It is no longer enough today to simply plan well in finance and then plan separately in other departments such as operations, sales, R&D and HR. Those that connect their planning processes and data across their organization will outpace the competition. Today’s businesses are moving fast, and traditional planning practices and older tools simply cannot deliver this kind of innovation and efficiency.
Earlier this year, Oracle teamed up with Velociti Partners, a market research and strategy consulting company for technology enterprises, to conduct an in-depth study of over 500 decision-makers and planning users on planning processes in the cloud. Here is what we found:
Among respondents that had made the move to Oracle EPM Cloud, the number of process improvements and benefits achieved was astounding. 75% experienced benefits in less than six months. Some benefits related to time and resources:
Other benefits related to boosting alignment between departments:
EPM Cloud customers also accelerated business growth:
More than half Oracle EPM Cloud customers surveyed achieved 12 or more of the above benefits — so why haven’t all companies flocked to EPM Cloud? Respondents that had not yet moved to the cloud told us that some of the barriers they faced were fiscal, cultural and time-related.
Considering the huge list of benefits realized by those that moved to Oracle EPM Cloud, the funding and time challenges don’t make good business sense. So, we dove a little deeper, asking participants that had not moved to the cloud, “What is one thing that would make your planning and budgeting process better?” From the huge number of comments received we arranged them into groupings. The top 3 (chosen most frequently) were:
Perhaps understanding how the above challenges could be addressed by software with best practices built in would help those not yet in the cloud. Organizations that moved to Oracle EPM Cloud can adopt best practices and innovate faster. The change in the use of spreadsheets alone, after implementing EPM Cloud, was astounding. Budgeting saw a 71% drop in use, forecasting a 47% drop, and enterprise planning saw a 57% drop.
Fig. 1: Use of Spreadsheets Before and After Adopting Oracle EPM Cloud
Adoption of best practices also increased:
One participant, from a medium-sized financial services company, reported that they had seen an increase in forecast accuracy from 50% to 70% after implementing Oracle EPM Cloud, and the team was now able to complete their monthly forecasting in 2-5 days. They were able to reduce time spent on data gathering from 90% to 30%, and time spent on analyzing data increased from 10% to 50%. It took them 2-4 months to implement Oracle EPM Cloud and they received benefits immediately. They were also able to realize 12 of the benefits from a list of 13.
A large research and education institution in Africa reported that they had seen their annual budgeting process improve dramatically, from taking almost 6 months down to two. Their forecast accuracy improved from about 66% to 77%, their monthly forecasting time was reduced by half, the number of people administering planning and forecasting was reduced from 66 to only 1, and it took less than 2 months to implement Oracle EPM Cloud.
A large North American education and research institution commented, “Planning in the cloud is the digital future!”
Oracle EPM Cloud is the only complete and connected solution that delivers the agility you need to outperform the competition in today’s constantly evolving business landscape. Find out more about our survey results in this infographic or download the full report.