A common denominator for strategic decisions

As companies grow, their departments and subsidiaries often take on a life of their own when it comes to software deployment. The result is often a coexistence of ERP, HCM, SCM and CX systems from different manufacturers. This results in company-wide data silos that are difficult to organize across the board and evaluate for consolidated annual financial statements and external reporting at group level.

With solutions for Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Oracle addresses the need for a unified view. In this way, it is possible to take a bird's eye view of all operational and transactional systems and to combine data.

EPM software is now an important tool for business administration across industries. The approach combines financial and operational metrics with data to support strategies, plans and their implementation. Management can use EPM software to align financial and operational results with forecasts and goals, identify trends through analytics, and forecast results to improve overall performance. The main users are the CFO and the finance department.

Focus on usability and integration

But other departments such as HR, sales, marketing and IT also use EPM for operational planning, budgeting and reporting. EPM business processes such as strategic modeling, planning, consolidation and close, reporting, and performance analysis provide organizations with a foundation to understand their data and use it to make informed business decisions. With Oracle EPM Cloud, a native cloud-based system solution is available that offers users various benefits depending on their initial situation and individual needs.

Most of the advantages of the solution over a local concept result from the layered architecture of the cloud: It enables a uniform database, a managed, extensible logic, and a uniform front end. The result should be a consistent user experience and a high degree of usability.

In addition, there is the possibility of using Oracle EPM Cloud together with SAP solutions and thereby benefiting from the know-how of the software manufacturers in the automation of interfaces from SAP BW. For this purpose, Oracle provides a broad basis of well-functioning ETL and integration tools, which are able to tame the prevailing flood of data even in heterogeneous SAP environments with different release statuses as well as divergent charts of accounts and data structures.

Design workflows to deliver measurable benefits

The approach of Oracle EPM Cloud scores in its competitive environment with a high functional scope, especially with regard to the topic of consolidation. One of the users who have opted for the solution for this reason is the sporting goods and fashion supplier Puma. The company is deepening its partnership with the software expert and migrating its local consolidation and data management processes to the Oracle Cloud.

McDonalds Germany is also a user of the EPM solution in the cloud. McDonalds has migrated its entire corporate planning to Oracle Budgeting and Planning Cloud in order to use a planning toolkit that meets all currently conceivable requirements. As a result, the company saves time and increases efficiency as well as transparency in handling important corporate data. For example, deployment times have been reduced by up to 50 percent, and the effort required to transfer newly developed applications from a test to a productive environment by up to 80 percent.

The examples of satisfied users and the accelerated dynamics of many markets show how crucial it is for companies to implement efficient and fast enterprise management and consolidation. Once the first step has been taken, the potential of the EPM solution should fully unfold in order to benefit from the additional added value of further modules such as Analytics or AI- Assistant.

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Curated by Simone Sailer, E-3 Magazine