Oracle Modern Best Practice Explained

Nothing is more counterproductive than old processes in new technology.

Oracle Modern Best Practice topics

What is Oracle Modern Best Practice?

Based on the distilled knowledge of our customers’ needs gained from more than 10,000 successful delivery projects, Oracle Modern Best Practice (OMBP) illustrates common business processes optimized to take advantage of the latest in Oracle’s applications and technologies. In brief, Oracle Modern Best Practices have the following features:

  1. Dynamic: Updated regularly to reflect changes in customer needs and the evolving capabilities in our applications and technologies
  2. Public: Available for download from this site
  3. Trusted: Tested and validated by Oracle experts

See Oracle Modern Best Practice in action

More than common practice

With industry and market leaders regularly challenged by newcomers offering new products and services enabled by new technologies, we need to rethink whether established common practices are truly best practices. When revolutionary new technologies are available, how can business processes optimized with old technology be best? As more emerging technologies reach commercial availability, today’s best practices may be out of date. To stay competitive, organizations need to continuously innovate and incorporate new technologies to their best practices.

OMBP approaches common business processes as historic input, but factors in what could be done with new technologies. Based on this an approach, Oracle Modern Best Practice:

  • Evolves with organizational needs as market dynamics change
  • Works end-to-end, across the organization to eliminate departmental silos and ensure operational agility
  • Uses emerging technologies, such as AI, to automate the mundane and unlock human creativity for new value and insight
  • Incorporates next-generation, digital technologies to enable radically superior, measurable results

Explore the collection of Oracle Modern Best Practice processes

The technology enablers

What makes Oracle Modern Best Practice uniquely modern are the enabling technologies that are embedded into operational processes:

  • Cloud: Cloud computing enables organizations to purchase business applications as a service, or software-as-a-service (SaaS,) with a “pay-as-you-go” model, lowering upfront adoption cost.
  • Mobile: Mobile capabilities help you access data, conduct business transactions, and connect with your colleagues anywhere, anytime.
  • Analytics: Embedded analytic capabilities enable you to monitor business performance and make better decisions with real-time KPIs and metrics on dashboards.
  • Collaboration: Capabilities such as messaging and document sharing in any business process enable you to collaborate with stakeholders—regardless of location.
  • The Internet of Things (IoT): The data provided by sensors and devices provides visibility and insights through real-time monitoring, operational insight, and early issue detection.
  • Big data: Big data services help you uncover trends, patterns, and new opportunities by harnessing timely insights from high-volume, complex data from various sources.
  • Artificial intelligence/Machine learning (AI/ML): Smart digital assistants, recommendation engines, and predictive analytics that use AI and ML help organizations automate operations, drive innovation, and make make better decisions, faster.
  • Blockchain: Blockchain provides a collaborative framework to streamline record sharing and reduce transaction costs within business network with a trusted, distributed source of truth.
  • Augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR): AR and VR offers more efficient ways to acquire new skills and resolve issues requiring hands-on intervention by providing immersive experiences and direct overlay of real-world environments with actionable information.

Oracle Modern Best Practice explained

The processes in Oracle Modern Best Practice are designed to exploit new capabilities made possible by digital technologies. Each process contains:

  • Process steps and descriptions highlighting the use of technology to achieve the tasks
  • A list of applicable enablers for the process
  • Oracle product(s) to execute the process
  • Popular KPIs to keep taps on the progress

For example: the requisition to payment process in finance. Most companies have procurement processes that involve the procurement department reviewing, approving, and managing requisitions, and distributing POs to suppliers. While it’s a good approach to manage costs, it may cause delays when purchase requests need more reviews and approvals.

Oracle Modern Best Practice harnesses IoT, AI, ML, mobile, social, and analytics to speed up the process by automating manual intervention and delivering needed information to the right people.

Here’s how it works: Employees raise requisitions by selecting goods and services in the catalogs from approved suppliers through experiences similar to online shopping. Designated approvers get notifications on any device and provide timely responses. POs are automatically created and sent to suppliers electronically for routine requisitions. An AI-enabled digital assistant quickly serves up status of the requisitions during approval and fulfillment. Invoice processing is also automated with machine learning for data recognition and matching.

