Pearson standardises ERP estate on Oracle

Publisher and education provider goes from 63 separate ERP systems down to one as part of wholesale digital transformation project

Global publisher and education provider Pearson has decided to standardise on Oracle for its ERP needs.

Previously the organisation used over 63 separate ERP systems, with Oracle and SAP representing the largest providers within the estate.

Pearson CTO and COO Albert Hitchcock told Computing that the decision was made to go with Oracle, despite his previous experience with SAP.

"We were split evenly between Oracle and SAP before I joined the firm, with lots of other vendors providing other systems too. I'd previously worked extensively with SAP, having implemented their systems into both Nortel and Vodafone," said Hitchcock.

"But we looked at the demographic at Pearson, and decided to go with Oracle in the end," he added.

Hitchcock said that he has recently implemented Oracle's Fusion product for various Pearson departments.

"Oracle Fusion has just successfully gone live last month in the UK business for supply chain management, finance and HR. We'll implement it for the global HR teams towards the end of this year, so we'll have all employees on one single HR environment, then roll it out for the US next year," he explained.

This is part of a broader push in the firm towards a 'single instance' approach. Having grown by acquisition over many decades, Pearson previously found itself with a large number of systems performing similar functions, with no single view of data or customers.

"That will be a continuation of our single instance approach," said Hitchcock. "Oracle house the system in their cloud, so we're moving to a cloud-based ecosystem. We want as little infrastructure on premise as possible."

Hitchcock also recently told Computing that data scientists are no longer needed in his view, thanks to the power of existing machine learning platforms.