The latest developments in Oracle Cloud HCM will allow HR teams to deliver personalised, AI-driven processes to support their employees.

Oracle has revealed a new platform that will provide a more streamlined employee experience in the Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM).

Oracle Journeys support businesses by delivering a one-stop platform for employees as they continue to focus on various aspects of work and tasks. The new services allow HR teams to develop and deliver detailed steps to guide employees through several events such as onboarding, returning to the workplace, launching a new service or developing their career.

Chris Leone, the senior VP of development at Oracle Cloud HCM explains that as our homes have become our offices over the past year, we have become more used to how technology can improve our lives as consumers and employees are looking for that same experience at work.

As offices begin to reopen, it will be important to enable consistent and positive experiences for the office and remote workers. Organisations will need to provide support throughout an employees entire career. Leone explains that Oracle Journeys will help HR provide value that expands beyond conventional HR processes by offering unique experiences for their employees.

Oracle journeys will guide employees through activities and particular milestone and offer access to resources needed across the entire business. It will make it simpler for employees to take action as they navigate through different events. The new features in Oracle Journeys allow HR leaders to go beyond the standard HR workflows and create personalised, step-by-step support for any task. By offering quick access to AI-powered services tailored to each individual, the solutions support employees in saving time and improving overall productivity.

Global HR analyst Josh Bersin highlights that employee experience is an essential, multi-disciplinary challenge and the needs of employees differ greatly. Businesses need simple, customised services to create, measure and integrate employees digital lives. 

Businesses that make a concerted effort to improve tasks with positive experiences for their team will yield the benefits of higher levels of satisfaction, engagement and productivity.

Customers can manage their path in the HCM systems. This allows businesses to better manage and grow their workforce in difficult times, but also allows HR to become an innovative part of the entire organisation. The demands and expectations of employees have changed considerably. Right now, our workforce requires bespoke support and motivation. Oracle Cloud HCM offers an individual HR platform that enables better management and the ability to meet changing expectations. Utilising this solution we ensure businesses are ready to deliver a positive employee experience, no matter what changes we may see in the workforce in the future.

Safra Catz, the CEO of Oracle has stated that she believes that the future of cloud for enterprises lies with autonomous systems and Oracle is planning to integrate all of its products on one cloud infrastructure system.

Autonomous systems provide the benefit of eliminating human errors and ensuring data is kept safe.

At the Oracle OpenWorld 2019 conference, the CEO stated that Oracle Cloud had created a new phase of integration for customers worldwide. Catz explained that Oracle is predominantly focused on users and believes the future for enterprises involves autonomous systems and that they are working together with their customers to provide the highest level of value. Catz reinforced the statement made by Oracle co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison in that autonomous systems remove potential human errors and keep data safe.

Highlighting its strong position and vision within the cloud ERP market, Oracle also confirmed a series of updates to the Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Cloud and Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Cloud. The latest updates will allow businesses of any size to boost their productivity, decrease costs and enhance controls by delivering product innovations and sector solutions.

Rondy Ng, the Senior Vice President of Oracle Applications Development recently stated that Oracle continues to reinforce its leading position within the Cloud ERP market with a series of innovative developments, supporting the continued changing demands within finance and operations teams. Ng believes that by combining intelligent systems and machine learning tools with Oracle ERP Cloud will allow customers to minimise the number of standard tasks performed by employees.

In order to ensure businesses and customer interaction is data-driven, Oracle released a number of data-focused updates within the Oracle Customer Experience (CX) Cloud. Oracle CX offers a range of applications within marketing, sales, services, and commerce. Rob Tarkoff, the executive vice president at Oracle CX Cloud and Oracle Data Cloud explains that the latest updates are driven by data and machine learning and are focused on ensuring customers can take advantage of data insights in order to meet customer requirements, creating the best customer experience.

Oracle also launched new updates to the enterprise-level customer data management platform (CDP). The new updates to Oracle CX Unity will allow businesses to offer personalised and detailed experiences within all customer interactions, including website visits through to in-store purchases.

The new platform will support businesses in developing their digital systems beyond cloud migration to generate a simplistic set of business activities driven by digital transformation.

Deloitte confirmed the release of Deloitte Ascend at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, explaining the product to be a ‘pre-configured digital accelerator’ developed on their cloud platform and focused on supporting business innovation, accelerating overall performance and creating enterprise digital transformation.

The Deloitte Ascend product is focused for clients seeking to migrate from on-site systems towards Oracle Cloud Applications. According to Deloitte, the system can be applied at any stage of the digital journey. Deloitte Ascend supports clients with the following:-

-Streamlining business activities by improving the overall delivery of Clean Core supported by Oracle Cloud. 

