INTERVIEW Point of Sale By David Baum Robert Moon explains how enterprise applications keep MICROS Systems at the top of its market. The next time you are relaxing over a glass of wine at your favorite restaurant, take a look at the system the waitperson uses to enter your order. Chances are it is a MICROS system. MICROS is the market leader in manufacturing and supplying point-of-sale and information-management systems to fine-dining establishments as well as quick-service restaurants, hotels, casinos, cruise ships, theme parks, zoos, and many other businesses throughout the leisure and entertainment industries. For more than 20 years, MICROS has supplied the advanced technology responsible for getting your dinner orders in, your hotel rooms booked, your winning bets paid, and much more. With offices in 30 countries, MICROS is certainly a global company. But for Robert Moon, vice president and CIO, simply being global is not enough. Since late 1996, Moon has led MICROS in an Oracle Applications implementation that has enabled the company to be what he calls cohesively global. MICROS has sales of uniquely configured systems occurring in 120 countries daily. With a complex product line and a disperse global workforce, Moon admits that a tightly integrated enterprise-resource-planning system is essential to "keep the right hand informed of what the left hand is doing." Profit recently spoke with Moon to gather his insights into today's IT challenges and to find out how his company's enterprise systems help keep a complex business on track. MICROS SYSTEMS www.micros.com Beltsville, Maryland-based MICROS Systems is the market leader in manufacturing and supplying point-of-sale and information-management systems to fine-dining establishments, quick-service restaurants, hotels, casinos, cruise ships, theme parks, and many other businesses in the leisure and entertainment industries. With offices in 30 countries, customers in 120 countries, and more than 2,000 employees worldwide, MICROS has an annual growth rate of 38 percent, a general ledger in 30 currencies, and a complex product line. With its dispersed workforce, a tightly integrated ERP system is essential to maintaining clear direction and competitive advantage. Web Customers was so popular with dealers and customers that MICROS feels it alone was nearly worth the cost of the entire ERP system. Hardware Hewlett-Packard HP/9000 N-Class Servers Dell servers, desktop, and laptop machines Software & Services Oracle Database Server Oracle Business Intelligence System Oracle Customer Relationship Management Oracle Financials Oracle Manufacturing Oracle Supply Chain Management Oracle Application Server Oracle Developer Oracle Designer Oracle Consulting Lucent Technologies telecommunications Profit: Technology is becoming the key differentiator in business environments, placing senior IT professionals in more-strategic roles. What are the biggest challenges that IT leaders face? Moon: One of a CIO's greatest challenges is to have an ERP system that is scalable and flexible enough to meet rapid changes in the business environment and the corporation's strategic plan. However, the ERP system must be cost effective as well, because every dollar spent on IT is a dollar off the bottom line. Good technical people are very expensive. We currently maintain some 22 Oracle Applications modules, supporting 1,000 employees, with a staff of 5 applications administrators and 2 database administrators.      Another challenge for senior IT professionals is retaining staff, which requires you to pay them fairly and give them interesting and rewarding work. If they have engaging work, they won't leave you for a 10 percent increase in salary. Profit: How have you set up your information systems to give MICROS a competitive edge? Moon: The key is that there is a big difference between data and information. People today are overwhelmed with data. Decision makers need information to run the business, and they need it at the right time and in the right format.      I originally proposed the Oracle project to our CEO with the first year's effort dedicated to building infrastructure-putting together the basic, back-office systems we needed to run the business. These systems included Oracle General Ledger as the foundation, with Order Entry, Inventory, Shipping, Receiving, MRP, and other applications we needed to operate and close the books. With these basic systems in place, we could run the business.      We are at a very exciting point in our Oracle implementation, where we are leveraging these back-office systems. Now we are concentrating on using all the data our employees enter all day to provide our decision makers with useful, timely, effective information, including sales, financial, operational, and product-planning information. This type of information will give us the real business intelligence we need to be a better, more efficient company and to service our customers even more effectively. Profit: How did MICROS become involved with Oracle? Moon: Several vendors came in to do presentations. My key point with the CFO and CEO was that we were not simply buying and installing a software package but establishing a life-long commitment—almost like a marriage—with whomever we chose as our ERP software provider. I told them there was no doubt in my mind that Oracle was the company we wanted as our strategic partner for the next 10, 15, 20, or more years. Profit: What factors influenced your selection of providers? Moon: The key reasons we chose Oracle were the strength of the company and the reliability of the software. Much of it has to do with Oracle's foresight and vision: It seems like Oracle is always going in the direction we need to go. I try to go with first-tier providers. I exclusively use Dell for desktop systems and network servers, Lucent for telecommunications equipment and software, Hewlett-Packard for enterprise servers, and Oracle for enterprise applications and databases. Profit: How has Oracle Consulting been involved in the implementation? Moon: We have worked with Oracle Consulting since July 1996. The first step was to use a discovery process