More4Apps Blog

More4Apps in the News...

2013-05-05T18:37:47Z

Exciting future predicted for Hamilton company More4Apps

Chris Hillock/FAIRFAX NZ

Software success: John O’Keeffe said that plans to grow the business include developing android app software.

A plucky Hamilton company doesn't recognise the word can't, reports Kashka Tunstall .

Award-winning Hamilton company More4Apps aims to double its revenue in the next two years.

It seems an ambitious goal for the 13-year-old business-to-business software tool builder but chief executive John O'Keeffe said the local company with a global reach is tracking so well he is feeling confident.

O'Keeffe is one of the founders of the business. An accountant by trade, he worked as a consultant for American administrative computer software giant Oracle.

He came to the Waikato in the 90s while working for Oracle, consulting for large organisations like the Waikato Regional Council and New Zealand Dairy Group, one of the legacy companies of Fonterra. In 2000, after he'd ventured into independent consulting, a conference in Rotorua with some colleagues sparked the idea of the business.

"What we were doing then is going on to sites, finding a problem and building a custom solution to fill the gap," O'Keeffe says.

"What we found was that the problems were common across companies, so wrapping those solutions up in a package, it meant you could sell a package rather than sell time".

The premise of More4Apps was building tools to bridge the gap between Microsoft Excel, the accountant's tool for reviewing and manipulating data, and Oracle, the software system companies use to manage accounts.

Packaging the software, instead of custom building the same thing for the same problems over and over, smooths and speeds the uploading of transactions and other information.

Get past all the tech-speak and the company's goal was simple.

Integrate software. Simplify accounting. Save clients money.

So O'Keeffe and five consultant friends formed More4Apps in 2000.

The idea took off quickly but with the shareholders only able to put part-time energy into developing the company, growth was slow, O'Keeffe says.

"We still were growing but hadn't put any effort into the company. "

In 2005, O'Keeffe decided to go full-time and the company opened in Hamilton's London St.

He hired programmers and back office workers for support roles and attending conferences and the small business worked steadily towards expanding and turning higher revenues.

"When we started off originally, it was a hobby. Whereas now, the bigger we grow, the more it feels like a corporation," O'Keeffe says.

More4Apps was recognised at the Waikato Business Excellence Awards last year, winning the award category for businesses employing five to 14 employees.

O'Keeffe said the process of applying allowed him to look at the business, what was working and what wasn't.

"That was excellent, we've always seen ourselves as a small company selling out of New Zealand and were getting recognition for what we've done, what we've achieved," O'Keeffe says.

"It made us take a good look at ourselves, it forced us to look in the mirror.

"We found we were doing enough right to get the award and highlighted what we need to work out. It's definitely a valuable process".

Now the company has sales offices in Los Angeles, London and Melbourne as well as the development centre based in Hamilton. O'Keefe says it has always been profitable, with about 60 to 70 per cent of its revenue from US clients."It gives you confidence and it gives you credibility".

That is tipped to double, possibly triple, in the couple of years, he says.

"The US has been our biggest market from day one . . . and we will look at the Chinese market now as well.

There has only been one year in its 13 year history where growth hasn't occurred and that was post-global financial crisis.

The growth the company saw pre-crisis is starting to gain momentum again now, O'Keeffe says.

Full time staff have increased from 14 this time last year to 17, prompting the company to move to an office block in Hamilton East and prepare for future growth.

O'Keeffe says three more people will come on board within the next four months and two extra roles in Los Angeles are planned.

Technology has changed since 2000 and with it the focus of the company.

The next chapter will be developing android phone apps to integrate with More4Apps software.

The staff to put the plans into play and develop the software in-house have been brought on board and the only barrier now is waiting for market capabilities to catch up with the company's vision, O'Keeffe says.

Better Excel and Oracle E-Business Suite Integration - Presentation UKOUG 2012

2013-04-08T21:59:10Z

John O'Keeffe presented the following presentation at UKOUG 2012.

Better Excel and Oracle E-Business Suite Integration.
Agenda:

Why use excel with Oracle EBS?
What are your challenges?
What are your options?
Why More4Apps?
Case Study

Enjoy.