-Automating activities like data migration, configuration, testing and coding migrations.

-Simplifying essential business activities that span across multiple industries and at the same time, enhance efficiencies with a range of digital activities and utilising cases created by Oracle Cloud and other digital systems.

Mark Walsh, Principal and Enterprise Performance Portfolio Leader at Deloitte Consulting highlights that in our connected world today, it isn’t enough for businesses to just migrate to a cloud system. Walsh explains that Deloitte Ascend combines leading industry processes and a number of digitally created insights with their award-winning Oracle Cloud platform, enabling clients to deliver innovative levels of performance for their business.

At the very heart of Deloitte Ascend is a digital transformative framework and a system with analytical focus combined with a number of digital project assets. The framework provides supports businesses with measuring their overall digital capabilities, to draw out their digital transformation path and to develop a platform that enables them to utilise their competitive advantage over other businesses.

The Ascend platform also provides a number of interactive Oracle Digital Experience Labs which provide a detailed experience, using Oracle Cloud and digital technologies to perform vital business processes via real-time configuration and data. The labs aim to support the digital goals of clients by displaying how to reach individual process can be streamlined and made simpler with digital technology.

Dave Donatelli, the executive VP of Cloud Business Group at Oracle emphasises that Deloitte has a proven track record of supporting businesses with driving value by using Oracle Cloud Applications. Donatelli believes Deloitte Ascend will support the planning and promotion of the digital transformation process, enabling customers to take advantage of everything the Oracle Cloud platform provides.

The personal greeting on websites is becoming a more common tool and often is the first interaction a user has with a business and therefore can be a vital influence in understanding how customers are treated at this particular business. Quite often, it will be a chatbot or a digital assistant providing this service, rather than an actual human.

Digital assistants are text-based platforms that are created to work within a single purpose application. Services are continuing to improve algorithms based on user behaviour and language conversion to enhance digital assistant development and improve the overall user experience. Many industry leaders believe that digital assistants will have a great influence on the way financial professionals operator. Digital assistants can enable finance teams to simplify and automate certain repetitive tasks, enabling finance professionals to spend more time on value-focused activities.

Technology businesses are integrating voice assistant into software support with processes such as recommending suppliers, completing expense reports and providing support on which invoices to pay first. Oracle is implementing innovative digital assistants into a product to assist in capturing and monitoring expenses, claims and generate useful algorithms that recommend the most suitable suppliers to engage with.

Automation to enhance business efficiency

Oracle believes that digital assistants will begin to support improvements to year end, budget management and financial forecasting. Businesses will start to use intelligent assistants to remove duties previously performed by employees, enabling teams to use their skills to develop insights and create more informed business decisions. A fine example of digital assistants in action is at Exelon who implement digital assistant to create a rapid customer service experience. Exelon was looking for quick digital assistant implementation to cover a number of platforms that include web, social media and voice assistants like Alexa. Exelon utilised the rapid digital assistant tools from Oracle Mobile Cloud and created faster response times, reduced costs due to lower call centre expenses and over 10 million users covered via the service.

In the finance industry, digital assistants can offer similar functions to automate and cover repetitive processes that are generally time-consuming for employees, time that could be used to focus on high-level jobs that influence the financial performance of a business. Digital assistants will potentially provide informed answers to specific questions such as ‘annual spend on travel and expenses’. Information like this can allow a financial manager to determine how much budget is available for employee spend.

Industry leaders believe that digital assistants will soon be able to automate complete financial processes, eliminating the need for human involvement. Financial employees will be given more freedom from repetitive jobs and the ability to spend more time on the critical and necessary work. This means more benefits in terms of a business and its financial strategy as well as keeping employees more engaged and challenged at work. Innovative digital assistants are likely to be a vital part of empowering employees and enhancing business performance.

The general manager for ERP/EPM SaaS at Oracle said their business has experienced 100% year on year growth within Australia.

Just looking back a few years, Oracle’s SaaS customers were fairly small. Many businesses that were using Oracle SaaS were unable to afford the capital costs of having an on-site system.  Today, regular users of Oracle products are transferring from on-site premises to SaaS.

Whilst the business implement an ‘applications unlimited’ policy, referring to on-premises applications will trigger further development for the next few years, customers can enhance their systems by transferring to the Oracle Fusions SaaS platform.

