COAM automates its financial operations with Oracle Cloud

COAM (Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos de Madrid), the College of Architects of Madrid, represents the professional interests of more than 10,000 affiliate architects in the Spanish capital and safeguards the cultural and environmental values of Spanish architecture. It trains architects in all aspects of their discipline, including technical and legal, and enforces the standards of the profession.

COAM’s income derives from membership fees, architectural seals of approval, training courses, and cultural activities staged on the college’s property or hosted by public organizations.

The college was running its financial operations through a combination of manual processes and a heavily customized and outdated on-premises enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. COAM was badly in need of increased agility in its finance department and wanted to rebuild the college’s financial and procurement processes.

COAM selected Oracle to build a cloud-based architecture due to Oracle’s track record as an innovator. Also, as an Oracle Database customer for decades, COAM decided to stay with the provider it knew best and, additionally, save money on hardware and updates.

“Oracle Cloud is always up to date. Having access to the most modern ERP processes is a true differentiator,” says Hugo Gómez-Carrillo Ruiz, COAM’s CFO.

COAM implemented Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP. After the switch from a manual on-premises system, COAM’s finance department is gaining significant efficiencies after automating its processes. For an organization that deals with thousands of low-denomination transactions throughout the month, modernization steps, such as bulk loading recurring monthly bills, have significantly reduced the workload.

The company’s monthly close, for instance, has been accelerated by seven days, freeing up staff to concentrate on business planning. COAM also saves time and effort by automatically generating remittance advice letters that are sent when inbound invoices have been paid.

With Oracle Fusion Cloud Procurement, COAM now enjoys previously unattainable traceability, tracking the lifetime of a purchase order in one application. “It’s giving us exhaustive control over costs. Our next goal is to automate invoice processing to improve accounts-payable efficiencies,” says Gómez-Carrillo.

Also, now COAM can make faster financial decisions. By accessing the standard dashboards and reports within Oracle Cloud ERP, it can analyze invoice aging, incurred debt, and value added tax (VAT) payments at the click of a button. “We could not report well before. It was all ad hoc and in Excel, but now we can furnish people outside of finance with analytical reports that aid their decision-making,” says Gómez-Carrillo.

In addition, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure lets COAM configure a communications gateway with Spain’s Tax Agency AEAT (Agencia Estatal de Administración Tributaria) to electronically send VAT returns and receive responses.

To nurture common business practices, COAM’s finance team established a scorecard to measure and adjust efficiencies as well as to create transparency. The plan is to extend Oracle Cloud ERP throughout the organization and set up common working processes.

COAM is integrating Oracle-based applications used for official architectural approvals, membership fees, event management, and training through Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications so that any changes made are replicated in Oracle Cloud ERP. “Having one source of data that can be cross-checked through the organization is critical to making decisions and driving innovation,” says Gómez-Carrillo. “It brings huge value in terms of speed and efficiency.”

COAM has several projects based on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. For example, a big data initiative involves incorporating more than 100 years of Madrid building plans and housing specifications into Oracle Cloud.