns.
For Oracle® E-Business Suite users, the idea of developing an agile ERP system may seem overly
optimistic, particularly for those who have lived through EBS implementations, global roll-outs, and
upgrades. The ability to change the building blocks (calendars, chart of accounts, business groups, costing
methods) within EBS or any ERP system within 30 to 60 days is going to be a competitive differentiator for
organizations to thrive in a constantly changing economic, social, and technology climate. When an
enterprise reaches the stage of complete, consistent, and correct data and standardized processes, then
its systems are in a stable state. When the systems are in a stable state, it is possible to consider changes
to the data and changes to the business processes, allowing the systems to be agile enough to support
changing business requirements.

5. Old Dog, New Tricks: How Gartner’s Pattern-Based Strategy Impacts Oracle® E-Business Suite Customers
Copyright © 2014 eprentise, LLC. All rights reserved. www.eprentise.com | Page 5
New Technologies for Sustainable Agility
Gartner suggests that organizations can now investigate new technologies that overcome these
limitations and help them achieve these goals. Whether to improve collaboration internally or with
customers, enhance product or service innovations, or improve business planning and transparency,
numerous new technologies have successfully entered the pattern-based eco-system. Gartner cites
everything from tools aimed at social software and the ‘collective’ to integrated business planning tools
and rules-based engines as new and reliable technologies that will change the way organizations
approach their ERP systems.
Armed with the technologies that provide sustainable agility, leading organizations will implement their
pattern-based wisdom with repeatable accuracy, whereas lagging organizations will undertake one-time
analyses that require a brute-force response that consumes both cash and IT resources as part of an
unsustainable one-time project.
Improved Profitability
Across virtually every industry and every organization, seizing the opportunity to improve an
organization’s IT agility will result in a financial competitive advantage. Dr. Peter Weill, chairman of the
MIT Sloan School of Management and co-author of “IT Savvy: What Top Executives Must Know to Go
From Pain to Gain”, seems to concur. By his estimates, as reported in a recent Wall Street Journal
interview, he noted that what he calls “IT-savvy” companies can be as much as “21% more profitable than
non-IT-savvy companies.”
By adopting Gartner’s pattern-based strategy – seeking patterns, modeling scenarios, and adapting with
new and proven technologies – organizations will have a good shot at achieving a 21% lead in
profitability.
Curious?
For more information, please call eprentise at 1.888.943.5363 or visit www.eprentise.com.
About eprentise
eprentise provides transformation software products that allow growing companies to make their Oracle® E-Business
Suite (EBS) systems agile enough to support changing business requirements, avoid a reimplementation and lower the
total cost of ownership of enterprise resource planning (ERP). While enabling real-time access to complete, consistent
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