What’s New in Oracle ERP Cloud?

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The future of Oracle Cloud looks smarter all the time. That’s often exemplified at Oracle OpenWorld, where Oracle unveils its latest product innovations, augmentations, and general improvements to its worldwide user base. Oracle OpenWorld 2018 pushed the bar higher than ever with the announcement that artificial intelligence is now an integrated core component of Oracle Cloud applications, including Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning Cloud.

Oracle CEO Mark Hurd took this AI ambition a step further during his annual OpenWorld keynote, predicting that “all cloud apps will include AI” by 2025. By stepping out ahead of the pack with fully integrated AI capabilities, Oracle is working to secure its lead in the rapidly growing cloud applications and services market.

What does this mean for Oracle ERP Cloud users and customers? Hurd highlighted real-world use cases for embedded AI during his keynote by saying “30 percent of finance organisations’ time is spent moving around spreadsheets.” This huge chunk of the finance professional’s workweek can now be freed up with the help of AI automations “allowing people to focus on higher-order tasks,” as Hurd put it.

Finance professionals were already saving time and manual effort with Oracle Cloud’s deep cross-product integrations, which provide greater insight into the financial performance of all parts of a business by tapping into data and analytics from every department and operating vertical. Now, with the help of AI, these insights can be generated automatically from vast corporate databases. The underlying databases that drive Oracle ERP Cloud are becoming more automated than ERP Cloud itself, which is good news from an analytics and security standpoint. Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison also used his OpenWorld keynote presentation to highlight automation in the form of Oracle Autonomous Database. He concluded his “Think Autonomous” presentation by saying that with “Autonomous Database, you eliminate human labor, you eliminate human error. There’s nothing to learn, nothing to do. Your developers become more productive, they bring up new applications, and they do a better job of analyzing data. Your system is more reliable, and it never goes down.”

In addition to AI-driven intelligent process automation, an expense-reporting chatbot and automated vendor or supplier assessment and payment functionalities have also been added to Oracle ERP Cloud.

Oracle’s expense-reporting chatbot is intended to speed up the processing and improve the accuracy of employee-submitted expense reports. Oracle ERP Cloud already includes an expense-reporting app, but this new chatbot functionality allows employees to take care of their expenses without a dedicated application. Eliminating friction in the reporting process should improve the experience for organisational finance departments and client-facing employees alike.

The procurement modules in Oracle ERP Cloud gain time-saving and cost-controlling functionality with AI-powered payment analytics. This feature helps organisations better control the costs of procurement and manage the varied risks of a diverse supplier network by assessing past supplier performance. By analyzing these assessments, organisations can produce recommendations for purchase offers and preferred suppliers that can retain real-time accuracy without the need for finance or procurement teams to regularly generate risk and cost analyses by hand.

AI should also help users develop greater insight from data that is collected and assessed across the full range of Oracle ERP Cloud applications, which include:

Oracle Financials Cloud
Oracle Procurement Cloud
Oracle Project Portfolio Management Cloud
Oracle Risk Management Cloud

Financials Cloud provides modern finance departments with a complete range of accounting, revenue management, and financial analytics apps and functionalities. Procurement Cloud gives purchasing and procurement professionals comprehensive sourcing, supplier management, purchasing cost control, and compliance tools so they can keep their companies well-stocked and within budget. Project Portfolio Management Cloud is a collection of financially focused project management tools. Risk Management Cloud helps ensure compliance and control access to sensitive data throughout the organisation. Each core application in Oracle ERP Cloud is fully integrated with the others, ensuring full data visibility and accuracy for employees.

Oracle ERP Cloud also easily integrates with other Oracle Cloud application suites. Human resources departments can pursue the highest-ROI hires and employee training programs when they use Oracle Human Capital Management Cloud in conjunction with Oracle ERP Cloud. Product-focused organisations can greatly extend the procurement functionalities in ERP Cloud by pairing it with Oracle Supply Chain Management Cloud. Oracle Enterprise Performance Management deepens ERP Cloud’s financial analytics and modeling capabilities. Oracle CX, the customer experience cloud, can improve an organisation’s marketing and customer service outcomes through ERP Cloud’s AI-driven financial performance insights.

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