Oracle Adds AI Smarts to Increase Oracle ERP Cloud’s Market Lead

Oracle has extended the artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities within Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Cloud and Oracle Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Cloud. The latest machine learning-based innovations include an expense reporting assistant, project management digital assistant, advanced financial controls and project-driven supply chain management.

“Oracle continues to deliver on the finance innovation promise expected by our customers,” said Rondy Ng, senior vice president, Oracle Applications Development. “Our pervasive AI strategy delivered via continuous product updates ensures rapid adoption with immediate business results. This allows finance and operations teams to stay ahead of the technology curve and retain a competitive advantage.”

More than 6,000 organizations in 112 countries and 23 industries have selected Oracle ERP Cloud to provide a complete, innovative and securely-featured platform for their organization. With Oracle ERP Cloud, organizations of all sizes can quickly and easily take advantage of the latest innovations in artificial intelligence, digital assistants, natural language processing, blockchain, and the Internet of Things to enable enhanced productivity, reduced costs and improved controls.

The latest machine learning-based innovations enable finance and operations teams to spend more time on strategic initiatives that grow the business by increasing efficiency, accuracy and compliance across business processes. New innovations include:

• Expense Reporting Assistant: Streamlines expense report processing by automatically creating, classifying and matching expense items. Users can interact with the assistant through a powerful voice interface, or simply by sending receipt images to the assistant via email, SMS, Slack or Microsoft Teams. The assistant uses machine learning to improve the automatic classification of expense items, monitor policy violations and reduce audit risks.
• Project Management Digital Assistant: Provides instant project status updates and enables users to update time and task progress using a digital assistant. The digital assistant learns from your past time entries, project planning data, and the overall context to tailor interactions and smartly capture critical project information.
• Advanced Financial Controls: Provides continuous analysis of transactions, setups, and configurations to automate audits and help prevent financial leakage. The solution uses self-learning algorithms to examine critical configuration changes and transactions against a library of proven rules leveraging built-in algorithms for fuzzy matching, anomaly detection, Benford analysis, clustering etc. This approach uses data science techniques to allow incidents to be directed to analysts for tracking, investigation and closure.
• Advanced Access Controls: Automates user security analysis using AI techniques to help protect business data from insider threats and fraud. The solution uses graph-based analysis to accurately and reliably assess violations hidden inside complex, recursive and dynamic security configurations. This technique includes a robust library of configurable, best practice data privacy and SOD rules that can continuously monitor users, roles, privileges, setups and transactions.
• Intelligent Supplier Management: Oracle DataFox integration enriches supplier profiles with AI-sourced and validated company data to power supplier scoring and categorization. It uses AI techniques to extract dynamic supplier risk signals from news articles and press releases, which are then combined with DataFox’s company data sources to automatically manage supplier risk, by identifying which suppliers are at risk and recommending alternative suppliers.

In addition, other machine learning driven innovations for Oracle ERP Cloud previously announced include:

• Intelligent Payments which enable organizations to reduce costs and build stronger relationships with top suppliers by taking advantage of in-the-moment supplier profile and risk data to generate vendor-specific offers in exchange for early payment of outstanding payables.
• Intelligent Performance Management which uncovers hard-to-spot data patterns to deliver actionable and contextual insights at the right time, helping improve the quality and business impact of financial and operational decisions.
• Intelligent Process Automation that enables the automation of labor-intensive tasks and allows organizations to redeploy employees to more strategic and rewarding work.

Oracle ERP Cloud was named the sole Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Midsize Enterprises[1]. In addition, Oracle (ERP Cloud) was named a Leader in Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant for Cloud Core Financial Management Suites for Midsize, Large and Global Enterprises[2],” “Magic Quadrant for Cloud Financial Planning and Analysis Solutions[3]” (with the highest position for its ability to execute) and was also named a Leader in the 2018 “Magic Quadrant for Cloud Financial Close Solutions[4].”

For additional information on Oracle ERP Cloud applications, visit Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Cloud’s Facebook and Twitter or the Modern Finance Leader blog.

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[1] Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Midsize Enterprises (Mike Guay, John Van Decker, et al., 31 October 2018)
[2] Magic Quadrant for Cloud Core Financial Management Suites for Midsize, Large and Global Enterprises (John Van Decker, Robert Anderson, et al., 29 May 2018)
[3] Magic Quadrant for Cloud Financial Planning and Analysis Solutions (Christopher Iervolino, John Van Decker, 24 July 2018)
[4] Magic Quadrant for Cloud Financial Close Solutions (John Van Decker, Christopher Iervolino, 26 July 2018).