Challenge
The departments’ finance function runs on an Oracle E-Business Suite 11i platform first implemented more than two decades ago. Over the years it has become one of the most heavily customised and mission-critical systems in the organisation — paying carers, concession recipients, housing assistance, suppliers and statutory bodies, and feeding whole-of-government reporting and audit.
Two realities made it demanding to support. The platform is past mainstream vendor support, and a planned cloud migration was deferred — meaning the existing system had to remain completely stable and compliant for years to come. At the same time, the day-to-day workload was unforgiving: month-end close, daily payment runs, bank reconciliation, audit extracts and emergency payments all carry hard deadlines, and a single failed batch can hold up payments to vulnerable Victorians.
The departments needed a partner who could do two things at once — keep a complex, end-of-life system running flawlessly, and extend it to meet new banking and regulatory requirements, without the deep, system-specific knowledge walking out the door.
Our Approach
The engagement spanned two complementary streams: a managed Level 3 support service that kept the platform stable, and project work that moved it forward.
Step 1: Level 3 Managed Support
Park Lane provided specialist Level 3 support for the entire customised Oracle Financials estate, working to defined severity-based SLAs as the escalation point behind the departments’ internal teams. This covered incident triage across AP, AR, GL, Cash Management, Purchasing and iProcurement; fixes to custom Oracle Forms and workflow modules; application DBA support across production, disaster recovery and development environments; database performance tuning; and monthly SLA reporting through a named account manager.
Step 2: Modern Payments Delivery
Alongside business-as-usual support, Park Lane modernised the departments’ Westpac payments capability — designed and built on the existing EBS platform and released into production with no disruption to live operations. This included upgrading Westpac payment file formats from v4 to v6, introducing OSKO near-real-time payments, implementing Bulk BPAY for housing bill payments, enabling intraday payment scheduling for public housing assistance, and separating the two departments’ banking interfaces so each operates independently and securely.
Step 3: Delivering Under Pressure
When emergency bushfire relief required same-day payments over a weekend — outside the system’s normal payment calendar — Park Lane stood up an OSKO-based emergency payment path at short notice, so urgent assistance reached recipients without delay. Elsewhere, a database statistics issue that had gone unrefreshed for years was traced and corrected, restoring an overnight payment run that had begun stalling for hours instead of minutes.
The Results
- A 25-year-old, business-critical finance platform kept stable and compliant while a longer-term replacement is planned
- New payment capabilities — OSKO, Bulk BPAY and Westpac v6 — delivered into production with no disruption to live operations
- Time-critical obligations consistently met: month-end close, daily payments, bank reconciliation, audit extracts and emergency payments
- Production incidents resolved at root cause, protecting payments to carers, households and suppliers
- Major operational milestones supported, including annual disaster-recovery testing and a hardware uplift
- A clean, well-documented handover transferring knowledge to the departments’ internal teams
“Clancy and the team invested real effort in understanding our heavily customised, challenging environment, and adapted quickly to provide valuable support. His thorough knowledge, and calm, assured manner gave us a real level of comfort.”
— Manager, Finance & Procurement Systems, Department of Health (Shared Corporate Services)
Talk to us about your Oracle environment
Level 3 support, performance, payments and modernisation — get in touch to see how Park Lane can solve similar challenges for your organisation.