More4Apps at the Red Rock Leadership Forum - 6th March 2013

2013-04-08T19:58:09Z

John and I were at the Red Rock Oracle Leadership Forum held on 6^th Mar 2013. The forum is a one-day conference dedicated to all things Oracle – Oracle Applications, Middleware, Technology and Systems. In short, the entire Oracle Red Stack.

Now in its eighth successful year, the Forum is widely recognized as Australasia's leading Oracle Partner event and it was held at the Sydney Town Hall – a lavish, historic building located at the heart of Sydney’s CBD.

At More4Apps, we were excited that two of our customers, City West Water and AJ Lucas were invited to speak in the forum. We are more than happy to share how we helped them and others to accelerate in Oracle implementation and boost their productivity. Below is the Oracle E-Business Suite Agenda for the day. Feel free to email me for a copy of the materials.

Oracle E-Business Suite: Strategy, Update
& Roadmap

Christopher Downie
Senior Director
Applications Sales Consulting -Oracle

City West Water's Business Transformation - The Journey so far

Steve Robertson
General Manager
Business Transformation & Technology - City West Water

Oracle Next Generation Applications and How they fit into Your plans

Doug Hughes
Vice President
Applications Development & Product Management -Oracle

Oracle E-Business Suite: Planning for Your
R12 Upgrade

Kathleen Hayes
Senior Delivery Executive &
Duane Goff
Account Director - Red Rock

Oracle E-Business Suite: Honey, I Shrunk the
R12 Upgrade!

Arup Choudhury
Chief Information Officer &
Susan Nehab
Regional Business Manager - Eveready & Panaya

AJ Lucas: an ERP Case Study

Andrew Green
Manager ICT - AJ Lucas

User Adoption Master Class - Thrive with Oracle

Ben Cook
General Manager Business Development - Articulate

Accelerated Oracle Testing – Customer Case Study

Barry Ryan
National Practice Manager Testing Services &
Vijay Kakade
National Practice Manager
Global Services - Red Rock

I would like to thank our invited guests who attend the event and also congratulate the winner of our lucky draw prize, an iPod Nano. Most of all, thanks for those who take interest and time to allow us to share our products and value propositions during the forum. It was great to see so many of you interested in our products and how they can help to accelerate Oracle EBS upgrade and implementation, and boost operational productivity.

It was good to see that most people are experienced Excel users, which means that anyone using a More4Apps product wouldn’t need a lot of training to get started, as More4Apps wizards work out of the box by simply plugging into Excel.

For more information or a FREE Demonstration of our Human Resource please Contact Us
Topics: Conference/Event employee wizard ohug 2012 oracle hcm oracle hr

Have loads of data you need to Import into Oracle EBS?

2013-03-26T20:31:38Z

Don’t want to write code? Read on.

Rapid Interface Development
Introduction
More4Apps’ traditionally offers highly developed Excel interfaces for Oracle E-Business Suite APIs and Open Interfaces.
All these products are specific to a particular interface or group of related interfaces.
The advantage of this approach is, a tool can contain the highest possible level of business intelligence on the data or metadata item being uploaded.
This means the download facility, one to many, many to many relationships, and all other dependencies and rules are programmed directly into the tool. The user gets a rich, real-time experience from Excel, as well as all the benefits of a fast multi-row uploader. Nothing developed on a platform can achieve this.

The problem
This approach means we are limited to supporting only those interfaces for which we have built a fully fledged “Wizard” product.
Oracle E-Business Suite contains many hundreds of interfaces and APIs. For example in 12.1.3 there are 2,139 database packages ending in _PUB, and many other packages that are also APIs but not named correctly. Not included in this number are dozens more open interfaces.
We have received many enquires asking do we support this or that interface, and the answer is often “No – not yet”.
Of course we take advantage of these enquiries to direct future development efforts, and some customers pre-order tools so they are top of our priority list, however a 3-6 month lead time is too long for many.

