Customers equal point-scoring in Oracle-SAP war

Arch enemies SAP and Oracle aren't just set to slug it out in court; they're using customer wins as sticks to beat one another with as both sides claimed knockout blows over the other this week.

Tyre manufacturing company, MRF is replacing existing applications from Oracle with automotive solutions, ERP and CRM solutions on SAP's NetWeaver platform. Siemens Information Systems (SIS) - a SAP partner, will implement the solution on HP Integrity servers and IBM DB2 database.

With global operations manufacturing and distributing tyres to more than 75 countries, MRF needed to improve visibility throughout its value chain from raw materials to finished-goods partners in order to better plan for and adapt to fluctuations in global supply and demand.

MRF will implement SAP solutions at its six global manufacturing plants and 100 sales offices including the company headquarters in Bangalore. The implementation is currently underway with a go-live expected in the fourth quarter of 2007. MRF will also establish an automotive user group within the company in its efforts to better user reception and ensure better ROI.

"At MRF, we selected SAP after a detailed evaluation process," states Prince Azariah, chief information officer at MRF Ltd. "SAP came out on top in terms of product superiority, post sales support, record customer satisfaction and we're confident that taking advantage of SAP's enterprise SOA product roadmap would be a strategic decision supporting our plans for continued growth."

But Oracle hit back with an announcement that WILD GmbH & Co. KG, the world's leading privately owned manufacturer of natural flavour ingredients for the food and beverage industry, is dumping mySAP ERP in favour of Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.

WILD said it had decided to evaluate other vendors after realising that its current, highly customised version of mySAP ERP 2004 had significant gaps in modeling business processes across its process manufacturing operations.

"An in-depth selection process and comprehensive business analysis revealed that Oracle's flexible and integrated product functionality would not only be a fit for WILD on an operational level, but economically it would enable us to quickly achieve significant financial returns," says WILD Chairman and Owner Dr. Hans-Peter Wild.

"We also found that Oracle Process Manufacturing, part of the Oracle E-Business Suite, supports WILD's business model far better than the SAP applications we have been using."