Melbourne-based Sutton Tools makes a variety of tools for the consumer and industrial markets, with particular expertise in round-shank cutting tools such as drill bits. It is a core participant in the Defence Materials Technology Centre.

The company is following the servitisation path, which in this context can be seen as providing customers with the holes they need, not just the drills and other tools that make them.

This involves collecting and correlating information about the way various cutting tools perform, and communicating the results to the company's distributors and end users, Dowey explained.

Sutton had a small IT department, so it realised it needed the right tools to improve the service it could offer customers rather than trying to throw bodies at the problem.

After investigating various development tools, it selected the Oracle Application Express (Apex) web application development environment.

Previously, its ERP, CRM and quality management systems had been connected via Excel. "That's a lot of handling of data," he observed.

"We can manufacture in Australia because we know when to automate," so the same principle was applied to IT using Oracle Database, Schema as a Service, Process Cloud Service, and Documents Cloud Service.

Until recently, integration was achieved by passing around CSV files, but now Sutton's on-premises Infor M3 ERP system and JDBC and SQL servers use the SOAP protocol to connect to the Oracle Process Cloud Service and Database.

This makes information available for activities such as marketing and labelling, and promotes the reuse of assets. Dowey said this was about applying lean and related principles to administration as well as manufacturing. It has reduced the time needed to introduce new products, and has encouraged people to feel that they are part of the processes.

The adoption of Oracle software and services has allowed Sutton to do more through configuration and scripting, with a reduction in the amount of programming required.

Documents Cloud Service has allowed the company to integrate information from various sources including catalogue data and marketing materials, and make it conveniently available to people inside the business as well as customers.

"The interface is just as important to people working in the business as it is to customers," Dowey said.

More generally, "It's been a very rapid journey" with Oracle, he said. Sutton has followed a 'show and grow' strategy (basically the agile approach of delivering something and then iterating on the basis of user feedback), and that has been supported by the selected tools.

It is important to keep people engaged in these changes, as there is a tendency for them to feel too busy with their everyday tasks to stop and participate in efforts to improve those tasks.

"This is business process reengineering," he observed, noting that Business Process Model and Notation has been a key tool because it provides "diagrams the executives and managers can understand."

Disclosure: The writer attended Oracle Open World as a guest of Oracle, and interviewed Dowey during that event.