{"id":109874,"date":"2021-11-25T08:02:00","date_gmt":"2021-11-25T07:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/e3mag.com\/?p=109874"},"modified":"2025-02-05T14:21:44","modified_gmt":"2025-02-05T13:21:44","slug":"quick-wins-in-a-world-of-constant-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/e3mag.com\/en\/quick-wins-in-a-world-of-constant-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Quick Wins In A World Of Constant Change"},"content":{"rendered":"

Employees are resigning en masse, opt\u00ading for early retirement, or driven out of the workforce by burnout. Consu\u00admers are abandoning their favorite brands because of supply chain issues; a recent Oracle survey<\/a> found that 80 percent of re\u00adspondents would stop buying a brand completely because of delayed orders. Meanwhile, treasury and the cash position is top-of-mind for every CxO. They need to reduce costs, but they also need to under\u00adstand their cash position so they can make the right investments in their next busi\u00adness model.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These are big challenges, and they can feel overwhelming. But the good news is, you don\u2019t need to tackle every problem at once. You can start by focusing on a single business challenge\u2014reducing procurement costs, improving planning cycles, or finding and keeping the best employees.<\/p>

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Many companies are moving from on-premises systems to the cloud, but you can\u2019t expect to do this overnight. Whether you\u2019re an Oracle or SAP customer, regard\u00adless of your starting point, you can reap in\u00adstant business value with Oracle Cloud. This is not a rip-and-replace scenario. While your on-premises backbone ERP solutions are still up and running, you can start to de\u00adploy Oracle SaaS too \u2013 for example, Oracle Cloud EPM for planning, budgeting, tax and profitability management, or Oracle Trans\u00adportation Management. Let\u2019s look at a few ways that Oracle is partnering with customers to help them achieve quick wins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Profitability through planning<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Over the past couple of years, how many times did you need to revise your plans and forecasts? How long did it take you? As we cope with the fallout of a global pandemic, planning cycles have shortened from months to weeks, or even days and hours, to real-time planning. The business en\u00advironment continues to change at a mo\u00adment\u2019s notice, so you need to be agile enough to re-plan and re-forecast quickly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The big picture<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Finance has typically taken the lead on budgeting and forecasting, but finance can\u2019t plan accurately without looking across the entire business. When your workforce, supply chain, and operations are among your biggest challenges, you need to bring in data from all these depart\u00adments for a holistic plan. That\u2019s where connected enterprise planning co\u00admes in. Connected enterprise planning bre\u00adaks down the silos between departments, combining all plans\u2014HR, supply chain, sa\u00adles, marketing, projects, and more\u2014on a single platform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the business environment was stable in times past, your company could get by with siloed plans. Departments could send their budgets to finance to consolidate periodically, but each team executed its individual plan without ex\u00adpecting much change. That\u2019s no longer the case. In today\u2019s era of constant dis\u00adruption, plans need to be changed and ad\u00adjusted continuously. It\u2019s less about crea\u00adting the perfect plan, and more about re\u00adfinement and reforecasting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We see organizations constantly run\u00adning scenarios and planning for contingen\u00adcies, as well as creating new models and rethinking strategies. The role of finance has evolved from consolidating plans to helping guide the company\u2019s strategy and roadmap. They\u2019re collaborating with line of business teams on tactical steps to achieve their long-term vision. You can see this in the way that Kraft Heinz, an SAP customer, gained more granular insights into each of its brands with Oracle Cloud EPM. Kraft Heinz now has fast, de\u00adtailed insights across its many lines of business, with unprecedented access to pro\u00adduct-level profitability and cost ma\u00adnagement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe now have visibility of our entire P&L down to the SKU level,\u201d said Eric Men\u00addez, Kraft Heinz\u2019s associate director of fi\u00adnance and IT, in a recent interview<\/a>. \u201cWe can allocate our costs globally down to the SKU level for the first time. That\u2019s exciting.