In May 2023, Oracle Cloud customers gathered in Dallas, TX, for BLUEPRINT 4D, an annual conference where attendees learn from real-life successes and failures, receive candid advice for avoiding mistakes, and understand the best approaches for transforming their people, processes, technology, and strategy.

The 2023 conference featured a range of Oracle Cloud customers as speakers, including Anastashia Alfred-Waller from Baylor University, Rob Longshore from YUM Brands, and James McBride from Voya Financial. Each presenter contributed valuable lessons, described in detail below.

Baylor University: Oracle Journeys

In one session, Anastashia Alfred-Waller, Lead HCM Analyst for Baylor University and Oracle Cloud HCM customer, shared her experience with Oracle Journeys.

Anastashia highlighted five key benefits of Oracle Journeys:

• Provides personalized employee experience
• Simplifies complexity
• Unifies the employee experience
• Creates enterprise-wide journeys
• Extends journeys beyond Oracle Cloud software

Then, Anastashia shared her tips to avoid mistakes with Oracle Journeys.  When setting up your organization’s Journeys, she recommends starting with the user perspective and working backwards from there.

She took this user-driven approach while building the faculty onboarding and exiting journeys, which she designs to be intuitive to make the process beneficial to Baylor University and its employees.

For more information on how Anastashia utilizes Oracle Journeys for Baylor, you can check out this blog post.

YUM Brands: Solving Workforce Compensation Module Complications

When Rob Longshore, Analyst ITSS at YUM Brands and Oracle Cloud customer, took over the Workforce Compensation module in Oracle Cloud HCM, he discovered an Excel sheet with more than 400 tasks needing attention.  At BLUEPRINT 4D, he shared the issues he and his team were facing and how they solved them so that other issues could more quickly implement similar solutions in their organizations.

Although there were several tasks that needed attention, Rob prioritized few high-impact items.

First, Rob turned off “Track Ineligible Workers” to clean up the interface for managers.  Then, Rob and his team eliminated cross references to other plans and cells, which was causing errors in saving changes during performance evaluation season.  Rob recommends confirming that the salary basis in the Compensation module matches the general ledger to avoid issues; after onboarding employees outside of the U.S., YUM brands encountered new issues because the salary base currency was not set correctly.

You can read more about the issues YUM Brands were facing and how they solved them in this blog post.

Voya Financial: Cloud Mistakes to Avoid

When James McBride, Financial Systems Manager at Voya Financial and Cloud ERP customer, took the stage at BLUEPRINT 4D, he took a creative approach to educating the crowd by sharing his what-not-to-do list to move to Cloud and after go-live.

James noted that you should NOT:

1. Treat your cloud project like a lift and shift.
2. Forget to emphasize executive engagement.
3. Fail to emphasize user engagement.
4. Support your Cloud product the same way you did an on-prem solution.
5. Implement Cloud in silos.
6. Ignore the resources available to you.

To learn the rationale behind James’s list, consider reading the full story in this blog post.

By learning from the experiences of experts like Anastashia Alfred-Waller, Rob Longshore, and James McBride, you can quickly solve issues, avoid failures, and achieve success in your Oracle Cloud projects.  You can view the full BLUEPRINT 4D session, featuring these three speakers, here: Oracle Cloud Apps – Ignite & FailFest Sessions.

To hear more Oracle Cloud customers’ stories like theirs, don’t forget the save the date for BLUEPRINT 4D 2024, which will be back in Dallas, May 7-10, 2024.