An Innovation Imperative: Oracle Extends Cloud ERP Lead With New Automations And Insights

When I speak with CFOs, CAOs and senior finance and operations leaders, two areas of discussion keep coming up: the digital transformation journey and innovation. Organizations are finally ready to begin their digital finance transformations and eagerly want to take advantage of a continuous stream of innovation for their business.

The need to simplify, standardize, automate, and then innovate is now an imperative for customers across industries and geographies. Whether customers are looking to improve the speed and accuracy of business processes by removing mundane, repetitive, and manual tasks using machine learning or want to enhance analytical decision-making via sophisticated predictive algorithms, choosing to partner with Oracle is sure way to get the right results.

To help our customers gain the speed and insights they need to be successful, my team and I are excited to announce several new innovations within Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) that help finance, operations, and procurement organizations focus on more strategic work. These include:

• Intelligent Document Recognition (IDR): New adaptive learning increases the accuracy of invoice scanning and improves touchless processing. When users make corrections in the interactive IDR viewer, each invoice edit trains the algorithms and improves future recognition. Telemetry reports help Payables’ users see a significant increase in supplier invoice recognition rate due to continuous closed-loop learning. IDR plays a significant role in reducing manual operations.
• Intelligent Performance Management (IPM) Insights: IPM Insights utilizes data science to help customers identify anomalies, trends, and biases to improve forecast accuracy and provide actionable business performance insights. IPM analyzes large amounts of financial and operational data to identify and highlight patterns, many of which may not be immediately apparent to humans such as a tendency to over- or under-forecast key metrics every period. This enables finance professionals to spend less time chasing and analyzing data, and more time acting on valuable insights and opportunities.
• Procurement Spend Classification: New machine learning capabilities help procurement teams automatically categorize unclassified business transactions to provide greater insight into spending patterns. Pre-built reports provide visibility into machine learning accuracy and help teams continuously improve line-item classification performance. At the same time, automated, accurate, spend classification helps customers manage suppliers more strategically, increase negotiation performance, and reduce costs. As a result, procurement professionals can now dedicate more time to making strategic purchasing decisions instead of gathering and cleaning data.
• Fusion ERP Analytics: New enhancements to Fusion ERP Analytics add spend and procurement KPIs to its prebuilt KPI library, allowing procurement and finance professionals to manage and improve spend operations. The latest update also includes enhancements to multi-language support and new analytics content across GL, AP, AR, plus a new employee expenses subject area for analyzing employee spend across company, cost center, expense types, and expense categories.
• Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Enterprise Journals: A new automated journal entry capability enables finance teams to streamline the creation, management and posting of journal entries. Finance teams often spend significant time manually moving journals from their EPM applications to their ERP systems. To eliminate this inefficient and manual process, which can lead to errors in financial reporting and forecasting, Enterprise Journals automates and directly posts journals from Oracle Cloud EPM to any cloud or on-premises ERP system. It also provides a single place to manage and track journals, while pre-built templates and workflows streamline the journal entry process and further reduce the potential for errors.
• Risk Management & Compliance APIs: With the latest update, best practice security rules can be analyzed prior to granting ERP access, helping to prevent access, privacy and separation of duties (SOD) violations. Potential issues are detected in identity management workflows using machine learning capabilities that analyze complex security setups that would traditionally require full teams to review. This reduces risk by simulating potential security and compliance violations, ensuring that new employees are onboarded with the correct privileges, and analyzing security at scale across all users, roles, and privileges.

Our customers are in great company. More than 8,200 organizations across all industries and geographies rely on Oracle Cloud ERP to run their businesses. Oracle Cloud ERP offers a comprehensive set of enterprise finance and operations capabilities, including financials, accounting hub, procurement, project management, enterprise performance management, risk management, subscription management, and supply chain and manufacturing. It is a self-updating platform that constantly provides customers with the industry’s most advanced technologies every 90 days, giving organizations the ability to build, innovate, automate, adapt, and leverage new business opportunities on-demand.

Here’s what some of our customers have been saying about the continuous innovation enabled by Oracle Cloud ERP:

I don’t worry about patching our environment or just keeping things running. And that allows me and my team to focus on other things — David Hovstadius, Senior Vice President of Finance Operations at Hearst

Oracle Fusion Cloud applications are natively designed for the cloud, so these innovations are made available in an easy-to-consume, non-disruptive manner. It’s easier to go through these upgrade cycles. You’re getting more robust functionality, more frequently — Victor Fetter, CIO at Fortive

We don’t have to get approval for a big system upgrade to get new capabilities. They’re delivered every quarter, and we can turn them on as needed — Jamie McConnell, Vice President and Controller at Chipotle

And, our ERP solutions continue to garner industry recognition. Just last month, Oracle Cloud ERP was named a leader for the third successive time in the 2021 Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises, ranking highest for “ability to execute” and furthest right for “completeness of vision.” We were also recently named a Leader in the 2021 Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Cloud Core Financial Management Suites for Midsize, Large and Global Enterprises for the fifth straight year and were named a Customers’ Choice Vendor in the 2021 Gartner® Peer Insights ‘Voice of the Customer’: Cloud Financial Planning and Analysis Solutions.

It’s because of our customers’ honest feedback, influencing more than half of our quarterly updates, that we are able to continuously innovate and deliver products that set the industry standard. From my team to yours: thank you for being a part of the journey in creating the industry’s leading cloud ERP.