USG

COMPANY REAPS SAVINGS WITH MINDSTREAM APPCARE, STABILIZING ENVIRONMENTS AND HELPING END-USERS GET BACK TO BUSINESS

USG, also known as United States Gymsum Corporation, has been a leader in producing innovative products and systems for the construction and remodeling industries fo over 100 years. Beginning as one of the largest distributors of wallboard and largest manufacturer of gypsum products in the Unted States, USG now manufactures a wide variety of construction materials. In addition to its gypsum drywall and joint compound business, it is a leading manufacturer of eiling suspension systems and recognized as a premier acoustic panel and specialty ceiling systems innovator. USG services its customers and projects worldwide and has manufacturing and distribution facilities in more than 140 countries.

USG was an Oracle Hyperion customer realizing that it needed more specialized support for its various Oracle Hyperion applications. USG faced the challenge of maintaining stable application environments in the face of personnel flux, at a cost-effective rate. They were seeking talent who could also address both planning and consolidation application needs of the Finance team. Finding specialized Hyperion skillsets in-house to help with ongoing maintenance, upgrades, and support was too expensive, but not having the right expertise compromised environment stability. Occasionally, such instability led to reporting issues all the way to the C-suite. USG needed help to manage their environment. In addition, due to strict security policies, USG had concerns about how to incorporate outside assistance.

Solution

Through consultation, MindStream discovered what USG needed was reliable managed services to not only maintain their environment, but also be available on-demand when issues arose. As a result, MindStream offered AppCare , providing the company set-fee monthly managed services with escalation support. With a customized AppCare plan, USG is able to rely on our expert administators to handle patching, migrations, and upgrade support.

USG chose MindStream for our demonstated knowledge across the entire Oracle Hyperion suite and the Finance function, both planning and consolidations. The history of application management, predictable support costs, and ability to comport to the service level agreements within those costs were key to USG's Hyperion team.

USG's IT team administrators could communicate with the AppCare team regularly. AppCare support is able to provide direct communication with Oracle. The team is able to patch their environments regularly and without issue. To address security concerns, the AppCare team set up protocols to provide coordination across various expertise to handle issues in development and production of Hyperion applications. Due to our knowledge across Hyperion applications, the team has provided support in the form of application recovery, currency translation assistance in Hyperion Financial Management , and application migrations.

Results

Since their engagement, AppCare support has been able to recover their assets quickly in emergency crashes, provide migration assistance for new applications built by the business team, and even provide some application assistance as needed. In one example of a particularly emergent crash, due to their access to AppCare support, an Essbase application was quickly receovered Ultimately, USG has reaped cost savings in resourcing dollars, as well as emergency support., while gaining knowledge across multiple application expertise. Had USG been required to seek in-house administators with the same capabilities, the costs would have exceeded their requirements and needs. Today, not only do they have those capabilities, but they have a reliable, stable Oracle Hyperion environment with a predictable cost structure.

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