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Connected thinking and integration<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Connected enterprise planning gives lea\u00adders the decision support to act quickly on real-time information and stay ahead of disruptions. Traditionally, however, pulling together data across lines of business has been painfully slow. True integration re\u00adquires an end-to-end, planning-to-execu\u00adtion, closed-loop system. With integrated business planning and execution (IBPX) from Oracle, you can help speed up plan\u00adning cycles, react to the unexpected, and readjust your plans to fit your new reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While long-range planning features are important to integrated business plan\u00adning, advances in technology and compu\u00adte power help planners adjust to near-term shifts in demand or supply with more suc\u00adcess. Oracle\u2019s ability to integrate the exe\u00adcution details from supply, manufactu\u00adring, logistics, and order management sys\u00adtems give planners the ability to adjust to change and continuously improve long-range planning. True integration requires this end-to-end, planning-to-execution, closed-loop system. The ultimate goal is to know sooner, act faster, and adapt to chan\u00adge. With a single hub, leaders have visibili\u00adty into what they need to make effective, rapid decisions and avoid the information gaps of the past.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example: Juniper Networks<\/a> makes high-performance networking products and services. Their supply chain team felt they were underperforming on customer service and cost. The team wanted to ex\u00adtend the principles of sales and opera\u00adtions planning (S&OP) throughout the supply chain, delivering one seamless ma\u00adnagement system with supporting busi\u00adness processes. With Oracle Cloud, Juniper in\u00adcorpora\u00adted important supplier data into its business plans, reducing inventory costs by 15 percent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Added value of SaaS<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe key benefits of being on SaaS is not only the reduction in the total cost of ow\u00adnership,\u201d said Kiran Garlapati, Juniper\u2019s senior director of IT solutions, \u201cbut there is also 99-percent availability of the sys\u00adtem, new features coming every quarter, availability of Industry 4.0 technology like AI, blockchain, IoT etc., and easy ac\u00adcess for all our Juniper employees.\u201d It turns out that innovation, perhaps more than anything else, is the real engine of business success. And it pays big divi\u00addends. Research from Boston Consulting Group found that, over the last 14 years, the most innovative companies outper\u00adformed the broader market on sharehol\u00adder return by 5.6 percent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet maintaining leadership in innova\u00adtion is tough: only eight of the original \u201cTop 50 Most Innovative Companies\u201d have managed to stay on the list over 14 years of research. Oracle is number 15 on the 2021 list, up 10 places from 2020. SAP is number 40 \u2013 down 13 places.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reason for the churn? Part of the problem is that companies are stuck with aging business systems that make it hard to access critical data. Hampered by frag\u00admented data and a lack of process integ\u00adration, companies suffer from slower time to market, product quality issues, and slim margins. The result is an \u201cinno\u00advation gap\u201d that can leave your company lagging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To jump start innovation\u2014and keep driving it over time\u2014the most successful companies unify their data and processes on a single \u201cplatform for innovation\u201d. This integrates the entire value chain, from idea capture and product development, to supply chain planning, manufacturing and maintenance, to post-delivery custo\u00admer service. In short, you translate the right ideas into value and sales sooner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s look how continuous innovation drives success across five areas of your product and service lifecycle: develop, plan, source, make, and serve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. Develop<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Ideas for great products or services can come from anywhere. But for innovation to be continuous and profitable, you need a framework to identify and select great ideas that align with business strategy. And you need to develop them quickly and cost-effectively, while ensuring they meet customer requirements, regulatory com\u00adpliance, and market demand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This can be a challenge when your product lifecycle ma\u00adnagement (PLM), supply chain and manu\u00adfacturing systems are outdated and ma\u00adnaged in separate silos or third-party ap\u00adplications that are badly integrated. These disconnected legacy systems weren\u2019t de\u00adsigned to meet the digital requirements of today\u2019s development processes. Often, they\u2019re engineering-centric, do a poor job of managing the complexities of global product launches, and aren\u2019t built to sup\u00adport complete service offerings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To adopt a continuous innovation approach, you should consider a collaborative, end-to-end system that shares real-time data and standardizes development processes for faster decision-making. When that data is tied together with built-in analytics, IoT, AI, and digital twin capa\u00adbilities, you can make better product de\u00advelopment decisions and go to market fas\u00adter while ensuring the highest quality of offerings. A great example of this is Voda\u00adfone, which has moved beyond telecom\u00admunications into other lines of business, including IoT services. From connected factories to cars making automatic emer\u00adgency calls after an accident to electricity meters reporting on usage, Vodafone Bu\u00adsiness links IoT devices in more than 180 countries and over 570 networks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"I think what people are really excited about is that the IoT encompasses everything these days,\" says\u201cI think what really wows people is that IoT ap\u00adplies to everything these days,\u201d said Erik Brenneis<\/a>, Director of IoT at Vodafone Busi\u00adness. \u201cWhen cars make emergency calls after an accident, lives are saved. When commercial trucks automatically take the most efficient routes, that saves a lot of CO2. IoT connects many things people aren\u2019t even aware of.