Andrew McAdams - CEO, PrimeQ
Australian Oracle partner, PrimeQ, is set to send funeral, cemetery and cremation operator, InvoCare, into the cloud, after striking a five-year deal with the company.
InvoCare is no minor player. It is listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) and operates 270 funeral locations and 16 cemeteries and crematoria across Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and the United States of America.
Under the terms of the deal, InvoCare will partner with PrimeQ as it embarks on a major upgrade of its operating system to provide greater customer service.
In partnering with PrimeQ, InvoCare settled on an end-to-end Oracle Cloud platform to support its business front and back office operations, with the five-year annuity contract including ongoing technical support from PrimeQ.
The project is aimed at delivering a fully-integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) solution, designed and implemented by PrimeQ using Oracle Cloud technology.
The transformation initiative is expected to go live in early 2018, and is designed to improve InvoCare’s customer experience.
The product suite under the deal includes customer management, financial and procurement management, supply chain management, transportation management, human capital management, service-oriented architecture (SOA) cloud integration, mobile cloud services, development and database cloud, document cloud and business intelligence.
“We will use cloud technology to support InvoCare’s commitment to family care, community engagement and investor value," PrimeQ CEO, Andrew McAdams, said.
PrimeQ will spend the next two to three months in design and planning, followed by training and testing later in the year. The transformation is expected to go live in the first quarter of 2018.
Although the value of the deal remains under wraps, according to InvoCare CEO, Martin Earp, the ERP project forms part of a $200 million investment in the company’s locations, systems and people.
Earp and team settled on PrimeQ for the project due, in part, to the provider’s quick understanding of the funeral operator’s business.
“We selected PrimeQ and Oracle as our preferred implementation and technology partners following extensive engagement across all areas of our business,” Earp said.
“PrimeQ demonstrated the ability to quickly understand the unique industry of the Funeral business; this came through clearly in the demonstrations provided to InvoCare.
“They were very engaged with operational employees, wanting to know what their pain points were and the demonstrations showed that they had not only listened to our people but had begun the journey of providing a solution,” he said.
The deal comes just weeks after the Oracle partner revealed plans to build a cloud campus in South Australia, with the start-up set to create 72 new jobs as part of a major investment across the state.
In May, the company revealed plans to raise $10 million on the ASX, in a bid to kick-off an acquisition-powered pathway to growth.
