Aerospace and defense manufacturer's transition to Oracle Cloud HCM

Client background

Frontgrade Technologies, a newly rebranded company resulting from a divestiture of CAES (Cobham Advanced Electronics Solutions), is the largest Space Systems business unit that was quickly acquired by the Private Equity firm, Veritas Capital in early 2023. For more than six decades, the skilled thinkers, makers and doers at Frontgrade have embraced the mission to solve complex technology challenges across the U.S. and around the world. As the largest provider of analog and radiation-hardened electronics for the aerospace, defense and medical industries, Frontgrade offers a broad portfolio of off-the-shelf and customizable radiofrequency, microwave and high-reliability microelectronic products and subsystems. The organization also provides complete solutions across the signal chain, from aperture to digital conversion.

The business challenge

The complex TSA (Transaction Service Agreement) dates drove prioritization for the overnight startup to get systems running quickly, with quality and thoughtfulness as to designing Frontgrade specific business processes. To do this, Frontgrade knew they would need a strategic software vendor and implementation partner to execute on this business challenge. After that, it was time to focus on data conversion and rebuilding all business-critical integrations and reports necessary to go-live.

Strategy and solution

Frontgrade evaluated Oracle Cloud and Workday for their Human Capital business processes and to be their mission-critical system of record for all their HR needs. After a thorough evaluation, Frontgrade decided to select Oracle Cloud to be their solution for the future because they could grow with the robust solution as it didn’t have to be digested all at once and Oracle’s secure government cloud infrastructure. Shortly thereafter, Frontgrade selected Baker Tilly to be its strategic implementation partner because of the long-time relationship as well as our expertise in the Aerospace and Defense and Government Contracting industries. As the Baker Tilly team ramped up, Frontgrade was advised on what a strategic roadmap could look like that considered their many competing priorities, but number one being that they had to be live by the end of the TSA, which was a short six months away. This strategy and project took a pragmatic, “crawl, walk, run” approach, which consisted of prioritizing short-term must haves to long-term strategic goals. This allowed Frontgrade to frontload all the needed functionality into the phase 1 go live without jeopardizing the timeline, which included “long pole in the tent” items like all conversion and integration activities. In parallel, a running log of future phase enhancements was maintained to not lose sight of high-value process improvements and additional functionality. This strategy also allowed the Frontgrade team to consume and learn the applications in chunks instead of everything at once, which helped tremendously with adoption from a change management perspective. Once the project was live, on time and on budget, even after restructuring the project plan to include an acquisition Frontgrade made in this time period, the team took a small breather for year-end activities in their new Oracle cloud HCM system. Once year-end activities were completed, the team was at it again, taking the future phase log that was maintained, prioritizing the items, and Frontgrade and Baker Tilly partnered to develop a roadmap to execute an optimization in a phase 2.

What’s next?

The next steps in the plan include kicking off the phase 2 optimization work, reducing IT overhead dependencies and streamlining FP&A business processes with an implementation of Planning and Budgeting and Financial Consolidation and Close in the Oracle Enterprise EPM Applications as the start of its financial transformation.