Pietro Fiorentini is a group operating internationally in the Oil & Gas sector: it designs, manufactures and sells components, plants and services for the treatment, regulation and measurement of natural gas. With a turnover of over 290 million euros (2018), more than 1,000 employees and 11 factories around the world, Pietro Fiorentini, founded 70 years ago in Bologna and then moved to the province of Vicenza, where its headquarters are still located, is not only a reference point in its sector, but also an exemplary case, known in Italy and abroad, of the adoption of the principles of Lean Management, which have guided the company’s organisation at all levels for over twenty years.
Alfa Sistemi is the ICT Business Partner of Pietro Fiorentini since more than 5 years, not only for what concerns the evolution and the management of the company ERP system, Oracle JDE E1, but also for what concerns the Oracle Cloud solutions complementary and integrated to it, such as, for example, Oracle Field Service Cloud, used to optimise the maintenance activities of the teams operating “on the field”.
In the case under examination, the main wish of the Customer was to create a supplier portal able to facilitate and speed up the interchange of information and documents. Since in the business model of Fiorentini the suppliers represent a strategic element to guarantee efficiency and quality of the processes along the Supply Chain, the aim was to renew the modalities and the technological instruments of communication, offering them:
- a “user friendly” tool that does not require particularly advanced technical/IT skills, which are often lacking, especially in smaller suppliers;
- a single portal where all necessary information is available, irrespective of the software in which it resides (first and foremost, but not only, the JD Edwards ERP system), and where the greatest possible number of actions can be carried out, thus limiting the use of email or telephone contacts which, by their nature, are unstructured and untraceable.
Alfa Sistemi decided to take up Fiorentini’s challenge by designing and implementing a tailor-made supplier portal based on Oracle Content & Experience Cloud (OCEC) technology. The reasons for this technological choice were, on the one hand, the possibility of exploiting the connector with Oracle JDE E1 that the product offers “out of the box”, on the other hand, the extreme ductility of the tool, which lends itself to tailored implementations. The solution designed for Fiorentini also included the use of Oracle Integration Cloud (OIC), as an integration platform that allowed the portal to communicate with the multiple Fiorentini applications involved in the supplier management process, both Oracle and third-party.