Western Digital

The Company: About Western Digital

Western Digital is a leading provider in hard disk drive manufacturing and data storage. Founded in 1970, Western Digital first made its mark as the world’s largest manufacturer of calculator chips, and later moved into data storage, introducing a floppy disk controller to help drive the PC revolution. In the 1990s, Western Digital acquired SanDisk, maker of the first flash-based solid-state drive for IBM computers.

Today, that same innovative spirit guides Western Digital’s development of a range of products designed to meet the data storage requirements for everything from next-generation mobile devices to autonomous cars.

The Situation: Standardizing to One Cloud-based System

After major acquisitions, Western Digital experienced challenges with disparate processes and software. Instead of choosing one of the on-premises Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems already in use, the company wanted to standardize on one cloud-based system across its entire organization.

The Solution: Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP

The Western Digital team already had experience with Oracle through the company’s use of Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and other systems. The company trusted Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP and Oracle Integration to help Western Digital create efficiencies and continuity within its financial planning and overall business.

The Results: Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP Implementation Benefits

Since implementing and standardizing on Oracle ERP, Western Digital has experienced substantial process and efficiency improvements.

Western Digital was able to rationalize 3,000 application modules, many of them redundant. With the data consolidation, company executives can view a single report that shows total spend and granular spending breakdowns across all departments.

With more than 2,000 applications across the three companies, management selected out-of-the-box adapters from Oracle Integration to limit project cost, risk, and delivery time. Quickly connecting Oracle ERP with SaaS systems, including Workday and Salesforce, as well as on-premises analytics applications, has also helped the company automate the end-to-end process of collecting data from business systems for real-time operational reporting and faster analytics refresh times. Previous ERP refreshes that took 24 to 48 hours were reduced to only 5 seconds.

Using Oracle Cloud, Western Digital reduced the number of cost centers from more than 15,000 to around 3,000. Additionally, Western Digital slashed the time it takes to approve purchases, as it streamlined the process from about 16 layers to five or fewer.

In addition, Oracle Cloud ERP’s regular, automatic updates have enabled the company’s decision-makers to use modern features more quickly than with on-premises applications.