3 Reasons Why Oracle Cloud Enterprise Data Management is Critical for Finance

By Steve Bogner, Project Manager, Perficient 

Enterprise performance management (EPM) cloud roadmaps are expanding rapidly across organizations and industries. It’s becoming more and more common to see multiple cloud EPM capabilities being implemented: planning, financial consolidation and close, profitability and cost management, etc. And while the number of EPM business process implementations are increasing, so is the need to efficiently manage the dimensions across the EPM footprint and beyond EPM to other business applications such as ERP. This is why Oracle Cloud Enterprise Data Management (EDM) is critical.

EDM provides time savings

In a cloud environment without EDM, administrators have to apply dimension updates to each application individually. However, with EDM, dimension management is centralized. Dimension updates can be applied with a few clicks within EDM—no need to log into each cloud application and apply updates separately. EDM also enables the synchronization of updates for dimensions shared across applications, meaning that users enter the update only once and EDM does the work of aligning the dimensions for all the impacted applications!

EDM empowers business users

EDM’s workflow components allow for business users to submit requests. Simple enough, but it provides a truly unique feature for users: change visualization. Within a request in EDM, users can see and interact with future-state dimensions as they apply updates. The target applications are not updated until the request passes final approval, ensuring data integrity remains. Gone are the days where business users are required to “mock up” the future-state of a dimension so that administrators can comprehend and apply the updates.

EDM enforces data governance and reduces errors

In a traditional EPM setting, business users submit a request to administrators who are responsible for analyzing and applying the updates. Does the request meet system requirements? Does the request meet organizational data standards, such as naming conventions? Has all the required supporting information been provided with the request to ensure it’s applied correctly? Has the request been approved by data stewards? It has typically been up to administrators to ensure these questions are answered—but what happens if the administrators miss something? The time lost to correct the issue could be significant. 

EDM removes this bottleneck by systematically enforcing data governance requirements on the front end—when the request is initiated by the users. EDM workflow policies can also be configured to ensure requests are reviewed and approved by required personnel.

There you have it: three major reasons why EDM is critical for EPM cloud environments. Contact us today to learn more about EDM!