The solution
Enter our new Rapid Interface Development program.
Like anyone, we hate saying No to potential customers. Our new program is designed to enable us to provide in short order and low cost, an Excel-Oracle EBS interface that meets the customer’s timeframe and functionality requirements. Of course the delivered product won’t be as richly featured as the existing suite of “Wizard” tools but there is nothing to stop the solution from evolving into one if customers so desire.

What you DON’T have to do
You DON’T have to write software. There are a number of companies who’ll try and sell you a platform upon which you have to build something. We see these things pop up from time to time and label them “JAP”s. Just Another Platform. Oracle can be included in the list. Anyone keen to write a WebADI integrator ? Anyone ?
We believe Oracle EBS customers should be able to use their big shiny ERP system without having to write software. Even software companies want to get on with their core business activities and not be forced to acquire or contract Oracle EBS skills. We have several such customers on our list if you care to look.
If you get someone in to do custom development work, as soon as they walk out the door their work is called legacy software !

What you have to do
Tell us your requirements. Provide screenshots and a few samples. We will look for an API and quote you. If all are in agreement, we provide;

An Excel spreadsheet with columns named according to your preference
A couple of database packages for your DBA to install (you may also need our infrastructure)
An upload button and if you like, a sheet or sheets for downloading, with sample queries

At the time of writing, we have two of these in testing with a customer. Our current list of uploaders (available now) include:
Contracts

Contract lines

CRM

Create Groups
Create Group Memberships
Relate Resource Roles
Add Employees to Roles

MRP

Load MRP forecast data

SysAdmin

Profile option value loader

Cash Management

Bank Statement Loader

Human Resources

Performance Reviews

More4Apps Video - Waikato Business Awards

2013-03-12T20:50:28Z

Feel free to view our video which was aired at the Waikato Business Awards. More4Apps was announced the category winner in November 2012.

From A Dinner Party Conversation�

2012-11-14T20:13:21Z

In 2000, a dinner party conversation started in Rotorua that has ended 12 years later with an award for Waikato Business of the Year 2012 in the Deloitte’s 5-15 FTE category. The Wespac Waikato Business Excellence Awards were announced at a gala dinner on Friday 9th November in Hamilton. The gentlemen involved in that first discussion identified a need for Oracle users to have a much more simple and effective way of loading information into the Oracle Business suites using Excel. While that sounds almost incongruous for anyone not familiar with Oracle software, it turned out that there was indeed a massive gap in the market for such a linking item of software.

More4Apps provides that link and in doing so provides solutions for thousands of Oracle operators around the world who use their software every day, saving thousands of hours in uploading of information.

CEO John O’Keeffe, was one of those people around that Rotorua table in 2000, and had been a manager and accountant working for Oracle in several countries before arriving in New Zealand in 1996. He and programmer Bruce Doig started the company which has now grown to include 4 shareholders, and a global team of 14 employees and contractors based in UK, USA, Australia and New Zealand. They are now certified Oracle Partners, and their client list is an impressive lineup of large companies including 7-Eleven, Starbucks, Vodaphone, McDonalds Corporation, University of Waikato and NIWA.

John O’Keeffe says that they owe their success to a strong focus on customer service which includes regularly asking their market about what they want and need so that More4Apps can be more proactive than reactive in delivery of their services. Judges commented that More4Apps is an impressive company who are doing a lot of great work in the delivery of exactly what they say they do while maintaining a firm focus on profitability.

The future looks bright for More4Apps with 27 products all in high demand from Oracle business software users. Plans for 2013 include an increased presence in the USA and targeting opportunities in China and South East Asia.

Excel to Oracle Accounts Receivable Case Study: Origin Energy

2012-08-14T20:21:58Z

Origin Background

Origin is Australasia’s leading integrated energy company. Origin is a top 20 ASX listed company, involved in gas and oil

exploration and production, power generation and energy retailing. The company has almost 4400 employees, more than 4.6 million customer accounts and 150,000 shareholders in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific.

(Source: www.originenergy.com.au 11/05/2011)

Origin Challenge

Origin has a large number of operating companies with the majority on a custom billing system. However, the company

uses a centralized financial services model to manage accounts receivable for the majority of its Renewable Energy and

intercompany customers.

