Rapid success in a world of constant change

Employees are quitting en masse, taking early retirement, or being forced out of the workforce by burnout. A recent survey conducted by Oracle found that 80 percent of respondents would stop buying a brand entirely due to delivery delays. Meanwhile, finance and cash position are paramount for any CxO - decision makers need to cut costs, but they also need to understand their cash position so they can make the right investments in their next business model.

These are big challenges, and they can feel overwhelming. But the good news is that companies don't have to tackle every problem at once. They can start by focusing on a single business challenge - reducing procurement costs, improving planning cycles, or finding and retaining the best people.

Many companies are moving from on-premises systems to the cloud, but it doesn't happen overnight. Whether you're an Oracle or SAP customer, you can get immediate business value with Oracle Cloud. It is not a rip-and-replace scenario. While your on-premise ERP backbone solutions are still running, you can also deploy Oracle SaaS, for example Oracle Cloud EPM for planning, budgeting, fiscal and profitability management, or Oracle Transportation Management.

Profitability through planning

How often have you had to revise your plans and forecasts in recent years? How long did it take you to do so? Faced with the consequences of a global pandemic, planning cycles have shortened from months to weeks or even days and hours, to planning in real time. The business environment changes in a very short period of time, so you have to be flexible enough to replan quickly and make new forecasts.

The big picture

Finance typically leads budgeting and forecasting, but it can't plan accurately if it doesn't have a view of the entire business. When your workforce, supply chain, and operations are among your biggest challenges, you need to pull data from all these departments for holistic planning.

This is where networked planning comes in. Networked business planning breaks down silos between departments by bringing all plans - human resources, supply chain, sales, marketing, projects - together on a single platform.

In earlier times, when the business environment was stable, companies got by with isolated plans. Departments could send their budgets to Finance for regular consolidation, but each team executed its individual plan without expecting much change. That's no longer the case today. In today's era of constant change, plans need to be modified and adjusted on an ongoing basis. It's less about creating the perfect plan, and more about refining it and making new forecasts.

We observe that companies are constantly running scenarios and planning for the unexpected, as well as developing new models and rethinking strategies. Finance's role has evolved from consolidating plans to supporting the corporate strategy and roadmap. It works with business unit teams on tactical steps to achieve their long-term vision.

This is evidenced by the fact that Kraft Heinz, an SAP customer, has been able to gain more detailed insights into each of its brands with Oracle Cloud EPM. Kraft Heinz now has visibility into its many business units and unprecedented access to profitability and cost management at the product level.

"We now have visibility into our entire income statement down to the SKU level", Eric Mendez, associate director of finance and IT at Kraft Heinz, recently said. in an interview. "For the first time, we can allocate our costs globally down to the individual product level. That is exciting."

Networked thinking and integration

Networked business planning gives executives decision support that empowers them to respond quickly to real-time information and stay ahead of disruptions. Traditionally, merging data across business units has been painfully slow. True integration requires an end-to-end, closed-loop system from planning to execution. With Oracle's Integrated Business Planning and Execution (IBPX), companies can accelerate planning cycles, respond to the unexpected, and adapt their plans to the new reality.

While long-term planning capabilities are important to integrated business planning, advances in technology and computing power help planners more successfully adapt to short-term shifts in demand or supply. Oracle's ability to integrate the execution details of supply, manufacturing, logistics and order management systems gives planners the ability to adapt to change and continuously improve long-term planning.

This end-to-end, closed-loop system requires true integration from planning to execution. The ultimate goal is to act faster and adapt to change. With a single hub, executives have visibility into the information they need to make effective, rapid decisions and avoid the information gaps of the past.

Example: Juniper Networks manufactures high-performance network products and services. The team wanted to extend sales and operations planning (S&OP) principles across the supply chain and provide a seamless management system with supporting business processes. With Oracle Cloud, Juniper was able to incorporate key supplier data into its business plans, reducing inventory costs by 15 percent.

Added value of SaaS

"The main advantages of SaaS are not only the lower total cost of ownership" said Kiran Garlapati, senior director of IT solutions at Juniper, "but also the 99 percent availability of the system, new features appearing every quarter, the availability of Industry 4.0 technologies such as AI, Blockchain, IoT, and easy access for all Juniper employees."

It has been shown that innovation - perhaps more than anything else - is the real engine of corporate success. And it pays off in a big way. Research by the Boston Consulting Group (BSG) has shown that the most innovative companies have achieved a 5.6 percent higher stock return than the overall market over the past 14 years.

Still, it's difficult to maintain innovation leadership: Only eight of the original "Top 50 Most Innovative Companies" have managed to stay on the list in the 14 years of BSG research. Oracle is number 15 on the 2021 list, ten places better than in 2020. SAP is number 40 - a drop of 13 places.

The reason for the churn? Part of the problem is that companies are stuck in outdated business systems that make it difficult to access important data. Due to fragmented data and a lack of process integration, companies suffer from slower time-to-market, product quality issues and low profit margins. The result is an 'innovation gap' that can put companies at a disadvantage.

