Why now is the time to run your business on Oracle Cloud

Over the last few years, it’s become more apparent than ever that organizations must be agile to successfully adapt to change, grow their businesses, and assure their long-term success. In less than 36 months, we’ve experienced a global pandemic, unprecedented supply chain issues, an increasingly competitive landscape for attracting and retaining talent, and a war in Europe. No one could have predicted how vastly different the world of 2022 would look from the world of 2020. And yet, these events highlight the continuous nature of change and the importance of staying ahead—or quickly adapting—when we inevitably face a new challenge.

Organizations that have successfully adapted over the last two and a half years are those that have transformed how they operate by leveraging the cloud to run their businesses. With the cloud, organizations can connect and gain visibility into their end-to-end operations, make smarter decisions, faster, and benefit from continuous innovation. For example, they can quickly shift resources to areas where demand is up and dial back in others where demand has suddenly dropped. With visibility into their supply chains, they can adjust before production is held up; with end-to-end automation, their employees can work more productively, spending less time on administrative tasks like sifting through data and spreadsheets and more time on value-add activities, like product development and customer success.

But even as leaders understand the benefits of achieving such agility, new research from PwC indicates that some are worried about the risks associated with moving to the cloud.

Like our customers, Oracle faced the same challenges triggered by change, and we grappled with the implications around a transformation approach. Fast forward to today, we now run our entire business and core operations on Oracle Cloud. We use the same data centers, the same cloud services, and the same versions as our customers. We have learned much along the way and have achieved great benefits as a result of our end-to-end business transformation.

For example, in finance, our adoption of Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP has enabled us to close our books and report earnings to the street in just 10 days—21 days faster than average, and faster than any other company in the S&P 500. In HR, Oracle Cloud HCM has helped us reduce talent review cycles by 70%. With Oracle Cloud Supply Chain Management, we’ve reduced planning cycles from one week to 48 hours. With Oracle Cloud CX, today, more than 90% of orders are fully automated and can be completed within minutes. And, thanks to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), we’re benefitting from 99.99% availability alongside new cost savings.

When it came to the strategy for our transformation, we thought about the effort along three major vectors: people, processes, and automation. It was critical to ensure our teams—starting with leadership and then extending to our entire employee base—understood why and how we needed to change. In addition, we needed to reimagine our business processes from end to end, including those that drive our operations and support the experiences we deliver to our customers, employees, and partners. Finally, we leveraged Oracle Cloud to automate as much as possible, and we continuously leverage cloud updates to deliver improvements and innovation on an ongoing basis.

To ensure we continue to succeed with our shift from a product-oriented company to a service-oriented company, we leverage a 4-step, continuous transformation approach. First, we streamline the journey for our users to provide a simple, intuitive experience that minimizes the time and effort needed to complete tasks. Next, we look for ways to empower employees and customers through automation and with technology like machine learning, AI, and chatbots to enable even faster task completion—without assistance. Then, we look for ways to delight users so they can complete the process quickly and derive success. This includes an intuitive, consumer-like experience that guides users through their activities alongside in-application help. And finally, we leverage Oracle Cloud to give us the automation that enables us to deliver these experiences and continuously improve and innovate. With input from our employees, customers, and partners and new features and functionality every quarter, we are able to transform on an ongoing basis to ensure we stay ahead of the ever-evolving changes in the market, and global challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic.

As a result of our transformation, we have seen an increase in efficiency and our employees are more productive. Employees, managers, and executives at Oracle can now access insights almost in real time, to make better decisions and move faster to quickly adapt and plan, especially when faced with the unexpected. And we’ve been able to deliver better experiences, without disruption, to those we serve, including customers, partners and employees.

These outcomes have had a tangible impact on our business, and we’ve seen an increase in satisfaction rates from our various users, accelerated innovation, new cost savings, and market share gains.

It may seem challenging to know where to start when it comes to transformation––we’ve been in your shoes, and we’ve also partnered with thousands of organizations across every industry to help them transform and achieve their business goals. Please take advantage of the lessons we’ve learned alongside our best practices. We love to share our experiences, and our practitioners, from IT to business users, are always here to help you accelerate your own success.

Good luck, and I can’t wait to hear your own success story soon!

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