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vodafone Business worked with Oracle to develop technologies supporting its IoT global platform, including billing and re\u00advenue management. The company cur\u00adrently supports 2 million customer transac\u00adtions per month, 1 billion usage events per day, and more than 123 million total de\u00advices. Along with scalability, security is a must when it comes to IoT.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe systems must be designed securely throughout the chain\u2014from the application in the cloud, through the communica\u00adtions lines, all the way to a device with built-in security authentication,\u201d Brenneis said. \u201cThat\u2019s why security has always been top of mind for us and why it\u2019s important to have partners like Oracle that share our security-first approach.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Plan<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Top innovators have found that better planning can help them anticipate market demand and meet it with the right pro\u00adducts and services. This requires you to closely align supply chain planning with product development and design. A single platform with built-in analytics can help you do that, allowing you to deliver real-time insights and share accurate master data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These teams get a head start on identifying the right parts and suppliers, at the right price, and they can match in\u00adventories to meet demand forecasts. IDC recently estimated that companies that institute a single, collaborative supply chain platform can improve innovation productivity by 10 percent and reduce pro\u00adduct lead times by 42 percent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. Source<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Most organizations only involve their suppliers when it comes time to buy goods and materials; they don\u2019t include them early in new product development. This can lead to higher product costs, lost savings, reduced quality, and latency, and you can end up with suppliers that don\u2019t align with your social or ethical stan\u00addards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unifying procurement and pro\u00adduct development on a single, integrated platform can help you 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, lets you extend the product record across internal teams and external suppliers. You can share transparent information throughout the product lifecycle to increase col\u00adlaboration with your suppliers and miti\u00adgate potential disruptions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. Make<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

To keep customers coming back, you need to keep quality high and produce volumes that can scale quickly to meet demand. Even better is when you can rapidly create personalized, customer-configured pro\u00adducts that further differentiate your offe\u00adrings and propel revenue. Top manufactu\u00adrers are using IoT and AI technologies to bring together and analyze feedback from customers, factories, and even the pro\u00adducts themselves (via IoT sensors), helping them to continually improve their offe\u00adrings. They\u2019re also using these technologies to help automate production processes and analytics to gain predictive insights that can avert unexpected downtime and costly equipment failures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5. Serve<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Increasingly, companies are not just sel\u00adling products, they\u2019re selling \u201cproducts as a service\u201d. The traditional sell-and-forget sales model is being outpaced by the gro\u00adwing adoption 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 evaluating these approaches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leading innovators are building new \u201canything as a service\u201d business models around centralized, cloud-based \u201cinsight engines\u201d that continually collect and ana\u00adlyze feedback from customers and combi\u00adne it with data from factories and pro\u00adducts. This helps to prioritize innovations across the value chain and ensure a better customer experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Drive growth with better planning, budgeting, and reporting<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In services industries, human capital is the primary product \u2013 but the ability to effectively plan around resourcing, demand, staffing mixtures, skill sets, and utilization extends beyond the workforce. Financial statements, cash, depreciation and amortization, mar\u00adketing, and project financials are just some of the other areas where effec\u00adtive forecasting and reporting can help drive growth. Professional