There’s an old adage: “You’ve got to spend money to make money.” But you’ve also got to understand where your money is going to make money, too.

If you don’t have full visibility into capital and operating expense, it’s nearly impossible to get a leg up in business. Optimizing a company’s spending is one of the simplest ways to maximize business output, but gaining a clear picture of where and how dollars and cents are being spread across a multi-faceted business can be difficult, and even vexing.

Oracle Fusion ERP Analytics was designed to unravel this complicated problem. It’s a product that operates much like a mighty iceberg, with unique tools above the service and within arm’s reach for the Procurement executives to utilize and the power of prebuilt data models chugging beneath the surface to maximize time and ease of function.

A Chief Procurement Officer has many important missions, but most important of all is taking a deeper look at direct, indirect and service expenditure to understand where the company is spending money, who are the top suppliers for various categories, and driving catalyst events to negotiate a better contract with each of those suppliers to optimize at every point.

In addition, Companies have a vested interest in understanding how their procurement processes and shared services centers are performing. FAW can get you there. FAW offers a deep dive into different cycle times for procure to pay processes, offering comprehensive insights into procurement performance for an organization. These revelations provide a critical advantage for companies looking to maximize their own organizational success.

Fusion ERP Analytics to light the way

But they can’t do any of that without meaningful insights helping to light the way. Fusion ERP Analytics offers those insights. And with Fusion Analytics Warehouse (FAW), we ensure our customers always have the latest and greatest data available to drive the most important business decisions. While Fusion offers quarterly upgrades, every Fusion release is certified to work with FAW before our customers get upgraded, so the data pipeline pulling valuable insight-packed data is never broken.

Now, let’s go back to the iceberg and take a closer look. Above the surface, we arm you with pre-built best practice KPIs and pre-built dashboards and reports that are ready to get to work the minute you are. Their impact however, is derived from the immense chunk of the iceberg that exists below the surface, anchoring and powering it: our pre-built data model and a pre-built data pipeline from Oracle ERP that is completely managed by Oracle.

The problem: Specific Category spend is over budget. But why?

Many organizations operate in an environment where operational costs are monitored closely and few others are growing rapidly supported by aggressive capital investment in assets which drive competitive differentiation. So consider this example: A CPO running a spend analysis sees that Service costs for a specific country are trending up creating financial risk. Using Fusion ERP, she keeps a close watch on the business with specific KPI cards showing direct, indirect, service spend across the enterprise. She can personalize the view with few easy clicks and is used to starting her day by observing the KPIs that matters most. The insight quickly becomes apparent: Services is trending over budget and details indicate a specific service category showing abrupt increase.

She is able to now collaborate directly with her team around this KPI to foster data-driven decisions. In this case, a note is sent to the commodity manager to continue investigation into why these costs are coming in over budget and what measures can be taken to bring it back under control.

Connected insights are effortless

Next, the CPO office goes on the hunt for connected insights working closely with CFO  & CHRO office. It’s easy by creating a cross-functional analysis with Oracle Cloud ERP and Oracle Cloud HCM data, both from a common analytical model. In this case, the employee expense data is combined with survey analytics & engagement data to identify the departments which are under-invested in terms of training, moral and team building.

New analysis and reports are easy to now build thanks to the pre-built data model of the ERP data, and using customized packaged content from embedded Oracle Analytics Cloud self-service capabilities, the company creates a simple investment plan to drive employee engagement with new strategic suppliers on-boarded in no time.

Going deeper to add machine learning and predictive analytics

The insights on this company’s spend and procurement are already becoming apparent, but they can go much deeper. By layering machine learning, predictive analytics and natural language generation, they can uncover further patterns. And it’s easy to quickly mash up ERP data with external data services: in this case, they import an Excel file with supplier credit ratings or sustainability rating to mashup with their supplier spend data, effectively minimizing financials & reputation risk correlated to the supply base.

First: Analyze. Next: Make game-changing decisions.

Our customers use the metrics we provide for them through Oracle Analytics to generate some of the most important strategic decisions of their companies. But before they can make decisions, they need to feel empowered by data that offers them a clearer bird’s-eye view of their financial output.. And you can’t begin the analysis until you feel confident that the numbers in your possession are accurate.

Fusion Analytics Warehouse solves this bottleneck. We work hand in hand with our Fusion teams to make sure we can extract the data out of our systems and when it’s presented to the business analyst, it’s ready for consumption at that very moment. So our customers can do what they do best — get to work right away.

Want to learn more about how you can use Fusion ERP Analytics to maximize profits?  Get an overview or join a virtual workshop today.