John Leonard, General Manager of ERP/EPM SaaS explains that nearly every project is completed within a year, with many being delivering in under 8 months. Leonard also highlights the sheer expense of on-site upgrades, suggesting they can incur costs of nearly $20 million for larger businesses. Transferring to SaaS offers a low-risk alternative to potentially costly and risky upgrades. Due to regular features releases, SaaS enables simpler adoption of new technologies, including blockchain.

Leonard explains that back in 2012, most Oracle CRM customers were using on-site software but by 2016 many had transferred to SaaS. A similar transition is now occurring within HR and Finance software.

Australia is following in this path with an extensive list of local customers ranging from investment business QIC to fast food chain Hungry Jack’s implementing SaaS. To further support customers moving to Saas, Oracle provides an option enabling companies to utilise the consultancy operation of Oracle and customers pay on delivery.

ERP is a top priority for Oracle in regards to SaaS during the next year. Leonard explains that many SaaS competitors provide point solutions, but Oracle’s SaaS applications use the same codebase and data model. Leonard believes that companies are looking for a provider to includes the whole of their business, rather than one specific area.

A key advantage of SaaS is that it allows users to monitor their software without viewing customers data. This means users can analyse potential issues before customers notice and identify any trends and react appropriately. Leonard believes that SaaS is the fastest method to provide innovation to customers, offering a significant advantage over other competitors.

A new study by Oracle claims that long standing cultural habits and a ‘short-term’ mindset are the main barriers preventing further collaboration between finance and HR teams.

The study exploring HR and Analytics includes an analysis of over 1,500 finance, HR and other business professionals worldwide. The report suggests that in order to really harness the value of data and to ensure companies can continue to evolve in a rapidly changing talent market, HR professionals need to take a different approach with analytics technology and enhance collaboration with their finance teams.

HR and Finance teams deliver different, yet crucial skill sets for a business. Traditionally, the two teams do not work closely, but industry leaders at Oracle believe this needs to change in order for companies to maintain a competitive lead within today’s progressive market and talent industry. Donald Anderson, the Director of Organisation & Talent Development at Oracle believes the main step to remove traditional barriers between HR and Finance teams is to create a collaborative mindset, using the right skills and expertise to collect and measure data which can be used to make critical business decisions. This alone would lead to considerable benefits for a business and its level of performance.

With the continued launch of innovative technology, rising recruitment costs and a surge in demand for new skills, today’s global talent industry is more competitive than ever and businesses need to ensure they remain competitive within this market, HR teams need to consider their overall approach towards analytics, skills and integration with finance to create a competitive lead.

According to results from the Oracle study:-

-Over 90% of Finance and HR professionals intend to prioritise data-driven collaboration this year.

-In order to harness data value, HR and Finance teams will need to develop new skills. The survey results showed that just under 50% of members are unable to use analytics properly to measure outcomes and over 80% are not equipped to understand predictive data for determining future plans.

Within the study, Oracle explains that Finance and HR professionals are exploring emerging technologies which can support business performance, in particular, Artificial Intelligence. Results show that around a quarter of respondents currently use AI to identify specific ‘at-risk’ talent and develop their talent pipeline. Few businesses are using AI to forecast overall performance or to search for the best talent. According to the report, over 70% of the respondents intend to use AI to forecast high performing candidates and select the ideal match candidates with CV/resume analysis. Other AI measures highlighted by respondents include shaping their talent pipeline, identifying at-risk employees and supporting interactions between chatbots and employees.

Emerging technologies, analytics and AI are creating a range of opportunities for HR teams to analyse important insights and make informed decisions that can create that competitive advantage. With more HR professionals planning to invest and focus on AI over the next year, it will likely mean businesses will be competing on a new scale to search for the best talent.

Oracle Financial Services Global Business Unit along with the RPA vendor, Blue Prism have confirmed a collaborative project to tackle fraud by creating a compliance platform to automate compliance tasks for financial teams.

Fraud detection has always been a challenge for finance teams and traditionally involved financial institutions hiring more professionals to tackle the issue. However, as criminal methods have become more sophisticated, businesses are finding it hard to use efficient methods to manage to investigate new cases.

In response to increasing concerns, Oracle and Blue Prism have announced a partnership to enhance the workflow of financial crime investigations. A representative from Blue Prism recently explained that their automation platform will enable Oracle’ financial crimes software to provide more accurate and detailed research and analysis in a more timely, efficient and cost-effective manner.

Jon Walden, the CTO for Blue Prism Americas explains that industries continue to be challenged on many aspects, highlighting the success of their platform in many areas of business challenges including profit concerns, retaining workers and impact of competition. Walden points to the capabilities of their services enabling a ‘unified workforce’ for both humans and digital workers to get the job done. Walden highlights the success they have gained in the finance industry and regards this to the detailed audit and resilience incorporated within their platforms.