The company has a large number of subsidiary companies and is progressively incorporating these onto the Oracle E-Business Suite. In conjunction with that process, the company is looking at ways to improve the current use and handling of transactions within Oracle Financials.

The growth in volumes of customers and sales and the lack of automated invoicing and receipting processes left the shared services department with a huge burden. This resulted in the inability to maintain the processing effort required to

complete all transactions within a month. This was compounded by data integrity and errors associated with high levels of manual data entry.

Origin the Solution

Origin had previously implemented a tool for data loading AR Receipts into Oracle. It did not give them the efficiency and validation benefits they needed. The tool consistently errored and took a large amount of time to complete the processing.

After viewing a live WebEx demonstration, More4Apps AR Invoice Wizard and More4Apps AR Receipt Wizard were

identified as potential tools for loading transactions into Oracle E-Business Suite. They conducted an initial evaluation of the product and the company quickly realized it had the potential to deliver the efficiency gains required. Origin put the product through the company’s rigorous testing process. It went through substantial IT and User Acceptance testing and was then approved by the IT group and the company’s user group.

The approximate hours taken to implement the products are shown in the table below:

Origin Actual Implementation Time (hrs) - More4Apps

Testing (hrs)	Implementation(hrs)	Training (hrs)	Documentation(hrs)	Total (hrs)
AR Invoices
10	2	1	6	19
AR Receipts
12	2	1	4	19

Benefits Realized by Origin

Origin estimated after the first 3 months of using the More4Apps AR Invoice Wizard, the company had achieved a

return on their investment of time and money. The More4Apps AR Receipt Wizard realized the ROI within just 2 months of use.

Origin Return on Investment (ROI) - More4Apps

Transaction Numbers (per Month)	Manual Data-Entry (days)	Other DL Tool (days)	Using More4Apps (days)	Savings (days)	100% ROI Time & Cost (months)
AR Invoices
4,000	43	N/A	5	38	3
AR Reciepts
25,000	54	18	2	16	2

The primary benefit has been cost savings from faster data entry and data integrity; enabling staff to focus

on reconciliation, credit management and other value added tasks. Overall the customer is extremely

pleased with the tools.

Download the full PDF case study Here

OHUG 2012

2012-07-16T19:15:43Z

More than 1,300 Oracle HCM professionals attended the event, and there was talk that this was the best OHUG conference to date. Sarah, Mike & myself had a fantastic time in Las Vegas and especially enjoyed drinks at Margaritaville on Wednesday night.

We would like to congratulate Vigdis Nilsson Wallem from Norway Post for winning the Samsung Galaxy Tablet from our OHUG 2012 questionnaire.

We would like to thank everyone who attended OHUG 2012 and visited our stand. It was great to see so many of you interested in our products and how they can help speed up data entry into Oracle E-Business Suite. We would also like to thank those who took the time to fill in our questionnaire on Oracle HR.

From the survey we could see that a third of respondents spend 11 or more hours doing data entry. This surprised us as many of the respondents were business analysts or IT Professionals, rather than HR Professionals. 71% of these respondents said data entry wasn’t related to their core job.

Most respondents use Oracle HR in their organisation for storing their employee data; these organisations however spend a lot of time maintaining this data. Less than a third of respondents use Oracle HR for Updating US State and Federal Tax, Assignment of Salary Proposals, Costing Budgets and Payment Methods, and Elements.

The area most Organization’s had difficulty maintaining were Absentees, Extra Information, and Agreement and grade results performance. This information will help us develop our products so our users can get a lot more of what's needed to done sorted quickly and efficiently.

It was good to see that most people are experienced Excel users, which means that anyone using a More4Apps product wouldn’t need a lot of training to get started, as More4Apps wizards work out of the box by simply plugging into Excel.
For the full summary of results please go to The Summary of Results

From these results we can see that many people who use Oracle HR spend more time than they need to entering data. Over half the respondents are spending nearly a day a week entering data and it is not even their core job. More4Apps has a range of Human Resource Wizards which help load and maintain employee data. These tools can save you time and money, as well as giving confidence in the accuracy of your employee information.

For more information or a FREE Demonstration of our Human Resource please Contact Us