Oracle Finance adopts Oracle Analytics and doubles productivity

The Oracle Finance team assists the parent company in a variety of key tasks, including budgeting, forecasting, and performing related analytics. Historically, worldwide team members relied on manually intensive Excel-based processes, which required extensive workarounds, ledger reconciliations, and data inputs.

As a result, team workflows were often disconnected, inefficient, and time-consuming. Executing financial tasks frequently required analysts to hunt for a random spreadsheet from another analyst, often in another region or line of business.

The processes didn’t just have numerous gaps, they lacked any fixed frequency, and often required special coding skills. Also, analysts extracted pertinent data at various times without creating coordinated, recurring flows to enable a timely, integrated financial close.

The Oracle Finance team decided to move to a holistic system that pulled in data from across the company. The application also needed to create visualizations and dashboards that could be rapidly crafted, updated, and corrected.

The Oracle Finance team wanted a robust, cloud-based platform that could automate, connect, and streamline analytics processes globally. It also sought rich data visualization capabilities—with the ability to optimize or tweak charts and graphs and presentations on the fly.

The analytics system also had to integrate natively with other Oracle solutions and share common data formatting. But it also had to link to certain key non-Oracle systems, as well. So, it was natural for Oracle Finance to select Oracle Analytics, which provides a broad set of capabilities, from data ingestion and modeling to visualization and collaboration.

The platform also supports a wide variety of individual users’ needs with interactive, intuitive capabilities for visualization and data discovery. Over time, such a system would enable finance end users to apply data in uniquely innovative ways.

After going live with Oracle Analytics, the Oracle Finance team saw a wide variety of benefits, both measurable and qualitative. The team now can schedule automated data flows into the platform regularly, and this more than doubled productivity. The system also enables a faster financial close—with dashboards that offer connected, timely, meaningful information, with data visualizations for priority areas.

The platform’s automation enables the team to spend more time using the analytics engine for insights. The ease of use and power of the software is unlocking new insights and capabilities. “The drag-and-drop format has given our teams the ability to ask questions that we never would have had time to pose when we were using only Excel in Oracle's Global Controllers Organization,” says Kieran Leiper, senior director in the Global Controller Organization.

Users can easily cleanse data, change chart types, explore questions, swap out fields, and create a financial story accessible in streamlined reporting formats. The team can deeply investigate such things as cost opportunities, revenue growth initiatives, salesforce activity, and productivity. Staffers also can look at the business through multiple dimensions, something impossible before—and assist decision-makers with the most accurate data and scenarios available.

 “This has been hugely beneficial, with the biggest impact being that it helps separate fact from fiction, and lets us examine long-held beliefs about what drives salesforce productivity,” says Leiper.

Users interact with the resources they specifically need: The operations teams analyze KPIs applicable to their particular lines of business. On the other hand, the accounting and finance teams can view that same data, before close, to look at trends and match them to expectations—while identifying potential issues.

The integration capabilities also enable analysts to easily source from a variety of Oracle and third-party platforms and applications. The team can also merge large volumes of data for rapid drill-down and issue resolution.