What is the future of connected enterprise planning and how can Oracle Cloud EPM help?

Industries are changing at an unprecedented rate, and the Pandemic only accelerated that innovation. No industry is immune to changes, with new entrants, new business models, ever-increasing customer expectations, and a changing workforce impacting everyone.

As demands increase in finance, businesses are embracing better technology, augmenting decision-making with AI, using more agile forecasting, and looking after new regulations like ESG.

Best Practices to Thrive in a World of Change

In a presentation by Wayne Heather, Executive Director EPM Product Marketing, Oracle, shared the following statistics:

• 59% of finance executives believe finance needs to transform to leverage technology differently
• 60% of businesses were projected to embrace the combination of AI and human judgment for more informed decision making by 2023
• 48% of companies are building predictive models and scenario analysis capabilities for forecasting
• 99% of public companies expect to invest in ESG reporting and tech in next 12 months

Managing costs for profitable growth is essential, and the future of finance relies on connecting plans across the enterprise.

As any finance leader sets their cost-cutting and profitability approach, they’ll need to ensure departments maintain autonomy.

Priorities for Achieving Profitable Growth

To achieve profitable growth, it’s crucial to manage costs effectively, ensuring a focus on profitability. Retaining top talent is also essential amidst workforce rationalization efforts. Investment should prioritize projects with the highest profitability potential. Additionally, aligning territories and quotas is key to optimizing sales revenue. Lastly, ensuring timely delivery of products and services involves integrated business planning and execution across all stages.

According to a study by APQC, finance leaders are transitioning from scorekeepers to business partners. Forward-looking finance departments are serving as strategic and integral partners who help shape the future. This happens through greater understanding and collaboration across every business unit.

Innovators in finance are committed to reimagining finance and establishing a new operating model that connects and aligns planning throughout the organization. They actively collaborate with operational functions and aim to evolve from traditional bookkeeping roles to becoming strategic advisors.

These innovators prioritize making informed decisions driven by comprehensive insights from both operational and financial data, both internal and external. They aim to lower the skills bar on data science capabilities while fostering trust and confidence in data-driven decision-making across the organization.

Additionally, they automate routine tasks to enhance efficiency by reducing manual labor in finance processes, minimizing the time spent on data collection and analysis. This strategic approach allows finance teams to redirect their focus towards more value-added activities.

The future of finance requires partnering with key leaders across the organization, with each department able to complete connected but independent planning.

Disconnected planning fosters inaccuracy and ultimately costs you money. For instance, using Excel for planning and budgeting is cumbersome, not agile, filled with risk, and encourages disconnection between lines of business. Instead of using tools like Excel, leaders need to use connected planning.

The Power of Connected Enterprise Planning

Connected enterprise planning can be transformational if done right.  The following are keys to connected planning:

• Operational planning is connected but independent.
• Connect dependencies across operational planning stakeholders.
• Operational metrics are crucial.

With one truly connected and integrated platform, businesses can:

• Increase agility and frequency.
• Truly integrate across finance, operations, lines of business, and back office.
• Leverage external operational data.

Imagine if you could utilize data from every part of your organization. As a sales leader, instead of restricting yourself to a salesperson’s metrics, you review all of the data in the CRM: age of deal, customer, geography, type of product, time of year, etc. You then run those attributes through machine learning and generate the percentage likelihood of a deal closing. You then use that data to inform financial decisions.

Connected Enterprise Planning with Cloud EPM

Many organizations hire data scientists to develop and maintain these types of models, but they don’t know how to activate the end user in the context of what they’re doing. With Oracle Fusion Cloud EPM, you can now embed those bolt-in models and equip each line of business to make data-driven decisions—without the help of external data scientists.

This embedded capability delivers:

• Faster more accurate planning using built-in data science.
• Seed predicted plans based on actual performance.
• Validation and added context for planning.
• The ability to run what-if scenarios based on predictions from the ML models.
• A quicker way to turn predictions into business value.

EPM’s faster, more accurate planning through data science is already helping businesses with connected planning by:

• Generating or validating a forecast with interactive predictive planning.
• Analyzing forecast vs prediction variances instantaneously with auto predict.
• Shifting analysis to be more prospective as opposed to retrospective.

On average, this leads to a 50% reduction in budget preparation.

EPM also helps streamline reporting and strengthen decision making so businesses can:

• Use insights to automatically uncover hidden correlations to help you realize faster time-to-action.
• Reveal hidden bias in forecast.
• Highlight significant deviation in forecast versus prediction.
• Detect unusual patterns that deviate from expected results.

As a result, customers report an 80% reduction in reports being created.

Key Takeaways

Oracle Cloud EPM can help you reimagine finance by connecting plans across the enterprise, empower decisions by leveraging all data with machine learning, and automate tasks intelligently with emerging technology.

If you’re currently seeking a connected enterprise planning solution, you’ll want to prioritize these characteristics:

• Configurable, and automatically upgraded
• Deployable in incremental phases
• Inter-connected with each other
• For both financial and operational use cases
• Seamless connection and integration to 3rd party systems
• Embedded data science for predictions
• Integrated ML and AI

Oracle EPM Cloud is completely agile for connected enterprise planning and includes:

• Strategic modeling and long-range planning
• Financial and operational planning
• Line of business planning (marketing, IT, sales)
• Driver-based planning/rolling forecasts
• Monte Carlo simulations and predictions
• Top down, bottom-up planning
• Zero based budgeting
• Management allocations
• Data science

Oracle Cloud EPM Planning customers are achieving amazing results. On average, they report:

• 47% increase in customers adoption predictive planning
• 17% more time spent on taking action (not collecting data)
• 61% improvement in forecast accuracy
• 138% increase in adoption of strategic modeling
• 51% fewer days spent on annual planning
• 16% reduction in time gathering data
• 45% fewer days in monthly planning
• 40% drop in spreadsheet use for planning, budgeting, and scenario modeling

Want More?

To learn more about connected resource planning with Cloud EPM, consider watching this BLUEPRINT 4D session: Connected Planning: Align Plans and Decisions to Drive Growth.

For more Cloud EPM content like this, consider the BLUEPRINT 4D conference or another an Oracle Cloud Quest Event.  You can also check out the Quest Learn Library, and to connect with other EPM, consider joining Quest’s Cloud EPM Community.