Douglas D. “Doug” Paul has been a practitioner of cost and profitability management since the early 1990s. He has served in roles in industry, software companies that are competitors of Oracle, and consulting firms. Since 2016, as part of Alithya, he has exclusively implemented and promoted Oracle Profitability and Cost Management, and has led or meaningfully contributed to over nine client implementations. These projects have spanned the realm of Oracle costing solutions including Standard Profitability, HPCM Management Ledger, Oracle PCMCS, and Oracle EPCM. During these implementations, Doug provided direct software implementation and configuration, project management, and knowledge transfer/training to client users. These projects have fulfilled a diverse set of business requirements including shared services costing, product costing, project costing, transfer pricing, indirect rates costing, store profitability, and multiple cases of responsibility center allocations to business units, divisions, and geographies. The industries included insurance, utilities, banking/brokerage/credit card financial services, and retail restaurants. Throughout the course of these projects, Doug developed multiple modeling techniques applicable to future circumstances, including but not limited to 1) methods for processing final results for export as journal entries, 2) derivation and calculation of complex multi-factor formula drivers, 3) mixed use of periodic and year-to-date calculations, 4) use of attributes for complex selection/exclusion criteria in rules, 5) derived driver values and percentages for reporting, 6) techniques for conversion of standard profitability models to PCM, and 7) progressive bracketed threshold calculations for chargeouts or other purposes.
During this period since 2016, Doug has also authored four published articles, two each in Strategic Finance and Cost Management magazines. He also posted nine blogs, delivered two KScope presentations and multiple webinars, and has built and delivered demonstration models for prospective sales situations. In addition to client implementations, Doug has also built or assisted with multiple pre-configured accelerator solutions in PCM of a diverse nature including Standard Cost Rate Development for Manufacturers, Healthcare Provider Cost of Care Analytics, and IT Financial Management. Doug’s activity with Oracle PCM has also included the submission of several service requests on behalf of clients that were ultimately deemed by Oracle as official “bug” incidents for subsequent rectification. Doug has participated in multiple calls with Oracle’s PCM Product Management to review prospective feature enhancements including 1) the creation of a capability for export of journal entries, 2) a rate x volume capability, and 3) a migration tool for Standard Profitability. Doug was also among a group of PCM consultants who were selected to assist Oracle Product Management with testing of the new EPCM product, six months prior to its release to the public. During this time, Doug identified numerous issues including failures during conversion from legacy PCM, member selection failures in model rules building, report errors, and calculation failures and errors. All of these issues were subsequently investigated by Oracle prior to general release.