Billy Allen:

Jacobs is an engineering and consulting firm. We provide engineering solutions for companies across a lot of different markets.

I'm Chief Accounting Officer and Senior Vice President for Jacobs.

The company has been an Oracle shop for a number of years. Most recently, probably about two-thirds of the company is on an R12 on-prem platform. The rest of the company has been on a group of disparate systems, and we like the idea of Oracle Cloud being a really good solution for that group of companies and with their disparate systems to come together into one.

SOX challenges were pretty common. It was around getting good documentation and completeness of what our SOX control structures were that were in scope, that were associated with all of those disparate systems, and how to determine the bridge of how you were going to go from that portfolio of key controls in those old systems to the portfolio and what it would look like under this one common solution with Oracle Cloud.

It's about preparation at the very beginning, end to end, communicating with all the stakeholders, whether it be process owners, whether it be SteerCo members, executive management, members of the board, and the audit committee, helping them understand what the process is going to look like, not only the IT side, but also the business process side that's going to be affected by a conversion of this size.

Definitely get prepared. Communicate early. Learn the as is model of what you are converting from. Learn that backwards and forwards. It will enable the team to know what good is going to need to look like and be in a position to say, "Hey, we're ready on all fronts. The technology's working, the controls are working, the teams are trained. Everything is ready to go."

KPMG has been a partner for many years. There was a lot of familiarity with our policies and our procedures and our people, and that was really a winning combination that made the choice about who we would work with a pretty simple one, actually.

KPMG, professional, first class, very communicative. And one of the best things about working with them on this project was their collaboration with our other external advisors who were also members of the Big Four, including our audit firm. And to this day, I talk to the team about how that made such a huge difference and was really a game changer for us to be able to cut over and convert to this first phase in the timeframe that we were able to do.

They brought the subject matter expertise into the conversations that helped us determine where we needed to look and also helped us build the tools that we want to use in the future that will help us get better at that really critical part of a conversion. They also knew what our requirements were going to be from an audit perspective.

I thought it said a lot about KPMG, that they saw the need to be collaborative and be nothing else except collaborative the entire time. When I think about capabilities and subject matter expertise on the system control side, definitely the experience speaks with the KPMG team. Their organization, their approach to the project is very intuitive from the client perspective.

I like how KPMG was able to assess the situation and immediately start to develop action plans that we needed to act upon. And you don't do that unless you have a lot of good experience and background. On the IT side and on the business process side, we couldn't have done it without KPMG, and we'd give them a very strong recommendation for other opportunities to do more of this work for other clients.