Extending its lead in the cloud ERP market, Oracle today announced updates to Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM). The latest innovations help finance teams leverage touchless operations, predictive planning and digital assistants to pivot towards growth. 

“2020 has been one of the most challenging years to run a business, putting added pressure on finance teams to balance short-term challenges with longer-term strategic initiatives,” said Rondy Ng, senior vice president of applications development, Oracle. “Our newest innovations help finance teams rapidly adapt to the current economic climate, drive new business models, and improve strategic decision-making; all designed to help our customers define their future.”

The latest product updates enable organizations of all sizes to quickly and easily take advantage of innovations in artificial intelligence, digital assistants and natural language processing. These advancements help finance teams improve decision-making with real-time insights, simplify business processes, and drive efficiencies needed to pivot organizations towards growth.

Increased Efficiency with Touchless Operations: New features and capabilities that help organizations increase efficiency, speed, and accuracy with touchless operations include:

  • Intelligent Process Automation: Helps improve financial close and account reconciliation by using configurable and intelligent rules and patterns to automate manual tasks. Automating a large portion of reconciliations allows customers to focus on complex issues requiring human judgement.
  • Intelligent Account Combination Defaulting: Automatically predicts and enters code segments for invoices not associated with purchase orders based on machine-learning. This allows customers to automate routine and mundane data entry, and reduce invoice processing time, with the system improving predictions with continued usage.
  • Automated Tagging of Regulatory Reports: Automates the tagging of regulatory reports (such as 10K and 10Q) using the customer’s SEC XBRL taxonomy based on advanced language processing and pattern recognition. This allows users to focus on quality and validation of required reporting and narratives versus spending time on repetitive tagging tasks.

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

  • Intelligent Performance Management: Uncovers hard-to-spot data patterns to deliver actionable and contextual insights at the right time, helping improve the quality and business impact of financial and operational decisions. Customers can quickly uncover correlations and realize faster time-to-action.
  • Corporate and Project Planning and Budgeting Capabilities: Combines planning and budgeting with project management to improve execution of strategic corporate plans and control of approved projects. This enables ad-hoc scenario modeling to plan costs for indirect and capital projects, while also creating a single business flow to increase cost visibility, reduce approval times, and accelerate project execution.
  • Business Continuity Management: Helps customers prepare for potential operational, safety and security risks that might be caused by future events. This allows finance teams to quickly assess risks, document and approve recovery plans, and keep executives informed to minimize reputational, operational and financial impacts. 

Improve User Productivity and Collaboration with Digital Assistants: Simple conversational and contextual user experience features that benefit all users include: 

  • Project Time Entry: Predicts project time entry, simplifies tasks and expenses’ entry, and reconciles month end processes for project professionals.
  • Expanded Collaboration Platforms: Help teams collaborate in common platforms including SMS, Slack and Microsoft Teams

Additional advanced industry-specific features that support utilities, oil and gas, asset intensive industries, as well as the professional services industries:

  • Joint Venture Management Capabilities for Utilities and Oil and Gas: Supports retroactive billing adjustments, partner reimbursements and partner contributions to improve the accuracy of joint venture accounting, shorten the financial close period, avoid costly billing disputes and reduce project costs.
  • Complex Procurement Capabilities for Asset Intensive Industries: Ensures compliance with contractual obligations over the duration of a project. By creating and managing supplier invoices matched to purchase orders with retainage payment terms, this helps organizations hold back retainage and only release the retained amount once the contract is completed. 
  • 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 customers to plan for a specified number of hours or variable hours each week and generate resource requests, and evaluate capacity based on weekly hours requested and total hours available. 

Oracle was recently named the sole Leader in Gartner’s 2020 “Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises” for the second consecutive year and was recognized as a Leader in Gartner’s 2020 “Magic Quadrant for Cloud Core Financial Management Suites for Midsize, Large and Global Enterprises” for the fourth consecutive year. 

For additional information, visit Oracle.com/erp or the Modern Finance Leader blog.

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