Clayton frames its future with Oracle
“Our vision is to offer attainable housing solutions to home buyers. Oracle Cloud Applications helped us consolidate our disparate technology landscape and provided a single, cloud-based, scalable platform that we needed to be successful on our journey.”
Clayton Home Building and ERP Technology Vice President
At a glance
Client
Clayton
Industry
Single-family home builder
Scenario
Clayton needed to consolidate divergent on-premise systems into a unified cloud solution to enable agility and growth.
Our role
Grant Thornton provided collaborative business advisory and system integration services.
Results
Oracle Cloud ERP consolidated sub-ledger data from finance, home building, retail and other business units into one chart of accounts, while Oracle Cloud EPM streamlined planning, budgeting and reporting to help automate financial close. Oracle Cloud SCM, Oracle Procurement Cloud and Oracle Product Hub unified management for suppliers, manufacturing and logistics.
Grant Thornton helped Clayton identify leading practices to improve its business processes and create a better business-driven solution design. Grant Thornton collaborated with Clayton as a strategic partner for successful solution implementation and management.
Scenario
A home for the future
Clayton is a leading national builder of single-family attainable housing. Founded in 1956, the company is based in Maryville, Tenn., and has expanded to offer a range of site-built, modern manufactured, CrossMod® and modular housing. Today, Clayton is a Berkshire Hathaway company with approximately 22,000 total Team Members at 28 supply facilities, 41 home-building facilities and more than 390 retail locations across 32 states.
The company’s legacy technology infrastructure was struggling to support emerging needs across its home building, retail and mortgage business units, and needs became especially cumbersome across its supplier network. Strategic supply chain planning was difficult and at a greater risk of inaccuracy. Financial reporting became a time-consuming process that compiled data from various sources across disparate sub-ledgers.
Clayton had a complex business model that offered distinct but related services, including home building, financing and insurance, but the company had aging on-premise applications. As Clayton looked at continuing to grow its business, it knew that its systems landscape would not be able to scale.
“They had to build systems to augment what they had and, from the system application standpoint, they were going to have to grow by becoming a custom app development shop. That just wasn't a strategy that they wanted to take,” said Grant Thornton Technology Modernization Advisory Services Principal Robert C. Allen. The company saw another path, modernizing its infrastructure to improve efficiency, add mobile capabilities, improve real-time visibility and more, to help Team Members, suppliers and customers share essential information.
The company needed a new technology infrastructure to support its growth plans. “They want to be able to build more homes efficiently and at scale — part of that journey was to create a good systems foundation, which is what Oracle provided,” Allen said. “Being a complex company across different offerings, they needed a robust application with a partner to help design how everything would fit together.”
Approach
A foundation set in leading practices
Clayton wanted one dynamic cloud platform that would adapt to meet its needs now and in the future. The company selected Oracle Cloud ERP and EPM modules: Oracle Fusion Cloud Supply Chain Management (SCM), Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
Oracle Cloud ERP helped the company consolidate the sources of its financial data into one general ledger, streamlining its accounting processes and improving the visibility across transactions. Oracle Cloud EPM streamlined the company’s reporting, budgeting, financial close and analysis across departments. This helped to drive better financial planning and budgeting processes. Oracle Cloud SCM targeted efficiency and improvements for supply and demand planning, as well as inventory and manufacturing control.
Clayton selected Grant Thornton as its Oracle alliance partner because it wanted a results-driven collaborator that could help overcome complexities to ensure success. “The Grant Thornton approach is to promote Oracle-supported leading practices — and challenge our clients to think differently,” Allen said. “We are business consultants who also know Oracle, so we talk about the business processes and leading practices. Then, we show you how we can configure Oracle to best fit your business needs.”
At the same time, it's important to look for places to standardize common business practices across the enterprise. “If you have over 40 home building facilities, Oracle is robust enough that you could support different processes for each location. We've seen some designs that have done just that, which is a big mistake,” Allen said. “With common processes across the organization, living on the application becomes easier,” Allen said. “We see it improving stability, predictability and implementation — and companies can get to value in the application quicker.”
“Implementing leading practices, cutting down design time, making testing quicker and more predictable and minimizing customizations are some of the reasons that we take our design approach,” Allen said.
The company’s enterprise was too large for a “big bang” deployment, so the team is deploying the solution to various teams in waves. First, the team deployed capabilities for planning and budgeting, including the new chart of accounts. Next, it moved on to the corporate consolidations process and migrated all fixed assets to the platform. The core financials and indirect procurement completed the migration of the corporate office. Order fulfillment, supply chain and manufacturing functionality were migrated at two supply locations, followed by a roll-out to the remaining supply and distribution centers. Finally, the team will be implementing Oracle progressively across the company’s home building facilities and retail centers.
Result
A unified team for a unified solution
The team deployed Oracle Cloud ERP and Oracle Cloud EPM in two years, and the Oracle Cloud SCM deployment is underway.
Oracle Cloud ERP let Clayton combine sub-ledger data from finance, home building, retail and other business units into one chart of accounts. Together, Oracle Cloud ERP and Oracle Cloud EPM helped Clayton consolidate multiple definitions, formats and management processes for its accounting and budgeting data. This created a more stable and standardized platform across the organization. From this platform, the company used Oracle Cloud EPM to streamline its planning, budgeting and reporting, automating financial close and reducing reporting times.
In the next implementation wave, Clayton began deploying Oracle Cloud SCM as a single platform for managing supply chain, manufacturing and logistics operations. This unified interactions for the company’s suppliers, reducing inconsistencies and improving relationship management. Within Oracle ERP, Oracle Procurement Cloud gave the company a single supplier record for vendor negotiations, cash discounts, onboarding and management. It also consolidated supplier item data to reduce inconsistent classifications. Another element in the platform, Oracle Product Hub, consolidated material data for consistent classification and sourcing.
This consolidation of data and interactions streamlined management and communications across suppliers as well as the mortgage, insurance and other services. “They have a lot of complementary businesses that are very different,” Allen said. “They're all interrelated and they wanted to have them on a single application.”
To drive this unified solution, the project needed a unified team. “What's nice about Clayton is that they take a team approach — it is a very collaborative approach,” Allen said. “With Grant Thornton, I think they feel they have a partner that will strategically challenge their processes, and that we're creative in the solutions that we offer. I think they see value in that. They're getting a better-architected overall solution because of the strong partnership with Grant Thornton.
The collaboration is built upon a business understanding. “We've taken the time and kept a stable team together to really learn the business. They look at us as a strategic partner,” Allen said. “They share what they're doing as a company with us.”
Together, the team has used proven practices and innovative ideas to build a new future for Clayton. “They are definitely a transformation-minded organization. They are rethinking the way that homes are built,” Allen said. “They're taking key learnings to create a better way to deliver homes to the market. They look at processes, they look at people, they look at technology all in that transformation mindset.”
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This Grant Thornton Advisors LLC content provides information and comments on current issues and developments. It is not a comprehensive analysis of the subject matter covered. It is not, and should not be construed as, accounting, legal, tax, or professional advice provided by Grant Thornton Advisors LLC. All relevant facts and circumstances, including the pertinent authoritative literature, need to be considered to arrive at conclusions that comply with matters addressed in this content.
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