Oracle Wins Wells Fargo, Asian Supplies Firm
Software provider Oracle Corp. (NASDAQ:ORCL) today announced a partnership with Internet bank and financial services firm, Wells Fargo & Company, to integrate its online payment services with Oracle's Procure-to-Pay in 30 Days. The integration will allow customers offering to automate indirect purchasing using Procure-to-Pay, to pay suppliers online with electronic payment services from Wells Fargo.
Oracle believes the partnership will raise the bar for e-procurement solutions by automating electronic banking, payments and cash reconciliation, arguing that alternative payment solutions cost more and fail to offer detailed matching and automatic cash reconciliation features.
Wells Fargo will convert and transmit electronic payments and account statements to and from the Procure-to-Pay solution. This will enable buyers to schedule automatic payments deposited directly into the accounts of trading partners.
“With this offering, Wells Fargo becomes one of the first financial institutions whose electronic payment system will be made available to Oracle's Procure-to-Pay in 30 Days customers. One of the big wins for customers is that Wells Fargo is ready-connected to Oracle's solution, so accessibility and implementation of these services are simple and easy,” says Debbie Ball, senior vice president, Wholesale Internet Solutions at Wells Fargo.
News of the partnership came with another announcement providing an additional boost to Oracle's ebusiness offering. Saggio Holdings Limited, Asia's sole direct provider of office supplies and outsourced office services, has selected the Oracle E-Business Suite to integrate and streamline its business.
Using Oracle's E-Business Suite, Saggio aims to integrate back-office functions with the management of its supply chain and its variety of interfaces such as the online procurement platform saggiodirect.com. Implementation of the system, which includes Oracle Financials, Internet Procurement, Order Management and Human Resources Management System (HRMS), is planned for October.
Peter Tilby, vice president of Merchandising and Marketing for Saggio Holdings Ltd. believes that staying competitive in today's fragmented market means establishing a 360-degree view of customers' needs: “To achieve this capability we needed a suite of components, integrated seamlessly, simple and fast to implement, but complete in functionality,” he says.
Saggio, which supplies printer and copier products, stationery and paper products, and small business machines to more than 5,000 corporations in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Malaysia is the only international and direct provider of office supplies in the Asian market which is estimated to be worth US$54 billion a year.
Through a centralized Oracle system, Saggio aims to integrate vendor and customer relationship management across countries, together with its inventory, financial and human resources functions.
Saggio's strategy is to consolidate the office supplies market in Asia through a single source supplier solution, reducing procurement and administration costs. Tilby believes Oracle's E-Business Suite will support this goal: “It will provide us with the scaleable information infrastructure we need to support our aggressive expansion plan for operations in new countries,” he adds.
Arics Poon, managing director for Oracle Hong Kong says the deal with Saggio is an opportunity for Oracle to help more businesses in what he calls, “the fast-moving Asian marketplace.”