ser\u00advices company Inoapps<\/a> is intimately familiar with the challenges of run\u00adning a rapidly expanding professional services business. Like many of their customers, Inoapps\u2019 challenge was to create a structured process to model their budget across all lines of busi\u00adness, operating units, divisions, and sub-divisions, by individual project\u2014while keeping the flexibility for indivi\u00addual plan owners to perform monthly forecasting and what-if modelling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To achieve a complete yearly picture, Oracle Cloud EPM collates the following sources: actual data, meaning work already complete and billed in a historical period, sourced from Oracle Cloud ERP; order-book data, meaning work already contracted and assigned to a billable resource for a future period, sourced from a custom resource allocation tool; and pipeline data, meaning work currently being bid on at some stage of the sales process, sourced from a sales\/CRM system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inoapps can now measure performance over time and use the system to drive informed business decisions as the year progresses. The company can see how to maximize not just immediate margin but growth aspirations (for example, growing a line of business in a specific location, or expanding an offshore team in another). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oracle Cloud EPM gives Inoapps a tightly connected system that, at the touch of a button, can report across multiple versions of budgets and forecasts, taking into account resource costs, utilization, skillset and availability. Now that their commercial and finance teams have these capabilities, Inoapps can continue to grow with confidence and help many more customers over the years to come. The Definitive Guide 2021<\/em>) that attracts and retains top talent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Risks and compliance<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Organizations process and maintain large amounts of data from their customers. With increasingly better data intelligence tools, this information can be used to pro\u00advide rich new value for companies and customers alike. However, this value is matched with new security threats and pri\u00advacy concerns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A big part of maintaining data security and confidentiality is controlling who has access to it. Access to confidential data is often determined by the roles and respon\u00adsibilities of individuals within the organiza\u00adtion. But their roles or responsibilities (and with it, the need for access to specific infor\u00admation) may change over time. For examp\u00adle, when employees change departments, they may accidentally maintain access to confidential information they\u2019re no longer authorized to have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With Oracle Cloud ERP, you can enforce access controls and separa\u00adtion of duties using Oracle Cloud Risk Ma\u00adnagement. It can continuously analyze every user\u2019s security configuration to iden\u00adtify policy violations and it can monitor any changes to critical access configurations. Oracle Cloud Risk Management uses built-in machine learning to strengthen controls, stop cash leaks, and detect emerging risks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unlike traditional audits or spot-checks, it can monitor every single transaction, giving you documentation that you can share with au\u00additors and use to streamline audit work\u00adflows. This high level of automation helps reduce the time you spend on labor-inten\u00adsive security and compliance tasks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition to our cloud applications, Oracle builds security into every layer of our technology stack\u2014databases, middle\u00adware, developer tools, all the way down to our global data centers. Our entire public cloud offers high customer isolation and automated protections. Data residency, sovereignty, and cloud security are at the core of our operations. We have more than 40 years of experience securing the world\u2019s most valuable datasets, and we roll out new capabilities every quarter \u2013 which makes it much easier to meet the latest industry, national, and global com\u00adpliance standards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Improve the customer experience to drive more revenue<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Data is the currency of the experience economy. The ability to organi\u00adze it, gain insights from it, and then use it as fuel to power contextual experiences across the customer journey\u2014whatever path that takes\u2014is critical. It\u2019s an extremely difficult engineering task to corral demo\u00adgraphic data, transactional data, and beha\u00advioral data and integrate it across devices and channels to create a complete, connec\u00adted, insightful, and actionable customer profile. That\u2019s why thriving in the experien\u00adce economy requires a partner that has data at the core of its business. At Oracle, we think delivering an enterprise-grade customer intelligence platform isn\u2019t about point solutions, content, or CRM\u2014it\u2019s about expertise in managing data at scale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CX Unity and AI<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Oracle CX Unity can help your company thrive in the experience economy by