Syneos Health — Oracle FA Global Implementation & Dynamics AX Migration

Executive Summary

Syneos Health — one of the world's largest contract research organizations, conducting clinical trials and commercialization services for pharmaceutical and biotech clients globally — engaged William Delaney Consulting to lead the Oracle Fixed Assets implementation and data migration from Microsoft Dynamics AX as part of a broader Oracle EBS R12 deployment. The engagement addressed one of the most technically complex FA scenarios: migrating a global fixed asset register from a non-Oracle ERP into Oracle FA, across multiple legal entities and depreciation books, while ensuring that accumulated depreciation at the migration date reconciled precisely between the two systems.

The engagement operated under Oracle's AIM methodology with AN100 Business Requirements Documents covering FA Book Status reporting, Global Manual Journal Entries, and the full Oracle FA configuration. The AX-to-FA reconciliation workstream — supported by custom SQL against both AX staging tables and Oracle FA tables — was the critical path deliverable, as any discrepancy in asset cost or accumulated depreciation at conversion would create a permanent balance sheet variance that would be reported and audited for the life of each asset.

Engagement Context

Contract research organizations have distinctive fixed asset profiles: a large base of laboratory equipment, clinical trial infrastructure, and technology assets distributed across global clinical research sites; high asset turnover as equipment is deployed and retired with clinical trial lifecycles; and complex asset ownership structures where assets may be owned by the CRO but stationed at client (pharma) facilities under contract. Oracle FA must be configured to track this complexity — asset location, custodian assignment, and the insurance/replacement value considerations that come with high-value clinical equipment.

Syneos Health's global scale added multi-entity complexity: legal entities across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, each with potentially different local tax depreciation rules, different functional currencies, and different statutory reporting requirements. Oracle FA's multi-book architecture — supporting corporate book depreciation and one or more tax books per entity — was central to the configuration design.

Microsoft Dynamics AX (now Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance) is a tier-one ERP with its own fixed asset module, but its data model differs from Oracle FA in important ways: AX's asset groups map to Oracle's asset categories, AX's value models map to Oracle's asset books, and AX's depreciation profiles map to Oracle's depreciation methods and conventions. The AX US staging tables created in this engagement (AX_US_CREATE_TABLE_STATEMENT.sql, AX_US_INSERT_STATEMENT.sql) confirm that the migration extracted AX data into intermediate Oracle staging tables before loading through Oracle's Mass Additions interface.

Oracle FA Implementation Scope

Business Requirements (AN100)

Oracle AIM AN100 Business Requirements Documents were produced for: FA Book Status reporting (tracking asset counts, costs, and accumulated depreciation by book and period), Global Manual Journal Entries reporting (providing the audit trail for any manual accounting interventions in the FA subledger), and the core FA configuration requirements covering categories, books, locations, and depreciation rules across Syneos Health's global entity structure.

Dynamics AX to Oracle FA Migration

The migration followed a staging-table architecture: AX fixed asset data was extracted and loaded into Oracle staging tables (AX_US tables) using INSERT statements that mapped AX data elements to Oracle FA data structures. From staging, the Mass Addition Insert Statement populated Oracle's FA_MASS_ADDITIONS interface table, which was then processed by the FA Mass Additions Post program to create official Oracle FA asset records.

The AX-to-FA Reconciliation SQL query was the validation anchor: comparing asset costs and accumulated depreciation between the AX staging data and the Oracle FA books after Mass Additions posting. Any variance identified by the reconciliation required investigation — either a data mapping error in the staging INSERT or a calculation difference in how the two systems computed accumulated depreciation as of the conversion date.

Legal Entity Change Testing

The Legal Entity Change Testing Visio diagram documented the test scenarios for assets that changed legal entity ownership — a scenario that occurs when CRO assets are reassigned between legal entities through internal transfers or post-acquisition restructuring. Oracle FA legal entity changes require careful sequence: the source entity must retire the asset (creating retirement accounting), and the receiving entity must add the asset as a new acquisition — creating the correct intercompany accounting entries in GL.

FA Reporting

FA Period Status Reports and custom SQL (FA_PERIOD_STATUS_REPORT.sql, NetBookValue.sql, FA Depreciation.sql, FA Report Query.sql) supported ongoing FA period reporting after go-live. The NSE_HIERARCHY.sql addressed the corporate hierarchy structure — providing the entity-level consolidation view needed for global fixed asset reporting across Syneos Health's legal entity tree.

Key Deliverables

Consultant Insights

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