The general public understands only those parts the things that they see and hear about. However, there is a lot that takes place in the back stage, which is as intense as visible activities. There are copious amounts of intense research, which make the base of all innovative medical procedures, devices etc. Cactus is one such company that supports the healthcare sector from the shadows. Cactus is global medical communications agency that has a proven record in the successful dissemination of technically rigorous and compliant scientific documents. In order to concentrate completely on the core activity, Cactus needed a solution that could take away the manual intervention in the billing and provisioning activity. They also wanted to shorten their accounts cycle. All these issues were addressed with Oracle ERP Cloud amongst other Oracle solutions implemented by Cactus. With this deployment implementation they saw a direct saving in time and efforts of account department personnel with help of automated interfaces.

BioSpectrum interacted with Dinesh Modi, Chief Financial Officer, Cactus Communications to talk about the benefits of automation with ERP Cloud.

Edited Excerpts-

What is the basic nature of work at Cactus Communications?

Founded in 2002, Cactus Communications is a global scholarly and medical communications company with offices in Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, Beijing, London, Princeton, Mumbai, and Singapore. CACTUS operates through two streams of services: Editage, a leading consumer technology business that provides editorial, translation, and digital solutions, and Cactus Life Sciences, which provides rich strategic and tactical content solutions to stakeholders associated with global pharma and device-making. Cactus team, comprising over 750 full-time employees and 2,500 freelancers, has served close to 200,000 researchers, doctors, and scientists across 173 countries and has transformed over 1 Million+ papers across 1,200 disciplines.

What role technology has played in this transformation?

We serve global research, editing and publishing community. Our clients are spread across the globe and transact in various currencies. To cater to such a diverse set of clients we have designed our in-house CRM system. Though business processes run smoothly on an in-house managed technology system, we did have our count of manual interventions which further highly relied on intricately designed multi-functional applications which did not often speak to each other. Move to cloud with interfaces to these various internal and third-party systems helped us accelerate the accounting, reconciliation and book closure processes. I think biggest transformation for us was elimination of almost 80% of manual data entry points. At the end of the day, we feel, with the process improvements introduced by KPMG in India Oracle team and with fusion financials, purchasing and FCCS cloud service, we are able to reap the right results and have created a solid foundation for future organization growth.

What were the challenges that you faced that led you to implement the Oracle solution?

As I mentioned, we are a global company with several offices across the countries. Our revenues and expenses are in several different currencies. We serve 55,000+ clients each year and we have several in-house systems which needed to be connected with Oracle Fusion. We needed a solution to stitch our processes together, to do an effective reporting and period close within a shorter span of time. Once we decided to go with Oracle end to end solution, to make the situation more complex, due to financial year closing, we had only 10 weeks from the commencement to go go-live. Thankfully, with dedicated team effort, support of Oracle and right guidance from the implementation partner KPMG, everything fell in place and we transitioned to new system.  

What kind of benefits have you witnessed post the Oracle implementation?

Oracle ERP cloud has helped us to integrate our entire operations on a single platform. We were able to automate most of the manual processes. From transactions perspective, we could now have a complete view from start to end. Our cash and bank books reconciliation has been automated to a great extent. We have been able to make our close cycle shorter and easier and enabled faster consolidation of books.We have a more effective system in place for expense booking and provisioning. Oracle ERP cloud has provided us with automated interfaces, which in turn has resulted in more time for our finance function, who in turn can concentrate on more strategic work.