Requisition to payment

  • Raise requisitions: Quickly find needed goods and services from approved catalogs with consumer-like UI on any device.
  • Approve requisitions: Automatically route approval based on predefined business rules including thresholds, reporting hierarchies, and purchasing categories. Review and approve requisitions on any device. Enforce separation of duties (SoD) rules and monitor violations.
  • Create purchase orders: Automate purchase order creation for approved supplier based on negotiated pricing and contract terms.
  • Approve purchase orders (optional): Automatically route approval according to predefined business rules.
  • Dispatch purchase orders: Automatically deliver approved purchase orders via secure electronic channels or supplier portal.
  • Receive goods and services: Record goods received or approve invoices for services rendered to trigger automated matching in Payables.
  • Manage invoices: Receive supplier invoices over electronic channels or supplier portal. Leverage machine learning to recognize scanned or printed format. Automate invoice approval based on predefined business rules. Handle exceptions and manual approval on any device.
  • Process payments: Optimize payment timing and discounts based on business goals. Process electronic payments, automated pay runs, or off-cycle payments.

Product Mix: Cloud ERP (Procurement, Risk Management, Financials)
Popular KPIs: processing cost per purchase order, procurement cycle time

Use Oracle Modern Best Practice

You can use Oracle Modern Best Practice in every stage of the cloud journey to:

  • Educate stakeholders on leveraging technologies to achieve their business objectives
  • Demonstrate business processes enabled by new capabilities
  • Plan an adoption path
  • Structure implementation scope and effort
  • Benchmark progress and benefits.

At Oracle, we use our Modern Best Practices to lay the foundation for our own cloud transformation and embed these best practices in the true cloud method to help our customers achieve success in their cloud journeys.

Efficiently turn your customer subscriptions into revenue

Quote to Revenue

By incorporating service subscriptions with your product offerings, you can gain higher customer lifetime value. Along with steady revenue streams through the contract lifecycle, you’ll gain insights into customer behaviors for cross-sell and upsell opportunities. At the same time, you need to address the added complexity in your business processes from quote proposal to revenue reporting. Oracle Modern Best Practice can help. With embedded mobile, analytics, collaboration, and AI/ML capabilities, you can streamline the quote-to-revenue process.

Identify opportunity

Your sales team can identify proposal-ready accounts on a centralized dashboard, assess open opportunities, review customer engagement history, and identify at-risk behaviors, such as credit holds or late payments. AI helps sales reps move their accounts through the sales cycle by providing win probabilities and recommendations for next actions.

Configure quote

Your salesperson can start a quote with relevant information automatically compiled from the account, customizing the quote with the optimal products, services, and subscriptions that meet the prospect’s needs.

Price and sell

While working through the quote, each salesperson gets instant feedback on how discounts impact their commission and whether additional approval is needed. You can establish rules to ensure commercial viability with workflow-routed approval of exceptions in pricing and terms, such as billing, shipping, payment, scheduling, and service-level requirements. Quotes are securely shared with customers and automatically converted to sales orders at the end of negotiation.

Record shipment

Your supply chain team implemented fulfillment strategies for different products to balance cost and service level. As soon as a sales order is confirmed, different fulfillment orders are automatically created based on the ordered products: work orders for make-to-order, POs for drop shipments, and warehouse orders for inventory on hand. On a centralized dashboard, your order management team can review confirmed orders, drill down to associated fulfillment orders, and handle situations that could cause delay. Your customers can get order and shipment status on a centralized portal.

Process subscription

Subscription contracts are created and covered usage will be automatically linked based on the customer orders after any onsite installation is completed. Your subscription team can access customer account data, review subscription details, and process amendments on centralized dashboards. Your customers can manage their subscriptions via a self-service portal. Your field service teams also have real-time visibility into subscriber entitlements, so the field technicians understand which services are covered as part of a customer’s subscription.

Collect usage

Your subscription team can monitor product usage, get notifications of exceptions, and identify issues on a centralized workspace. The sales team has a full view of customer usage and interaction history. They get key metrics on customer consumption patterns and subscription plan performance to uncover account insights for cross-sell and upsell opportunities. Predefined AI models predict customer churn probabilities using current and historical indicators to help teams proactively address at-risk accounts.

Bill customer

You can set the schedule to generate customer invoices to provide timely statements with accurate usage data and billing calculation. Your customers can receive invoices though their preferred channels, such as email or the self-service portal, and submit payments with the most convenient options, including credit card and direct bank transfer.

Recognize revenue

Independent of billing activities, you can report subscription-based revenue in accordance with ASC 606/IFRS 15. Revenue entries from qualified activities, such as delivery of goods or services over time or point in time, are automatically generated based on customer contract terms. Your finance team can review the revenue entries from corresponding customer contracts and adjust if needed.

Partner with Oracle

Disruptions and continuous change of environment have become the new normal. To adapt and thrive in a volatile environment, leading organizations are moving to a model of continuous innovation. Oracle is committed to embed latest technical innovations to our business application offerings with regular quarterly updates, while providing flexibility to ensure customers adopt new features at the times of their choosing. With Oracle Modern Best Practice, you can always leverage the latest technology innovations for next level of excellence.