for documenting our business processes. We put the results in a big notebook and held it up side by side with the Oracle Applications processes to see where our needs differed. In nearly every case, we chose the Oracle process over our own because we found it was better thought out, more direct, and actually more effective for us. Profit: How long did the project take? Moon: We started implementation in October 1996 and went live in October 1997. It took exactly one year, and we finished one tenth of one percent under budget. Of course, one never completely "finishes" an Oracle implementation. As long as a company is growing and the business processes are expanding, the systems must also scale with them. That is another reason I am pleased we made the decision to go with Oracle technology. It seems to be moving in the right direction both in functionality and architecture. Profit: How were the new self-service applications received within the company? Moon: One of the first self-service Web applications we brought online was Oracle Web Customers. Not only was it a very easy implementation but our internal as well as our external users gave it rave reviews. Our CEO made the comment that Web Customers was so popular with our dealers and customers that it alone was nearly worth what we had spent on our entire ERP system. I am sure this was a bit of hyperbole, but our Oracle Web-based applications have been very popular and are an excellent and cost-effective extension of the ERP systems behind them. Profit: What is an example of how the new systems are helping improve business processes? Moon: When a new restaurant is opening, the time from the start of construction to the actual restaurant opening is often very short. We can't deliver our point-of-sale equipment too early, because there won't be a secure place to put it. And if it arrives too late, the restaurant cannot open. As a result, restaurant managers are very interested in when that equipment will arrive and be installed.      Before we had Web Customers, we were constantly receiving calls: "Have you shipped my equipment yet? When will I receive it? Who is the carrier?" Handling these calls was disruptive to our shipping staff because they would have to stop their work to dig through reams of paper to find answers. It was also inconvenient for customers.      With Web Customers in place, the customers go to our Web page, link to the application, and log in with an account name and password. They can then see the status of any and all of their orders. If an order has not yet shipped, they can see the scheduled ship date. If it has shipped, they can get the details and link to the carrier to see delivery information. This makes our customers happy, because they can get instant, up-to-the-minute information on order status at any time of the day or night. It makes our shipping staff happy, because they don't have to handle the calls. Profit: In what other ways are Web applications changing your business processes? Moon: Oracle Field Sales Online is a good example. Our senior sales executives are inundated with literally hundreds of messages a day trying to coordinate the activities of some 200 salespeople in 120 countries. Oracle Field Sales Online brings our global sales staff into a centralized system that allows them to access sales, lead, and point-of-contact information. The information will be available on a dynamic, up-to-the-minute basis from anywhere in the world, via the internet. As a result, we expect to see better customer relationships, increased efficiency from our sales managers, and reduced communications costs. Profit: What are some of your other plans over the next two or three years? Moon: We feel that our Oracle back-office applications are world class at this point, so we're rolling them out to our major overseas offices. One of my major IT strategic goals has been to make our IT system a cohesive, global enterprise that can efficiently and effectively support our worldwide business. With such a geographically distributed business, it can be difficult to communicate information across oceans and time zones. But our Oracle systems allow us to pull everyone together and let them use the same systems and access the same databases. This fact itself will make us a truly synergistic company. We are also currently adding multilanguage capability to our Oracle Applications, making them available in four languages.      Although we are not yet a huge company—we'll hit about $350 million this year, based on analysts' estimates—our general ledger has 42 sets of books and works in 30 currencies. It is all consolidated here at headquarters. Profit: What elements of a central system simplify business? Moon: It's not so much scalability as it is adaptability. If you build an ERP system that is not dynamic and able to grow and change with the needs of the business, people start developing custom applications and workarounds outside the ERP system to crunch numbers or make reports. This is dangerous, because you have business-critical information residing on individual PCs that are not as secure as the enterprise system. And the users who create these "unofficial" applications may be the only people who know how to use them. If one person leaves, there is suddenly a missing process. And a sudden gap can have serious repercussions.      I absolutely insist that all work be done inside the enterprise applications, which means I must have the ability to adapt our systems as necessary to provide the business tools our employees need to do their jobs and meet the needs of our growing business. Profit: How does the Oracle system prepare your for the future? Moon: We are constantly improving the the system to make it faster and add more-sophisticated capabilities. I can confidently assure the CEO that our IT systems can support MICROS regardless of how quickly we grow or how large we become. He has stated a goal of being a billion dollar company within three years. I have no doubts our systems can handle that kind of growth. David Baum (david_baum@netpipeline.net) is an Oracle Publishing contributing editor based in Santa Barbara, California.