After the recent Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, the business has progressed with its new Exadata project.

The Exadata project intends to make it considerably simpler for enterprises to handle data without requiring the need to manage dozens of servers, varied networks and a range of storage options.

The ultimate goal of the project is to provide Oracle customers with a singular stack that is capable of delivering the highly effective results. David Sivick, the technology initiatives manager at Wells Fargo and speaker at Oracle OpenWorld explains that the bank is now utilising 70 racks of Oracle’s Exadata. Prior to implementing these systems, Well Fargo required thousands of Dell servers to produce the same results.

Sivick explains that the new system has resulted in savings exceeding millions of dollars every year.

He explains that Wells Fargo has seen significant improvements in overall waiting times, a reduction in space required for compression and a general increase in application speeds. The main objective was to consolidate overall processes, the business was attempting to manage a range of varying systems, with different databases and memory systems.

Whilst Exadata can sometimes take longer to implement and operate, it does enable larger businesses to avoid managing multiple platforms and situations of handling technology upgrades over numerous systems. Wells Fargo now operates over 90% of its databases on Exadata, leaving the remaining systems in their existing form purely for strategic decisions or because they are due to be removed.

At this year’s Oracle OpenWorld, the conference focused a lot on the cloud credentials of the business and their vision of how the cloud would manage existing operational challenges. The cloud based strategy of Oracle is focused mainly on the provision of important business applications. At the conference, Oracle states that larger businesses are now using its Exadata products to improve speed and enhance the use of data services and reduce overall reliance on traditional systems.

Larry Ellison, the chairman of board and chief technology officer at Oracle highlighted the competitive edge of the business against Amazon Web Services, referring to Exadata-based projects and data warehousing.

Oracle intends to place itself as a leader in the transformation of cloud technology, an area that is likely to be vital in future ERP applications. The business is also very aware of the challenge facing larger businesses like Wells Fargo that require a complex migration of multiple systems into a streamlined integrated network.

What is the Oracle OpenWorld 2018 Event?

Leading CEOs and industry representatives will be attending the Oracle OpenWorld 2018 in San Francisco next week.

Attendees at the 2017 Oracle OpenWorld event

For years Oracle’s community hub of technology and business professional have collaborated at the Oracle OpenWorld to discuss and solve challenges, learn about innovative products and find inspiration. The event provides a conference pass enabling attendees to gain access to over 2,000 educational sessions, training and tutorials on emerging technologies and networking opportunities.

Oracle OpenWorld 2018 will include case studies from over 300 Oracle customers, including FedEx, Gap and American Red Cross and how these businesses use the latest cloud products and technology. The conference will focus on how companies like these have transformed their products, integrated their business processes and successfully implemented their own strategies.

As in previous years, registrants can utilise an online tool to schedule all their sessions via the Oracle OpenWorld site. Some of the key themes at the conference include Your Autonomous Future (autonomous database, AI and machine learning), Tomorrow’s ERP, Evolving Customer Experience and Actionable Business Insights (data analytics, business intelligence and forecasting). High profile speakers at the event include former US Homeland Security head Jeh Johnson, Glitch CEO Anil Dash and Snips CEO Rand Hindi. Oracle will also be hosting three additional events in San Francisco to complement Oracle OpenWorld.

Oracle Code One event will expand on previous JavaOne developer events with more languages, technology and developer communities. Oracle Leaders Circle event will include presentations from leading industry members, such Amity Millhiser, the Chief Client Officer at PwC.

Oracle Product Focus: Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud Services

For many businesses, managing financial consolidation is a challenge that involves time and multiple resources that could be used more effectively for analysis and decision making. Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud Service provides an end to end solution for effectively managing the consolidation and closed process.

Whatever size the company is, businesses can have complete confidence in their financial consolidation and overall reporting processes. The system enables the process is correct, timely. completely transparent, compliant and auditable.

Oracle’s Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud Service is a cloud solution that can be implemented to meet the requirements of each individual business. Applying best practices enables companies to develop an application that meets their business needs, without the addition of other functions that are not required. Oracle explains that the service enables companies to combine a leading consolidation solution with the capability to customise the solution for all the features they require.

Oracle highlight that it is essential that businesses implement a consolidation and close solution to make their activities more effective, efficient and easier to manage. The Oracle Financial Consolidation and Cloud Service provide a range of useful reasonings for businesses to choose this solution for their close and consolidation strategies.

View the agenda of the upcoming Oracle OpenWorld 2018 event.