Multinational computer technology corporation Oracle has updated Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) to meet the emerging demands of the finance operations in the new normal.
The latest innovations in these cloud enterprise products are aimed at helping finance teams leverage touchless operations, predictive planning, and digital assistants to pivot toward growth. The latest product updates enable organizations of all sizes to quickly and easily take advantage of innovations in artificial intelligence, digital assistants, and natural language processing. These advancements help finance teams improve decision-making with real-time insights, simplify business processes, and drive efficiencies needed to pivot organizations toward growth.
“2020 has been one of the most challenging years to run a business, putting added pressure on finance teams to balance short-term challenges with longer-term strategic initiatives,” said Rondy Ng, senior vice president of applications development, Oracle. “Our newest innovations help finance teams rapidly adapt to the current economic climate, drive new business models, and improve strategic decision-making; all designed to help our customers define their future.”
PH cement manufacturer adopts Oracle Cloud ERP to automate operations
Finance leaders’ current operational challenges
Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP and EPM’s new features and capabilities assured that organizations will be able to increase efficiency, speed, and accuracy with touchless operations.
With intelligent process automation, finance teams will be able to improve their financial close and account reconciliation by using configurable and intelligent rules and patterns to automate manual tasks. The solution also automatically predicts and enters code segments for invoices not associated with purchase orders based on machine-learning. This allows customers to automate routine and mundane data entry, and reduce invoice processing time, with the system improving predictions with continued usage.
It will also allow the finance department to automate the tagging of regulatory reports (such as 10K and 10Q) using the customer’s SEC XBRL taxonomy based on advanced language processing and pattern recognition. This allows users to focus on the quality and validation of required reporting and narratives versus spending time on repetitive tagging tasks.
In terms of decision-making, department leads and heads can take advantage of the intelligent performance management, whch uncovers hard-to-spot data patterns to deliver actionable and contextual insights at the right time, helping improve the quality and business impact of financial and operational decisions. Customers can quickly uncover correlations and realize faster time-to-action.
It also has corporate and project planning and budgeting Capabilities, which combines planning and budgeting with project management to improve the execution of strategic corporate plans and control of approved projects. This enables ad-hoc scenario modeling to plan costs for indirect and capital projects, while also creating a single business flow to increase cost visibility, reduce approval times, and accelerate project execution.
The two solutions also aim to help customers prepare for potential operational, safety, and security risks that might be caused by future events. This allows finance teams to quickly assess risks, document and approve recovery plans, and keep executives informed to minimize reputational, operational, and financial impacts.
Digital assistants
The digital assistant’s features are made simple that offer “contextual user experience features that benefit all users.” Project time and expenses’ entries can be predicted and automatically reconciles month end processes for project professionals. The expanded collaboration platforms help teams collaborate in common platforms including SMS, Slack, and Microsoft Teams.
Additional advanced industry-specific features that support utilities, oil and gas, asset-intensive industries, as well as the professional services industries:
Joint Venture Management Capabilities for Utilities and Oil and Gas: Supports retroactive billing adjustments, partner reimbursements, and partner contributions to improve the accuracy of joint venture accounting, shorten the financial close period, avoid costly billing disputes and reduce project costs.
Complex Procurement Capabilities for Asset Intensive Industries: Ensures compliance with contractual obligations over the duration of a project. By creating and managing supplier invoices matched to purchase orders with retainage payment terms, this helps organizations hold back retainage and only release the retained amount once the contract is completed.
Flexible Resource Scheduling for Professional Services: Helps project-centric organizations benefit from flexible scheduling when planning, requesting and assigning labor resources on a project. This enables customers to plan for a specified number of hours or variable hours each week and generate resource requests, and evaluate capacity based on weekly hours requested and total hours available.