Boldness is the name of the game for businesses looking to drive growth, and cloud is the way to get there. Focusing on cloud in your tech strategy ranks high on McKinsey’s list of chief information officer priorities for the next 12 months. As businesses continue turning to the cloud to address pandemic-induced challenges, such as supply-chain disruption, cost pressures, and labor availability, they’re also provided with the opportunity to increase flexibility, speed, and innovations that can transform their operations.
Modernize technology to gain a competitive edge
The cloud can provide cost savings and scaling speed that help businesses improve operations and deliver better customer experiences that build loyalty and drive growth. The potential rewards of adopting cloud are exponential. McKinsey estimates that Fortune 500 companies could generate $1 trillion in extra run-rate EBIDTA by adopting cloud.
One example of how organizations are using the cloud to modernize and boost innovation comes from Deutsche Bank. CEO Christian Sewing has made modernizing the bank’s technology one of his signature efforts, aiming to simplify a range of platforms and hosting arrangements.
With more than 40 petabytes of data in Oracle Database instances, Deutsche Bank is embracing Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer in a move that brings big cost savings. Deutsche Bank’s work with Oracle to modernize the data handling software behind key trading, risk management, and capital planning underlines technology’s importance in helping banks gain a competitive edge.
Read more about how Deutsche Bank innovates with Oracle.
Speed up reporting to democratize access to data
With the transformative benefits cloud can bring to an organization, it can also provide businesses with improved data analytics. Accurate, fast data helps organizations more easily satisfy reporting requirements and deliver key information to decision-makers.
The cloud brings significant advantages for the deployment of applications, access to data, implementation of analytics, and efficiency of operations, all of which help organizations build speed into their operations.
An example of how the cloud helps organizations speed up reporting comes from Lyft, a transportation network company that develops, markets, and operates the Lyft mobile app. By working with Oracle across their cloud infrastructure, database, enterprise resource planning, and analytics needs, Lyft accelerated their financial reporting and reduced time to close the financial books by 75%.
For Lyft’s finance team, closing the financial books faster isn’t just an accounting timesaver, but also a means to grow faster by democratizing access to data. Having finance, operations, and analytics on one system ensures that everyone at Lyft knows where to turn for information to make more accurate decisions.
Read more about how Lyft speeds up financial reporting with Oracle Cloud.
Automate financial operations to increase efficiency
Research from McKinsey suggests that 42% of finance functions can be fully automated with solutions that exist today. As CFO responsibilities evolve to include organization-wide growth strategies, automation can help reduce manual processes and enable data visualization and analytics that drive growth.
Proof of how finance can use automation to improve operational efficiency comes from Dropbox, the file-hosting service provider that develops smart content and collaboration products. With over 600 million users, Dropbox processes a high-volume of transactions.
To scale the business rapidly while minimizing cost and risk, Dropbox embraced automation wherever possible to eliminate manual labor across financial operations. They turned to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to create a simple, secure invoice consolidation process to manage their large volume of monthly transactions. With Oracle, Dropbox reduced their processing costs by 80% through invoice consolidation and automated data delivery.
Read more about how Dropbox automates financial operations with Oracle.
Improve forecasting for speed and flexibility
Simplifying how organizations approach their forecasting procedure is a key method of driving efficiency, and efficiency is a key driver of value. Cloud technology like automation and machine learning can reduce manual processes to hasten the forecasting process and provide more accurate results.
An example of how businesses are improving forecasting with the cloud comes from Mazda, an automaker based in Hiroshima, Japan, that supplies 1.5 million automobiles annually in 130 countries. Mazda’s operations teams were looking to shorten inventory management processing and improve the accuracy of demand forecasting.
Mazda moved their inventory management transactions from an on-premises server and storage infrastructure, which also hosted other business functions, to OCI. They can now make on-demand forecasting calculations without worrying about crimping other applications, and they can run models daily to incorporate the latest order records and increase the accuracy of demand forecasting and inventory management.
Read more about how Mazda improves forecasting with Oracle.
Ready to innovate?
Companies who strategically embed cloud technologies like automation, analytics, and machine learning into their business can improve operational agility and drive growth.
OCI is designed to deliver better performance, manageability, security, and efficiency for any workload and application, so your business can spend less time managing IT and more time innovating. Learn how Oracle Cloud Infrastructure accelerates business innovation.