The support services, spanning accounting and finance, IT, human resources (HR), and procurement, mobility, and logistics functions, manage more than five million payments (accounts payable), 1.9 million paychecks, and 1.7 million travel and expense claims per year, as well as 5800 quarterly tax returns.

Relying on Oracle Database, Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle Automatic Storage Management, Oracle Partitioning, and Oracle Enterprise Manager, Siemens Shared Services' clustered database environment delivers the performance, scalability, reliability, and flexibility required to support their Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise Human Capital Management applications and critical business processes, including payroll for all US-based employees. PeopleSoft Enterprise is deployed on a two-node cluster of Dell PowerEdge 6850 servers running Microsoft Windows 2003.

As Siemens Shared Services moved from a client-server architecture to Web-based deployment of PeopleSoft Enterprise Human Capital Management, they needed a foundation that would support an extensive increase in information, transactions and provide users with continuous uptime. Their new Web-based system needed to support 50-100 super users, each performing payroll for up to 10,000 employees or developing large tax reports, while also facilitating a daily stream of 5000 employees accessing the HR portal daily to update information, such as a change of address.

Siemens Shared Services uses Oracle Partitioning to break payroll data information into manageable components - speeding query times, improving availability, and easing archiving. To monitor their clustered environment, the company uses the monitoring and diagnostic capabilities of Oracle Enterprise Manager. In addition, Siemens Shared Services relies on Oracle Automatic Storage Management to automate and streamline storage performance and management and add additional storage capacity without disruption.

"As we moved towards an employee 'self-service' model for HR functions we needed an IT infrastructure that supported an influx of users and information without the risk of downtime", stated Steve Montgomerie, Oracle Database Administrator, Siemens Shared Services. "Being a service business managing processes such as payroll, we would have a lot of irate employees if the system went down. We also do a lot of batch processing for PeopleSoft Enterprise Human Capital Management in the middle of the night - so there is literally no time of the day in which an outage would not disrupt our business. Oracle Real Application Clusters on Windows provides us with the continuous uptime we need to meet our critical business objectives, while easing the burden of our IT infrastructure to grow and scale with the business."