The future of business at Oracle Live: Virtual event recap

By Grant Kieckhaefer, Oracle

No one knows for certain what a post-pandemic world will look like, but we do know that COVID-19 won’t be the last disruption we face. The future of your business depends on your ability to analyze fast, plan smartly, pivot quickly, and innovate for growth.

Oracle customers have reassessed their standard business practices to pivot forward in a meaningful way. They’ve kept pace with technology changes, achieved positive business outcomes, and are positioned for future growth.

Want to learn how? Watch the Oracle Live replay featuring Oracle's applications development team and executives from Vanguard and Marriot International. A quick recap of the event:

Lessons learned from 2020

Post-pandemic, each industry faces a unique reality. Many industries have experienced unprecedented growth, while other sectors will never look the same. In working with thousands of customers across industries and geographies, we’ve learned some important lessons:

1. Dynamic supply chains are essential to adapt to changing global conditions. A more refined risk management strategy can help pivot you from a just-in-time mentality to a just-in-case mind set.
2. Access to real-time financial information is critical to make meaningful, rapid change. Automating the close process, having better scenario-based planning, having better predictive modeling and cash forecasting will help your finance team to make the best decisions in a rapidly changing environment.
3. Accelerating digital customer experiences is key to making your brand stand out. Businesses that have flourished in today’s environment are able deliver real-time digital experiences to customers through e-commerce, touchless payments, and contactless service.
4. In this pandemic environment, we have seen how distinct industries are affected differently. Some industries developed to move forward and grow quickly during ever-changing conditions, while others had to pivot and innovate new business models rapidly to survive.

Define your future

Oracle has found common traits among our cloud customers that allow them to flourish. They are:

1. Agile organizations that are built on continuous innovation and process improvement. They take quarterly software updates with new features and functionality to improve their business processes, which is what helps keep them agile.
2. Deploying artificial intelligence to help give better predictions and recommendations and to detect hidden anomalies. In our ever more complex environment, our customers leverage artificial intelligence to optimize processes, free-up resources, and help teams play a bigger role in driving business change.
3. Leveraging industry-specific application functionality that caters to your specific business challenges.

Showcasing what’s new in Oracle Cloud ERP and EPM

Vice president of ERP applications development, Catherine You, shared how pivotal Oracle customers are in influencing our roadmap. Over the last four months, over 1,700 new features have been introduced and they’re being adopted rapidly. These innovations help free up resources for finance teams to shift from an operational focus to becoming more strategic, supporting companywide transformation goals. There are three key innovations in Oracle Cloud that will strengthen your finance and operations performance:

1. Touchless operations are key to accelerating the financial close. Intelligent document recognition and intelligent process automation are two capabilities that seamlessly bring external data sources into your ERP with little-to-no manual intervention. Along with reducing manual tasks, this ensures that everyone can see the status of the close.
2. Continuous forecasting includes higher frequency and machine-generated predictions to compliment human insight and help your business move faster. Enhanced driver-based forecasting models help you ensure that insights are explainable and understandable by finance users, with little data science background.
3. Conversational experience provides AI tools like digital assistants to handle self-service tasks, such as submitting expense reports or project time entries. Oracle Digital Assistant can also give you visibility into account reconciliations or close activities that need your attention.

To see more highlights from the Oracle Cloud ERP and EPM demo, watch the video:

Watch the Oracle Live replay to learn more.