Margaret Harrist, Oracle BRANDVOICE Brand Contributor, wrote in Forbes about six lessons that Oracle learned while moving finance to the cloud. Ivgen Guner, who as executive vice president of global business finance at Oracle helped lead the company’s migration to the cloud, often advises her peers at other companies on the biggest lessons she and her team learned along the way. This article lays out the top six lessons Guner says Oracle learned.

Harrist explained that finance leaders are looking for ways to cut costs, including technologies that automate business processes and improve insights into company operations. As CFOs consider a timeline for moving to a modern, cloud-based finance system, among their biggest questions is how to make that move.

6 Lessons Oracle Learned When Moving Finance to the Cloud

No. 1: Secure a Mandate from Executives

Most companies struggle with where to start with a cloud implementation and how to keep the process moving, Guner acknowledges—and that’s why a mandate from the top is critical.

“This is more than a technology change. It’s a transformation of how the business operates. If you have a decentralized approach to such a transformation, the bureaucracy will always slow you down. It will prevent you from simplifying and eliminating complexity in the system and in processes, and you will not be able to quickly take advantage of new technologies and tools when they become available.”

-Ivgen Guner, Executive Vice President of Global Business Finance

At Oracle, the senior executive management team was involved in the transformation every step of the way. So were the owners of global processes, who understand specific business functions “from soup to nuts,” Guner says. “We empowered those global process owners to make decisions.”

To ensure that those decisions didn’t inadvertently introduce more complexity for end users or drift from the company’s strategic goals, Oracle instituted a governance model to enable executives to overrule decisions if necessary to meet those goals.

No. 2: Simplify and Standardize Processes First

Companies that have heavily customized their applications will see a lot of benefit from standardizing and simplifying their business processes, which they can do either before or during their move to the cloud, Guner says.

That standardization reduces complexity, increases scalability, and makes onboarding acquired companies easier—which was critical for Oracle in the last decade. When the company migrated its finance operations to the cloud, having mostly standardized processes already in place simplified the move. It has since continued to standardize and simplify to take advantage of more of the finance tool’s new capabilities.

No. 3: Focus on End Users

Among Oracle’s goals were to reduce finance employees’ time-consuming transactional tasks, as well as simplify administrative tasks, such as filing expense reports, performed by employees throughout the company. This is why Guner said that the more time spent thinking through the end-user, employee, or customer experience, the better.

“It’s easy for the core implementation team to get so excited about deployment or the new features or getting as much technically out of the tool as possible that they end up not focusing enough on the end user experience.”

-Ivgen Guner, Executive Vice President of Global Business Finance

For example, Guner’s organization creates complex planning models using Oracle EPM Cloud, but some of those models were too complicated for other employees who needed to use the system. While her team’s intent was to eliminate manual work in Excel, the complexity for some end users drove them right back to spreadsheets.

“One of the good things about the cloud is that you can course-correct very, very quickly. As soon as you understand why people are not using the system, it’s easy to turn it around and address the issue. You don’t have to wait months or years for an update.”

-Ivgen Guner, Executive Vice President of Global Business Finance

No. 4: Move to a Global Chart of Accounts

While Oracle’s move years ago to standardize company-wide processes was a distinct advantage, complexity still crept back in overtime, Guner says. They were on a single instance of Oracle E-Business Suite, but as the business and reporting requirements got more complex and they made more acquisitions over the years, they eventually ended up with 32 different charts of accounts that needed to be consolidated.

In the process of moving its finance operations to the cloud, Oracle went from 32 charts of accounts to a single one, which significantly accelerated the monthly and quarterly closes and enabled Oracle executives and managers to have real-time visibility into the data. Guner said it would have been better to make the move sooner.

“Before, when we wanted to drill down into the transaction level, we had to go to each subledger, perform the transactional analytics, and summarize them offline. Today, because we have a single global chart of accounts and we’re on Oracle EPM Cloud, we can perform analytics automatically on a daily basis. We don’t have to ask someone to generate a report because we can drill down to the level of detail we need and the data is there.”

-Ivgen Guner, Executive Vice President of Global Business Finance

No. 5: Prepare Staff for a Dramatic Change in Focus

Guner set a goal early on that Oracle’s finance organization would become what she calls a “game-changer” department—one that leads rather than follows other groups.

“My finance people were focused on transactional activities, reporting, and looking backward. Today, most of my team members are partnered with the business. They work with the top executives on down to the third or fourth tier and help them make strategic decisions.”

-Ivgen Guner, Executive Vice President of Global Business Finance

That transition requires finance team members to acquire or bone up on their leadership, collaboration, and data analysis skills, as well as know the business in depth so that when they see an opportunity to grow the topline or enter a new market, they can bring together the right people and lead the charge.

At Oracle, for example, a finance business partner may see opportunities to introduce new discounting processes based on her analysis of what-if scenarios using Oracle EPM Cloud. She would lead that effort, working with sales leaders, product marketing, engineering, data center management, and line-of-business units to review the findings and explore options.

Guner explained that this requires a change-agent culture throughout the finance organization, which has meant constant training to upgrade skill sets, rotating finance team members to a range of business organizations, and hiring people with different strengths than they would have a few years ago. Guner stated that the learning never stops.

No. 6: Deliver Immediate Value

Especially at large, highly complex companies, Guner strongly recommends doing a pilot deployment in a subsidiary or focus on a single function. This is the path that Oracle took, and Guner explained that “because it was a smaller environment, we could more easily course-correct.”

Oracle started by moving marketing and sales functions to the cloud, then financial planning and budgeting, and talent management. The company also established an accounting hub to consolidate that function and provide more visibility.