With an unprecedented business climate driving companies to fast-track digital transformation journeys to build resilience, agility and cultivate the ideal conditions for growth, cloud solutions have been touted as a possible means of achieving these ends.
“There is a clear need for CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, CMOs, CHROs and commercial directors to not only survive but also quickly explore new growth avenues,” says Leopoldo Boado, Senior Vice President – Business Applications, ECEMEA at Oracle, adding that business leaders are looking beyond an on-premises architecture towards digital cloud platforms to both survive and increase top-line revenue.
Looking back to the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, when work-from-home went mainstream, Boado says organisations with cloud-managed core functions in HR, supply chain management and enterprise resource planning (ERP) were able to continue their operations seamlessly, while those still reliant on an on-premises platform were not.
“For many CEOs, the first priority will be CRM as they need to keep the top-line revenue, retain customers and do cross-selling. We see a huge opportunity as digital transformation is gaining traction in every industry.”
Boado believes there are two parts to enterprise resilience: “It’s about having the foresight to identify areas of risk and causes of disruption while having the agility to quickly transform operations to adapt to what’s coming down the track.”
Flexibility and firmness
He points out a fundamental paradox of the resilient organisation – it requires both flexibility and firmness under pressure at every level. “To accomplish this, companies need an empowered workforce supported by a flexible and integrated infrastructure – leveraging the cloud, big data, automation, AI and machine learning.”
Research conducted by Oracle and the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) backs up Boado’s faith in these technologies. “Incorporating AI into ERP systems can yield a 36 percent drop in errors and reduces the time it takes to close the books by 3.5 days,” he says, adding that the findings are based on a global survey of 700 finance and supply professionals that was carried out prior to the pandemic. “One significant top-line finding is that 84 percent of organizations are using at least one of these four new technologies: AI, IoT, intelligent voice assistants and blockchain.
“Incorporating AI into ERP systems can yield a 36 percent drop in errors and reduces the time it takes to close the books by 3.5 days.”
“These technologies are returning big results in finance and operation, which is helping them build resilience in a time of uncertainty.”
AI aiding finance teams
AI automation can be particularly beneficial to finance teams, with the survey results pointing out a 30+ percent hike in productivity, 32 percent improvement in forecast accuracy and 37 percent reduction in errors. “These results demonstrate the power of eliminating manual tasks by adding intelligent automation to back-office processes.”
Oracle has built AI capabilities directly into its Cloud ERP and EPM, which the company’s own finance team uses for automating reconciliations and closing the books faster. “In Oracle Cloud EPM, we are using the financial consolidation and close capability, along with enhanced narrative reporting to basically auto-populate our financial statements.”
Meanwhile, for day-to-day performance management, Oracle Analytics has automated business intelligence, data visualization and predictive analytics. “Like the survey respondents, we’ve seen big results, including a 35 percent reduction in manual accounting, shortening of the monthly close by four days and a streamlining of our global P.O. accruals process (now three hours a month) as well as our global accounts reconciliation processes (now 1.5 hours a month.)”
AI automation can be particularly beneficial to finance teams, with the survey results pointing out a 30+ percent hike in productivity, 32 percent improvement in forecast accuracy and 37 percent reduction in errors
AI-powered chatbots, another tool built into Oracle finance applications, were also shown to have improved productivity and analysis, while the company’s Digital Assistant collates and displays relevant data from across multiple systems for project managers.
IoT and operational efficiencies
On the supply chain side, IoT has been improving companies’ operations in a range of ways, from reduced fulfilment errors, lower manufacturing downtime and inventory stock-outs to faster fulfilment of orders. “Digital assistants are a driving force for these improvements. Companies said these assistants helped them speed up supply chain analysis by 26 percent and boost employee productivity by 28 percent.”
Additionally, 87 percent of manufacturers in the Oracle-ESG survey said blockchain applications were exceeding the expected return on investment. “One popular application is Oracle Intelligent Track and Trace, which builds trust among suppliers,” adds Boado.
Digital assistants can boost employee productivity by up to 28 percent
A growing number of large and mid-sized public and private sector organisations in the Gulf – including DP World, Emaar, Emirates NBD, Apparel Group, Dubai Airports, Thumbay Group, Ducab, Emirates Driving Institute and the Kuwait Gulf Oil Company – are using Oracle’s suite of cloud applications to drive business continuity, deliver vital citizen services and accelerate growth.
“Resilience is no longer about having the cash reserves and resources to weather disruption right now – it’s about building an infrastructure that is flexible, cloud-based and automated to deal with constant, unrelenting change,” says Boado.
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