ONE ON ONE

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-493X.2004.tb00251.x
• Published date: 01 December 2004
• Date: 01 December 2004

2The Journal of Supply Chain Management | Winter 2004

ONE

ON

ONE

An Interview withGreg Tennyson

Greg Tennyson is vice president, corporate procurement

and travel for Oracle Corporation headquartered in

Redwood Shores, California. Tennyson has responsibility

for global strategic sourcing of indirect materials, logistics

and travel. Oracle has created a global single instance

of the ERP applications, globalized financial business

processes and embraced e-business technology, allowing

the procure-to-pay (P2P) process to be optimized and

automated. The P2P transaction savings to Oracle is

approximately USD $4-6 million. More importantly, tech-

nology has allowed the purchasing team to bifurcate

strategic from tactical purchasing roles and responsibili-

ties, and the change in structure has allowed the team to

increase its cost savings and avoidance by over 100 per-

cent. Tennyson received his MS in management from

St. Mary’s College and has over 20 years’ experience in

the purchasing and contracts field in the manufacturing,

defense contracting and services sectors.

The Journal of Supply Chain Management:

Please describe the offshoring of transactional

purchasing responsibilities at Oracle.

Greg Tennyson: Oracle has had a significant

presence at the offshore location in Bangalore,

India, since the early ’90s, and our efforts have

been to (1) build a 24/7 “follow the sun” develop-

ment and support model (resources are available

24 hours a day, seven days a week in the same time

zones in which there is daylight); (2) take advan-

tage of the incredible talent pool that exists at the

offshore location; and (3) develop what is one of

the fastest-growing domestic markets. Oracle started

the transformation process approximately five years

ago by developing a single instance of our ERP

applications and a standard, global way of doing

business. Then, as a part of the global process pro-

ject and global single instance creation, we also

formed three regional shared service centers. We

migrated business processes from the operating

unit into its respective shared service center, and

we’ve operated this way for a few years. So, for

example, the procure-to-pay (P2P) process follows

the same global process regardless of where the

requisition was created. The only exception is vali-

dated local legal and tax implications. All employees

see the same view of Oracle’s self-service applications,

and transactions are processed by one of three shared

service centers in accordance with the global P2P

business process. Our globalization efforts have

been a major achievement. Oracle has created a

virtual back office using the Internet and our appli-

cations. With this, we realized that we could place

the transactional responsibilities anywhere in the

world, and it would be transparent to the user and

Interview by Julie S. Roberts,

writer for Inside Supply Management®.