For businesses of all sizes, including enterprise and small to midsize, retiring on-premises systems and moving entirely to the cloud all at once isn’t possible. Or, at the very least, it’s not something they’re comfortable doing within a short development window. Meanwhile, staying the course with an on-premises ERP, ignoring all the advantages of enterprise resource planning as a cloud solution, is no longer an ideal path, either. Tomorrow’s leaders are those most capable of adapting to change today. For such businesses, Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP is a complete, modern, cloud ERP suite that provides teams with advanced capabilities, such as AI to automate the manual processes that slow them down, analytics to react to market shifts in real time, and automatic updates to stay current and gain a competitive advantage.

Organizations have always struggled to balance traditional ERP’s high costs and complexity against the need for customized features and flexibility, all while meeting the demands of the business. The Oracle ERP Cloud delivers connected teams, unified data, and real-time insights to help businesses and their finance teams to ensure that the best business decisions are made. With ERP delivered as a service in the cloud, organization can be future-ready and outpace change.

Integrating ERP to the Cloud

One of the benefits of the SaaS model is that the software is kept up-to-date with the latest features, functions, and best practices. Cloud ERP providers roll out updates regularly (as often as monthly, in Oracle’s case). This means that the latest new and revolutionary emerging technologies—such as AI, digital assistants, machine learning, blockchain, augmented reality, and the Internet of Things (IoT)—become available to subscribers on a regular cadence.

With access to these new technologies, organizations can quickly improve their business best practices as the ERP software evolves. They can automate processes that used to require heavy manual intervention, such as reconciling financial accounts. In addition, users gain a comprehensive, real-time understanding of enterprise business activities not only in the front office, but also in warehouses, on factory floors, and everywhere else across the enterprise. This knowledge is then readily available to every appropriate employee on their mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets. Built for the digital age, today’s ERP cloud embraces mobile, social, analytics, and the latest emerging technologies. Anything less won’t move an organization forward.

The Prebuilt Cloud Solution

Oracle Fusion ERP Analytics is a prebuilt cloud native solution for Oracle Cloud ERP that helps finance and procurement professionals uncover underlying drivers of profitability, improve the use of working capital, and control business expenditures. Finance and procurement teams can enrich their analytics beyond what Oracle Cloud ERP provides with additional data sources by extending the single, cross-functional data model and pipelines, and end user metrics without coding. Oracle’s unique breadth and depth of combined analytics and application capabilities enable organizations to unify financial analytics across different departments.

At Oracle, the team understands the fact that every organization has unique needs, which requires analyses from multiple sources of data, beyond what resides in Oracle Cloud Applications (ERP, HCM, CX & SCM).  Oracle Fusion Analytics provides a variety of easy and more sophisticated ways to capture these data, from self-service methods to a more governed, curated approach for IT/data engineers that is preserved across Fusion Analytics upgrades.

Oracle Fusion Analytics provides multiple ways to extend with additional data sources. The solution’s Automatic Oracle Cloud Application flex field extensions extend automatically to Oracle Fusion Analytics. The Self-service option leverages the capabilities of the underlying Oracle Analytics Cloud, enabling anyone to utilize self-service tools for loading, modeling, managing, and visualizing any data. Moreover, the solution is centralized to load additional data sources in the same data repository as the Oracle Cloud Application data to govern and curate all data together.  Use open database APIs or any data integration tool to load, clean and manage data at huge volumes.  Semantic model extensibility tools are available to include additional data sources in the semantic model with security.

The Intelligent ERP System

The Oracle ERP system is designed to deliver great projects from start to finish. Oracle Project Management is a solution within Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP that gives full control of the work. As a result, managers could keep the workforce engaged by connecting the right people to the right projects, support organization’s goals with a clear view of financial performance across project portfolio, and quickly adapt to changing requirements.

Planning, Scheduling and Forecasting is part of the Oracle Fusion Cloud Project Management solution and ensures that projectcentric businesses stay informed and on track through complete and integrated project planning and financial control. With simplified project planning, budgeting and forecasting businesses can seamlessly streamline the project financial planning processes and extend planning and scheduling to the “occasional” project manager as well; to those who manage projects infrequently and not as their primary role. No longer is planning a specialized skill, only performed by experienced personnel, as more and more people are given projects to manage. Not all planning and scheduling solutions have kept up with this evolution. Planning, Scheduling and Forecasting has been designed from the ground up to address the needs of all project managers, regardless of their level of experience, and can be adopted by all organizations for any type of project work.

Project managers can easily manage and schedule their plans using extensive drag and drop capabilities, to efficiently manage task dependencies, reorganize tasks, and quickly fill down values to multiple tasks. They can take advantage of visualization and scheduling capabilities, including progress line display, timeline format, critical path identification, and summary task and milestone scheduling – seeing project schedule changes instantly. Tasks can be easily created with minimal data, for example starting only with a task name and adding effort, dates, and dependencies later. Simply entering a start or finish date holds the task where it is placed unless it becomes dependent on other work, in which case just link it to another task to schedule it. More experienced project managers can still take advantage of capabilities that include constraint dates and types, dependency types, leads and lags, and the ability to compare the plan with current and historical baselines.

A Futuristic Solution

Oracle Cloud ERP customers like Lyft, MTN, and Square, drive innovation and become more competitive in their markets by leveraging state of the art technologies from Oracle. The company’s new machine learning (ML) capabilities will help procurement teams automatically categorize unclassified business transactions to provide greater insight into spending patterns. Prebuilt reports also provide visibility into machine learning accuracy, helping teams continuously improve line-item classification performance. Procurement professionals can now dedicate more time to making strategic purchasing decisions instead of just gathering and cleaning data. Automated, accurate spend classification enables customers to manage suppliers more strategically, increase negotiation performance, and reduce costs.