Oracle Strengthens Market-Leading Cloud ERP

Oracle announced updates to Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM). The latest innovations include business continuity and remote security features, digital assistants for expense reporting and industry-specific features to help finance teams build resilience and return to growth.

Rondy Ng, senior vice president of applications development, Oracle, said, “2020 has been one of the most challenging years to run a business and in many cases that has put more and more pressure on finance teams as they try and balance changing short-term challenges with larger strategic initiatives. The latest Oracle Cloud ERP updates help finance teams rapidly adapt to the current economic climate, explore new business models, improve strategic decision-making, and define their future via the strength of innovation built into the product.

The latest product updates to Oracle Cloud ERP enable organizations of all sizes to quickly and easily take advantage of touchless automation, predictive planning and enhanced digital experience to increase productivity, reduce costs and improve controls.

Increase Speed and Accuracy with Touchless Automation: New features and capabilities that help organizations increase speed, accuracy and efficiency with touchless automation include:

• New Remote Workforce Security Controls: Protect against the increased risks of insider threats, compliance and audit costs and privacy issues associated with a remote workforce. The new security controls leverage machine learning to automate security monitoring and also include security dashboards to easily track incidents as well an intuitive workflow to help customers quickly and easily approve and certify employee access.
• Automated Tagging of Regulatory Reports: This new feature eliminates manual tagging of regulatory reports (such as 10K and 10Q) with language processing and pattern recognition, enabling Oracle Cloud EPM users to focus on the quality and validation of required reporting and narratives.
• New Multi-fund Accounting Capabilities: Helps organizations gain better visibility into operations at the fund, product or line-of-business level. This feature enables customers to create operating statements for different business segments, do multi-fund accounting and review ‘pool level cash positioning’ to optimize liquidity.

 Improve Decision Making with Predictive Planning: Organizations can intelligently plan and rapidly execute with new capabilities that include:

• Business Continuity Management: Helps customers prepare and respond to operational, safety and security risks caused by Covid-19 and other future events. With Business Continuity Management, finance teams can quickly assess risks, document and approve recovery plans and keep executives in the loop to minimize reputational, operational and financial impacts.
• New Corporate and Project Planning and Budgeting Capabilities: Combine Oracle Cloud EPM planning and budget with Oracle Cloud ERP project management to improve execution of strategic corporate plans and collect costs for approved projects. This new feature enables ad-hoc scenario modeling to predict costs for indirect, capital and contract projects, while also creating a single business flow to increase cost visibility, reduce approval times, and accelerate project execution.

 Enhance Adoption With Intuitive Digital Experience: Simple conversational and contextual user experience features that encourage adoption include:

• Expense Creation with Microsoft Teams: Helps customers streamline expense reporting and accelerates reimbursement. Expense Creation in Microsoft Teams gives customers a context aware digital assistant that engages users based on prior expense patterns to improve the user experience.
• EPM Guided Learning: Helps customers improve on-boarding and adoption of applications in Oracle Cloud EPM. It provides users with step-by-step tutorials presented within context of the application to reduce the need for training and to accelerate time-to-value.

 New industry-specific features in Oracle Cloud ERP support professional service teams, asset intensive projects and customers operating in the Oil and Gas industry.

• New Flexible Resource Scheduling for Professional Services: Helps project-centric organizations benefit from flexible scheduling when planning, requesting and assigning labor resources on a project. This enables project managers to plan for a specified number of hours or variable hours each week and generate resource requests. It also helps resource managers evaluate capacity based on weekly hours requested and total hours available.
• New Complex Procurement Capabilities for Asset Intensive Projects: Ensure that contractors or subcontractors comply with contractual obligations over the duration of a project. By creating and managing supplier invoices matched to purchase orders with retainage payment terms, this feature helps organizations hold back retainage and only release the retained amount once the contract is completed.
• New Joint Venture Management Capabilities for Oil & Gas: Improve automated transaction processing, compliance and reconciliation. Support for retroactive billing adjustments, partner reimbursements and partner contributions improve the accuracy of joint venture accounting, shorten the financial close period, avoid costly billing disputes and reduce project costs.