The most successful companies are unifying their data and processes on a single innovation platform to drive innovation. This integrates the entire value chain, from idea capture and product development to supply chain planning, manufacturing, maintenance, and post-delivery customer service. In short, they turn the right ideas into value and revenue faster.

Let's look at how continuous innovation drives success in five areas of your product and service lifecycle: Development, Planning, Procurement, Manufacturing and Service.

1. development

For innovation to be continuous and profitable, companies need a guide to identify and select great ideas that align with business strategy. And they need to develop them quickly and cost-effectively while ensuring they meet customer requirements, regulatory compliance and market demand. This can be a challenge if your product lifecycle management (PLM), supply chain and manufacturing systems are legacy and managed in disconnected silos or poorly integrated third-party applications. These disconnected legacy systems were not designed to meet the digital demands of today's development processes.

To take a continuous innovation approach, companies should consider an end-to-end collaborative system that shares real-time data and standardizes development processes to make faster decisions. When this data is combined with analytics, IoT, AI, and digital-twin capabilities, companies can make better product development decisions and bring products to market faster while ensuring the quality of their offerings.

A great example of this is Vodafone, which has moved beyond telecommunications into other business areas - including IoT services. From connected factories to cars that automatically send an emergency call after an accident to electricity meters that report on consumption, Vodafone Business connects IoT devices in more than 180 countries and over 570 networks.

"I think what really excites people is that the IoT today encompasses everything", says Erik Brenneis, Director of IoT at Vodafone Business. "When cars make an emergency call after an accident, lives are saved. When trucks automatically take the most efficient route, it saves a lot of CO2. The IoT connects many things that people are not even aware of.“

Vodafone Business worked with Oracle to develop technologies that support its global IoT platform, including billing and revenue management. The company currently supports two million customer transactions per month, one billion usage events per day and more than 123 million devices in total. In addition to scalability, security is also a must when it comes to IoT.

"Systems must be designed to be secure across the span - from the application hosted in the cloud, to the communication lines, to a device with built-in security authentication" Brenneis said. "For this reason, security is always our top priority, and it's important to have partners like Oracle who share our security-focused approach."

2. planning

Top innovators have found that better planning can help them anticipate market demand and meet it with the right products and services. To do this, they need to closely align supply chain planning with product development and design. A single platform with integrated analytics can help by providing real-time insights and accurate master data.

Teams get a head start on identifying the right parts and suppliers at the right price and can align inventory with demand forecasts. IDC recently estimated that companies that establish a unified, collaborative supply chain platform can increase innovation productivity by 10 percent and reduce product lead times by 42 percent.

3. procurement

Most companies only involve their suppliers when it comes time to buy goods and materials. They don't involve them early in the development of new products. This can lead to higher product costs, lost savings, reduced quality and delays - and it can lead to working with suppliers who do not comply with their social or ethical standards.

Unifying procurement and product development on a single, integrated platform can help accelerate the pace of product development, improve the supplier qualification process, and select the best suppliers. A unified cloud running on a single data model enables the product data set to be extended to internal teams and external suppliers. Companies can share transparent information across the product lifecycle.

4. manufacture

To keep customers coming back, companies must keep quality high and produce quantities that can be quickly adjusted to meet demand. It's even better if personalized, customer-configured products can be produced quickly to further differentiate offerings and drive sales. Leading manufacturers are using IoT and AI technologies to collect and analyze feedback from customers, factories, and even the products themselves (via IoT sensors), which helps them continuously improve their offerings. They also use these technologies to automate production processes and use analytics to gain predictive insights that can prevent unexpected downtime and costly equipment failures.

5. service

Companies are not just selling products, they are selling products as a service. The traditional "sell and forget" sales model is being overtaken by the increasing introduction of subscription services, pay-as-you-go and consumption-based revenue models. According to a recent MIT survey, four out of five companies are currently considering these approaches.

Leading innovators are developing new "everything as a service" business models based on centralized, cloud-based insight engines that continuously collect and analyze customer feedback and combine it with data from your factories and products. This helps you prioritize innovation across the value chain and ensure a better customer experience.

Growth through better planning, budgeting and reporting

In the service industry, human capital is the primary asset - but the ability to effectively plan resources, demand, staff composition, skills and utilization goes beyond the workforce. Financial statements, cash, depreciation, marketing and project finance are just some of the other areas where effective forecasting and reporting can drive growth.

The service company Inoapps is well acquainted with the challenges of running a fast-growing service company. Like many of its customers, Inoapps faced the challenge of developing a structured process for modeling its budget for all business units, operating units, departments and subdivisions, as well as for individual projects, without losing the flexibility for individual plan managers to run monthly forecasts and what-if models.

