Certain aspects of implementing and managing the Oracle E-Business Suite can be risky, time consuming and resource-intensive. The challenge is to mitigate the risk and automate the process while reducing expense and effort so that the project will achieve the organization's business needs and goals. One thing is certainly clear: the higher the level of automation is, the lower the operational cost of the environment.

Unfortunately, organizations frequently underestimate the time and effort involved in their Oracle E-Business Suite projects. In fact, one analyst group found that Oracle E-Business Suite projects took 43% more time and 39% more money than anticipated.

In this paper, we outline many of the operational costs and resource drains that can be addressed regardless as to whether the organization is:

• Implementing the Oracle E-Business Suite for the first time
• Implementing a new module
• Managing an ongoing implementation of Oracle

In addition, we focus on specific operational aspects of the Oracle E-Business Suite, and we explore how to execute this resource-intensive and error-prone process using native tools as well as how to simplify and automate this process while eliminating errors using third-party solutions.