People, Platform, Process

Oracle Cloud ERP offers an opportunity to reduce costs, streamline business processes, strengthen financial decision support, and raise workforce satisfaction. To realize these benefits a genuine transformation of people, platform and process is necessary.

A group of people working around a table

People

Cloud transformation reshapes the skills of several user communities.

For the IT department, Cloud ERP eliminates on-premise maintenance and upgrades and hence, frees resources to focus on more business orientated tasks. For example, assessment and deployment of new features in collaboration with other user communities.

Within the finance department, automation replaces many data entry and detailed reconciliation tasks. Instead, users will spend more time assessing and resolving exceptions identified by automated processes.

In both departments, employee skills evolve towards higher value tasks and responsibilities.

End users should also expect user experience and business processes to evolve over time.  As your enterprise responds to regulatory and market challenges, it will implement new and enhanced Cloud ERP features. Moreover, as Oracle modernizes its user interface and underlying technology, it will become available to users.

In summary, Cloud ERP elevates IT and finance roles by allowing them to focus on more business orientated activities. End users will see incremental innovation as you implement new features and user interface changes.

A DBA in a datacenter

Platform

Cloud ERP eliminates many of the tasks performed by your IT department for on-premise applications.

  • Compliance: Oracle monitors and addresses hardware and software vulnerabilities.
  • Certification: Oracle ensures that all tech stack components are mutually compatible.
  • Monitoring: Oracle’s Cloud Operations team performs most day-to-day DBA and system administrator tasks.
  • New provisioning: as Cloud adoption expands and the business grows, Oracle will elastically adapt hardware, software, and other resources to match demand.
  • Customizations: With Public Cloud, a significant proportion of resources dedicated to maintaining customization will be freed to focus on other tasks.

The migration to the cloud is more than substituting one platform for another. It presents an opportunity for the IT department to elevate its role in the enterprise. For example, by monitoring service levels, evaluating new features, and participating in the business relationship with Oracle.

Man discussing a process diagram on his cellphone

Process

Cloud ERP offers an opportunity to standardize, automate, and innovate:

  • Standardize: replace complex homegrown business processes with industry and generally accepted best practices.
  • Automate: eliminate manual and repetitive tasks with automation, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). For example, machine learning automatically predicts and inputs distribution accounts for invoices not matched to purchase orders.
  • Innovate: the perpetual innovation inherent in the Cloud paradigm means that finance, IT and, end users will continually assess, configure, and roll out new features that improve or replace existing processes.

Cloud ERP’s enterprise structures and features support best practices via upgrade safe configuration. Digital enablers such as AI and ML elevate flexibility to a new level by ‘self-configuring’ the application to reflect the needs and circumstances unique to the enterprise.

Customized on-premise solutions often remain on an outdated version because of the prohibitive cost and risk of upgrading customizations. The only way to address emerging business challenges is further customization making it even more complex, costly, and risky to upgrade.

Oracle Cloud is different because:

  • End users will benefit from new features enabled through further configuration or delivered by Oracle in quarterly updates.
  • Oracle monitors the popularity of Customer Connect Ideas. It prioritizes the most compelling and popular ideas for inclusion in a future quarterly update.

Take Advantage of Opportunities to Become an Agile Organization

The cloud transformation is an opportunity to become more agile by streamlining, automating and adopting standard processes. Don’t make assumptions about Cloud ERP’s capabilities based on your legacy ERP experience. Start out with a thorough review of Fusion features to ensure that you miss nothing.

Review Cloud ERP in the context of your overall systems architecture. Identify upstream and downstream processes that can be replaced by standard features. Are you, for example, generating GL balance profit and loss reports in an on-premise data warehouse when they are available in real-time in General Ledger?

Manual procedures are slow and prone to error. Are there tasks that can be fully or partially replaced by automated processing? For example, can you simplify reconciliation with the Payables and Receivables to General Ledger reconciliation reports or through the Clearing Account Reconciliation features? Manual journal entries represent another opportunity. Can Cloud ERP features to calculate accruals or allocations replace them?

Examine whether period end processing respond to a genuine business requirement or legacy limitations. If you can spread processing over the period, it reduces pressure on period end and makes data available earlier for management reporting. Similarly, can you summarize feeds from upstream systems to streamline processing?

If you identify critical industry or enterprise specific processes that are not supported out of the box by Oracle Cloud.

  • Question whether your current business process owes more to legacy features and limitations than an underlying business requirement. Look for other ways to meet the business objective using standard features.
  • Explore the upgrade safe configuration and personalization features offered by Oracle Cloud. For example, descriptive flexfields, custom reports, or page personalization.
  • As a last resort, consider extensions using Oracle’s platform as a service (PAAS) offering. It allows you to build extensions using the same underlying technology and certified versions as Cloud ERP. Cloud ERP offers upgrade safe REST APIs to support integration with both PAAS and external applications.

Executive Sponsorship

An executive sponsorship that fosters change across your user communities is vital to a successful implementation. They:

  • coordinate between user communities engaged in the implementation
  • communicate and promote the implementation’s business objectives
  • establish clear governance for evaluating and approving exceptions to corporate policies
  • safeguard the implementation’s goals throughout its initial and subsequent phases

Conclusion

The migration to Oracle Cloud is far more than a lift and shift from one technology platform to another. The most successful implementations embrace the change inherent in Cloud across people, platform, and process.