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Guide to Hiring an Oracle Consultant

When it’s time to implement new technology and roll out corresponding business processes, your enterprise’s implementation partners play a vital role in your success. Deciding which partner to choose can be a make-or-break type of decision for your company, making it crucial to select the right partner for your business needs.

Why? Well, with the wrong partner, your implementation could be delayed, which could cause multiple problems for your business. It could also come with numerous cost overruns. Even worse, the implementation might even ultimately fail.

The right consultant, though, can guide you through the software selection process, making sure you select exactly what you need, with your technology of choice implemented in the most strategic way possible with the least amount of business interruption. Experienced consultants can also provide change management services, post-implementation services, and more to help companies maximize their technology investments, both now and in the future.

The question, then, becomes how to hire the right consultant. To help, we’ll share tips and tools so that you can see through the marketing hype to pick the right Oracle consulting team for your company.

In step one, you should create your team that will ultimately select the partner. You may decide to have experts from all levels of the organization on this team, from the executive level members who will look at the solution strategically and determine how it dovetails with enterprise goals to end users who will use these solutions as an integral part of their daily jobs. You might also want to get input from trusted vendors, suppliers, and others.

Your selection team can then determine your organizational needs, prioritizing and clarifying them. This is an ideal time to take a deep dive into your challenges and opportunities, and brainstorm what fully optimized enterprise operations that streamline processes and maximize ROI might look like. If you’re a member of a partner selection team, it’s important to focus on today, meaning what your enterprise needs for success now and in the future, as well as what’s needed for the life of the software and the company’s overall future growth.

The next step for the selection team is to create a list of potential Oracle consulting partners that you believe may be able to meet your implementation needs. This list can be made by gathering recommendations from colleagues, Google searches, companies that you’ve heard about or read about, and more.

As you develop the list of qualifications that you have for your Oracle consulting company of choice, they should include, among others:

  • whether they can meet all your business requirements
  • their organizational culture and how well it meshes with your own
  • their technical expertise
  • their business expertise
  • their cultural expertise

If your first list of potential partners is long, the next step is to reduce it to a manageable size.

Depth of Oracle Experience and Knowledge

While looking at your list, it’s important to distinguish between companies that can provide an Oracle focus and those that offer Oracle consulting services among a menu of other offerings.

Often, with companies that don’t have groups specializing in Oracle implementations, you may discover that their teams’ knowledge of applications isn’t broad and/or deep enough for your company’s needs. If so, eliminate them from your list of firms to consider.

Case Studies and Industry Experience

As another key step, be sure to review the companies remaining on your list to see what case studies they have to offer. As you review these case studies, make sure that each candidate still under consideration has already successfully handled implementations for companies of your size. If not, they may not be the best match for your company.

For example, a consulting firm may do highly effective work for small businesses but does not have experience of any significance with large national and/or global companies. If you have a large company, would you want yours to be the first for a consulting firm?

Also, make sure your partner either specializes in your industry or has a proven history of success across multiple industries.

After you go through this process, you may be ready to start having discussions with potential partners.

Initial Contact with Oracle Partners

Each initial consultation is an opportunity for you to explain, at least at a high level, the challenges that your enterprise is facing and that you need your new technology and strategic implementation to solve—and then to ask, again at a high level, what solutions might make sense for your company.

At this point in the process, pay close attention to how closely the candidate is paying attention to you! How engaged are they in your conversation? Also, watch to see if you’re being offered what seems like templated responses. No consultant can or even should roll out an in-depth plan during an initial consultation meeting, but they should be focused on discussing your unique circumstances.

As each candidate describes how their team would work with you, is the overall process clear to you? Does the timeline make sense? Does it fit within your goals? If not, do the reasons why more time might be needed seem logical? Do you understand what it may cost your company, in general, for your implementation, along with the potential for ROI?

When you ask questions of each candidate, are they answered clearly? And, in the instances when answers require research, does the consultant follow up promptly on promises made?

Comprehensiveness of Services

As you talk to each potential Oracle partner, it’s important to ensure that the company can manage all the services that you need. For example, you may need recommendations about which modules your enterprise needs to accomplish goals, and then you’d need an implementation plan, the actual implementation, a post-implementation plan, and more.

For a streamlined solution that maximizes an enterprise’s potential, it can be best to choose a consulting firm that can provide and coordinate all the elements of your enterprise solution.

We offer a wide range of services, including:

Review Your List of Potential Oracle Partners

After you’ve conducted high-level discussions with potential companies for your Oracle implementation, it’s time to prioritize them based on what you’ve learned. At this point, you may decide to remove most firms from your list because it’s become clear that they’re not the best choices for your enterprise needs.

Ask the one or two candidates at the top of your list for their references to find out what their clients have experienced.

Benefits of Choosing Argano

Our team has industry knowledge along with services provided by a dedicated team led by a senior consultant with a significant amount of experience working with and getting the most out of Oracle applications. Because of our company’s low turnover, you’ll benefit by always working with the same people with incredible resource continuity. We also provide excellent customer service.

When we work with companies, we move your enterprise forward, making you:

  • stronger
  • more agile
  • more competitive

We provide holistic business solutions that are tailored to your enterprise needs. In other words, we go far beyond plug and play as we optimize and leverage out-of-the-box functionality.

We’re one of the very first consulting partners in the Oracle Partner Network to provide clients with integrated hybrid cloud solutions—and, today, we continue to provide them with strategic, cutting-edge, carefully targeted solutions that meet their precise needs.

Partnering With Our Oracle Consultants

We define partnership as something much more than simply doing business today. A partnership is significantly more important than that, a commitment to a long-lasting, meaningful, and productive relationship—productive to us, our customers, and the Oracle community.

We continue to invest in our organization so that we can provide the absolute best Oracle consulting services possible, today, tomorrow, and for years to come. We also proudly partner with the Oracle User Communities. Through these partnerships, we educate users about Oracle solutions and enable exchanges that lead to technology advancement.

To discuss your enterprise’s unique needs, and to allow us to leverage the knowledge and commitment that few other partners worldwide can offer, we’d appreciate the opportunity to talk with you about your technology needs. Contact us today to learn more.