About Liberty Global
Liberty Global is a world leader in converged broadband, video and mobile communications and an active investor in cutting-edge infrastructure, content and technology ventures.
Some of the best-known telecom consumer brands belong to the Liberty Global family, including Virgin Media O2 in the UK, VodafoneZiggo in The Netherlands, Telenet in Belgium, Sunrise UPC in Switzerland, Virgin Media in Ireland and UPC in Eastern Europe. With over 86 million subscribers across Europe and the United Kingdom, Liberty Global plays a vital role in today’s connected society.
The global investment arm, Liberty Global Ventures, has a portfolio of more than 75 companies across content, technology and infrastructure, including strategic stakes in ITV, Univision, Plume, Lionsgate and the Formula E racing series.
Challenge
Managing this type of organisation is complex, especially with parent and subsidiary companies operating with different technologies and business processes. In particular, multiple finance systems with different charts of accounts across many countries required a complicated, time-consuming process to reconcile ledgers and close books.
Providing technical support is another challenge. Liberty Global set up a Shared Service Centre in Bradford in the UK to provide support across the whole organisation. But driving efficiencies is hard when the team is supporting myriad different systems, infrastructure and software versions. The parent company itself was running different versions of Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) in the headquarters in the US, UK and NL.
“This migration to Oracle Cloud ERP will enable Liberty Global to take advantage of a truly integrated single platform solution for its Finance across the Group, which lays the foundations for our service delivery. This will help to enable us to be fit for the future and enable our GFS team to become a centre of excellence for Cloud based finance systems, in line with our strategy. We want to thank Namos for their dedication to getting this over the line and live.”
Liberty Global
Solution at a glance
- Oracle ERP Cloud, replacing EBS in the US, UK and NL
- Oracle HCM Cloud to provide payroll in the US and UK
- Oracle SCM Cloud
System integrations included:
- Oracle Hyperion
- Workday Global HRIS
- ADP for NL payroll
- Salesforce
- Exchange rate loaders
- Azure Active Domain
- APRO Banking
Adopting standard business processes
To gain maximum benefit from Oracle Cloud solutions, it’s best practice to adopt their standard business processes. Bespoke extensions can be costly to implement, require ongoing testing and updating with every quarterly Oracle update, and can conflict with future enhancements to the core product.
But Liberty Global had their own well-established business processes that exactly met their needs. So changing to the standard Oracle Cloud processes wasn’t straightforward. The team needed to ensure that the final solution would meet all requirements without compromising on quality.
A dedicated change team liaised with the different parts of the business to champion the changes required and reach agreement with relevant parties to ensure a successful outcome.
The results
The challenges and complexity of the project did mean an increase on the estimated timescale. But in April 2023 the solution went live, thanks to teamwork, resilience and dedication from both Liberty Global and Namos. Our ‘One Team’ approach ensured alignment, well-defined responsibilities and clear communication across both organisations.
And the complex implementation had an upside. During the project, the team analysed the business operations in depth and explored how to best implement Oracle Cloud to meet Liberty Global’s requirements. As a result, the final solution went live with remarkably few issues – a triumph for a project of its scale and complexity.
Namos completed a full handover of the final solution to the Liberty Global Shared Service Centre in June 2023. Liberty Global now benefits from a modern, cloud-based solution with the built-in advantages of security, resilience and scalability – and without the overhead of managing infrastructure, legacy systems and software upgrades.
With a single integrated platform, the solution streamlines the complexity of managing finances across multiple countries and currencies. The time to close the books for a financial period is significantly reduced. Trusted payroll processing gives greater insight into payroll calculations and transactions.
The Oracle Cloud solution provides the foundation for Liberty Global to continue their drive for innovation and continuous improvement. It paves the way for other business units to adopt Oracle Cloud applications to support their own operations.
“This has been a long and complex project for Namos and Liberty Global. It has not been without its challenges and I believe open communication was the key to getting this project over line. I would like to thank both teams Namos and Liberty Global for the hard work and dedication they have put into these projects.”
Chris Mason, CEO at Namos