weaving disparate customer data from marketing, sales, commerce, and service into strategic intelligence. It can merge online, offline, and third-party data to create a single sour\u00adce of real-time customer truth, helping eli\u00adminate the \u201cblind spots\u201d that prevent so many companies from better understan\u00adding their customers and delivering richer interactions. What\u2019s more, Oracle CX Unity applies built-in AI and machine learning to set out the optimal experience within existing bu\u00adsiness processes. Data is everywhere for you to identify and harness. You can even use it to target audiences based on the we\u00adather! At Oracle, we use demographic, transactional, behavioral, first-party, and third-party data to drive our CX applications and help you give every customer, prospect, and website visitor a personalized experien\u00adce, driving them into the funnel and crea\u00adting more revenue opportunities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion: Quick wins in a world of change<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Companies need to move toward a portfolio that is more adaptable to business change, with composable applications that can be assembled, reassembled, and extended. Oracle can provide these composable appli\u00adcations because we have the entire suite of cloud applications: ERP, EPM, advertising, customer experience, HR, and supply chain. Many vendors started with one of those \u2013 like Work\u00adday with HR, Salesforce with CRM, or SAP with HR in the cloud (with the ac\u00adquisition of SuccessFactors) \u2013 but with just one of those cloud solutions, they can\u2019t offer the composition capabilities that Oracle can.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oracle can offer a SaaS-based, business-centric application to complement any customer\u2019s on-premises footprint. It adds immediate value, and we can seamlessly extend this partnership over time. With Oracle, you have the possibility to compose this all into one cohesive suite, engineered to work together. No other vendor can do this right now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oracle is partnering with thousands of customers worldwide to help them achieve quick wins and be more innovative. Every quarter, we improve our software with new capabilities, functions, and built-in technologies like AI and machine learning. With our software-as-a-service approach, you\u2019re always up to date with the latest innovations, so you can focus on solving your most immediate business challenges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PDF (in English)<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Download<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It feels like nothing is the same anymore, doesn\u2019t it? COVID-19, economic upheavals, and an unprecedented labor shortage have turned the world upside down, and many companies are struggling to stay right-side up.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":2362,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[40129,40127],"tags":[39,707,73,40130,198],"coauthors":[39503],"class_list":["post-109874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coverstory-21-12","category-mag-21-12","tag-cloud","tag-coverstory","tag-erp","tag-mag-21-12","tag-oracle","pmpro-has-access"],"acf":[],"featured_image_urls_v2":{"full":"","thumbnail":"","medium":"","medium_large":"","large":"","image-100":"","image-480":"","image-640":"","image-720":"","image-960":"","image-1168":"","image-1440":"","image-1920":"","1536x1536":"","2048x2048":"","trp-custom-language-flag":"","bricks_large_16x9":"","bricks_large":"","bricks_large_square":"","bricks_medium":"","bricks_medium_square":"","profile_24":"","profile_48":"","profile_96":"","profile_150":"","profile_300":""},"post_excerpt_stackable_v2":"

Nichts ist mehr so, wie es war, oder? COVID-19, wirtschaftliche Umw\u00e4lzungen und ein noch nie dagewesener Arbeitskr\u00e4ftemangel haben die Welt auf den Kopf gestellt, und viele Unternehmen k\u00e4mpfen darum, ihren Kopf \u00fcber Wasser zu halten.<\/p>\n","category_list_v2":"Coverstory 21-12<\/a>, MAG 21-12<\/a>","author_info_v2":{"name":"Charles Homs, Oracle","url":"https:\/\/e3mag.com\/en\/author\/charles-homs\/"},"comments_num_v2":"0 comments","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/e3mag.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/e3mag.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/e3mag.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e3mag.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2362"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e3mag.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=109874"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/e3mag.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109874\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":148755,"href":"https:\/\/e3mag.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109874\/revisions\/148755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/e3mag.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=109874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e3mag.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=109874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e3mag.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=109874"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/e3mag.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=109874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}