To obtain a complete annual picture, Oracle Cloud EPM brings together three sources. First, the solution makes use of actual data, which includes work already completed and billed over a historical period. Order book data, work that has already been contracted and assigned to a billable resource for a future period, is taken from a custom resource assignment tool. Pipeline data, information about work for which quotes are solicited at a particular stage of the sales process, is taken from a CRM system and completes the overview in the Oracle solution.

With this overview, Inoapps can now measure performance over time and use the system to make informed business decisions. The company can identify how to maximize not only its immediate profit margin, but also its growth objectives (for example, expanding a line of business in one location or adding an offshore team in another).

With Oracle Cloud EPM, Inoapps has a tightly networked system that can generate reports on multiple versions of budgets and forecasts at the touch of a button, taking into account resource costs, utilization, skills and availability. Now that the commercial and finance teams have these capabilities, Inoapps can grow with confidence and help many more customers in the years to come.

Stress, anxiety and changing priorities over the past 18 months have led to a spate of resignations and job changes around the world. According to a Bankrate survey, more than half (55 percent) of current employees say they are likely to look for a new job in the next 12 months. Companies need to act quickly to "capture the irresistible enterprise" (Bersin, The Definitive Guide 2021) that attracts and retains top talent.

Risks and compliance

Companies process and manage large amounts of customer data. With ever-improving data intelligence tools, this information can be used to create new value for both companies and customers. However, this value is also offset by new security threats and data protection issues.

An important part of data security and confidentiality is controlling who has access to the data. Access to confidential data is often determined by the roles and responsibilities of individuals within the organization. However, these roles and responsibilities (and therefore the need for access to certain data) can change over time. For example, when employees change departments, they may continue to have access to confidential data to which they are no longer authorized.

Oracle Cloud ERP lets you enforce access controls and segregation of duties using Oracle Cloud Risk Management. It can continuously analyze each user's security configuration to detect policy violations, and it can monitor any changes to critical access configurations.

Oracle Risk Management Cloud uses built-in machine learning to strengthen controls, close leaks, and identify new risks. Unlike traditional audits or sampling, it can monitor every transaction, giving you documentation you can share with auditors to streamline audit workflows. This high level of automation helps you spend less time on labor-intensive security and compliance tasks.

In addition to our cloud applications, Oracle builds security into every layer of our technology stack - databases, middleware, developer tools, all the way to our global data centers. Our entire public cloud provides a high level of customer isolation and automated protections. Data residency, sovereignty, and cloud security are at the heart of everything we do.

We have more than 40 years of experience securing the world's most valuable data sets, and each quarter we launch new capabilities that make it easier for organizations to meet the latest industry-wide, national and global compliance standards.

Experience Economy

Improve the customer experience and increase revenue: Data is the currency of the Experience Economy. The ability to organize it, extract insights from it, and then use it to fuel contextual experiences throughout the customer journey - whichever path it takes - is critical.

Bringing together demographic, transactional, and behavioral data and integrating it across devices and channels to create a complete, connected, insightful, and actionable customer profile is an extremely difficult technical task.

To succeed in the experience economy, therefore, requires a partner for whom data is at the heart of their business. At Oracle, we believe that delivering an enterprise-wide customer intelligence platform is not about standalone solutions, content or CRM, but about the expertise to manage data at scale.

CX Unity and AI

Oracle CX Unity can help companies thrive in the Experience Economy by weaving disparate customer data from marketing, sales, commerce and service into strategic intelligence. It can bring together online, offline and third-party data to create a single source of real-time customer truth, eliminating the "blind spots" that prevent many companies from better understanding their customers and delivering richer interactions. In addition, CX Unity applies integrated AI and machine learning to create the optimal customer experience within existing business processes.

The data is everywhere and can be identified and used by customers. You can even use it to target audiences based on the weather! Oracle uses demographic data, transactional data, behavioral data, first-party data, and third-party data to drive its CX applications and help deliver a personalized experience to every customer, prospect, and website visitor.

Conclusion: Success in a world of change

Enterprises need to move toward a portfolio that is more adaptable to business changes, with compatible applications that can be assembled and extended. Oracle can deliver these compatible applications because we have the full suite of cloud applications: ERP, EPM, Customer Relationship Management, HR and Supply Chain.

Many vendors started with one of these applications - like Workday with HR, Salesforce with CRM, or SAP with HR in the cloud (with the acquisition of Successfactors) - but with just one of these cloud solutions, you can't offer the same composition capabilities as Oracle.

Oracle can provide a SaaS-based, business-centric application that complements each customer's on-premises solution. This creates immediate value, and we can seamlessly expand this partnership over time. With Oracle, you have the ability to bring all of this together in one cohesive suite designed for collaboration. No other vendor can do that right now.

Oracle works with thousands of customers worldwide to help them achieve rapid success and be more innovative. Every quarter, we improve our software with new capabilities, features, and integrated technologies like AI and machine learning. Our Software-as-a-Service approach keeps you on the cutting edge of innovation, so you can focus on solving your most pressing business challenges in a world of constant change.