“We have become a more data-driven company. Before adopting Oracle Cloud, we were decentralized from a finance and procurement systems perspective. Corporate had insights only on a consolidated level and not on each individual platform. This new visibility not only provides us with the ability to understand the numbers better, but also helps us identify where there may be inconsistencies or problems that we can subsequently address.”
Business challenges
Founded in 1616, Royal Vopak is now one of the largest tank storage companies in the world. Headquartered in Rotterdam, Vopak operates 78 terminals and is located in 23 countries. Its sophisticated facilities safely secure vital 21st century products used in everyday life, such as chemicals, oil, gases, and biofuels. In addition, the company focuses on new infrastructure solutions for low-carbon and renewable hydrogen, CO2, sustainable feedstocks, and long-duration energy storage.
For many years, Vopak supported financial management processes with Oracle JD Edwards. Localized environments for each country were spun up, heavily customized, and hosted in a data center in Rotterdam. Each country’s finance team mapped financial data to a high-level chart of accounts using a third-party solution to achieve periodic reporting at the global level. This filled a fundamental need, but company leaders couldn’t fully analyze the numbers at the general ledger level. Plus, supporting more than 10 environments became costly. Consequently, Vopak began to plan for standardizing finance and procurement projects across operations globally.
Vopak selected Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP based on Oracle’s market leadership, the software’s functional capabilities for finance and procurement, and its ability to natively support localizations.
Why Royal Vopak chose Oracle
Vopak leaders crafted a blueprint to detail how they would move to a new target operating model with three core tenets. The first goal was to simplify technology management and operating processes. A second objective was to standardize processes globally. Finally, leadership sought smart controls for reporting and approvals, which would bring operational efficiencies.
Subsequently, the company evaluated 10 financial and procurement management providers via an RFP process. After narrowing the field to three, the company selected Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) based on its market leadership, functional capabilities for finance and procurement, and ability to natively support localizations. The company also chose Oracle Fusion Data Intelligence Platform based on its proven quick time to value, prebuilt KPIs, and predictive analytics.
Results
In 2022, Royal Vopak completed the migration from JDE to Oracle Cloud ERP and Oracle Fusion Cloud Procurement in 21 countries. Staff gained better insights and decision-making capabilities with access to real-time and globally integrated data. By rolling out standardized processes, Vopak put controls in place while it refined segregation of duties and established data consistency. The prebuilt procurement analytics capabilities within Oracle Fusion ERP Analytics also helped the company better manage procurement performance by gaining insights into spend, purchasing, and suppliers from a single source of truth.
Vopak reduced operational costs by consolidating finance and procurement operations to a single cloud platform. And supplier relationships improved via automation and efficient integration with third-party solutions. Perhaps the most significant benefit was delivered via the Oracle Fusion Data Intelligence Platform with Fusion Analytics. Users can drill down into a topline data point and investigate its origin. The analytics platform proved even more impactful for everyday users who struggled with reporting within the legacy systems. Reports that used to take as much as an hour are now available in less than a minute.
Oracle Risk Management and Compliance, used for access and transactional controls, gave Royal Vopak monitoring controls and support for its internal audit processes.
Partners
After working with several consultancies, Vopak settled on Cognizant as its implementation partner. Cognizant was instrumental in helping Vopak establish controls and governance. The team expertly investigated the locations in each country to determine its compatibility with the environment being established. Subsequently, Cognizant proved to be knowledgeable about the capabilities of the adopted Oracle Cloud ERP modules, while also demonstrating a deep understanding of how the applications interacted with each other.
About the customer
Royal Vopak is a Dutch independent multinational company that stores and handles products ranging from chemicals, oil, gases and LNG to biofuels and vegetable oils.