During Quest Forum Digital Event: Innovation Week, Douglas Kehring, Executive Vice President of Corporate Operations at Oracle, shared the story of how Oracle itself leveraged the Oracle Cloud to reimagine its business and build delightful customer and employee experiences from end to end.

The cloud was a fundamental change to Oracle’s business processes because it was the first time the underlying business model changed. Previously, Oracle viewed its offerings as a technology product with changes every few years. The customer relationship was transactional, reactive, and intermittent. Upgrades took place in five-year cycles, and customers said they loved the technology, but it was difficult to do business as a customer. Over the last few years, the company transitioned to a service-oriented approach. Now, the key offerings come in the form of subscription services that change every quarter. The design philosophy is experiential and customer service is proactive and ongoing.

In a service-oriented world, organizations must continuously deliver exceptional experiences and stay ahead of ever-changing expectations. This is essential not only at Oracle but also across all industries. In the consumer age, customers expect better support and ongoing advancements. Oracle Cloud helps companies adjust to meet these expectations.

Benefits of Moving to Cloud

Most customers move to the cloud for four major benefits:

• Maximize efficiency and effectiveness
  • Focus on high-value activities, increase collaboration, and save money with integrated automation across the entire business
• Outpace change
  • Stay ahead with flexible, high-performance services and quarterly innovation
• Make the smartest decisions quickly
  • Make more informed and faster decisions with holistic insights, smart data, and AI/ML
• Delight customers and employees
  • Increase satisfaction, engagement, and loyalty with exceptional and secure experiences

Oracle@Oracle: The Guinea Pig

Oracle now leverages all Oracle Cloud technology including:

• Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Cloud
• Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) Cloud
• Oracle Supply Chain Management (SCM) Cloud
• Oracle Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Cloud
• Oracle Customer Experience (CX) Cloud
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)
• Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse (ADW)
• Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing (ATP)

By testing services on itself, Oracle@Oracle serves as a guinea pig for its customers. This enables the company to continuously approve. After switching to the cloud, the Oracle team began to reimagine possibilities and achieve better business results.

Based on its success, Oracle leaders wanted to share the Oracle@Oracle cloud adoption story.

Here are a few of their major achievements with the cloud:

• Finance Transformation via Oracle ERP
  • Close books and report earnings in less than 12 days
  • Eliminated 35 percent of manual accounting activities
  • Reduced time to complete monthly accounts payable close by 30 percent
• Operations Transformation via Oracle SCM
  • Supply chain planning cycles are down from weeks to days
  • Integrated over 10 supply chain modules on a single platform
  • Leverage quarterly updates to add hundreds of new features
• Human Resources Transformation via Oracle HCM
  • Oracle employees are more satisfied than ever
  • Reduced time needed to complete talent review process by more than 70 percent
  • Save over 20,000 hours of manager time each year on offer process
• Customer Experience Transformation via Oracle CE
  • Lead conversion has doubled
  • Reduced campaign execution lead from weeks to days
  • Fully automated purchasing for 70 percent of transactions
• IT Transformation via Oracle Cloud
  • IT costs are down by millions
  • Extensively reduced customizations across our applications
  • Delivered more than 100 new features each quarter

Oracle’s corporate team utilized a systematic approach for transforming and continuously improving operations:

• Streamline – Remove and simplify steps across the experience
• Empower – Enable users to complete the experience autonomously
• Delight – Design a positive experience that users love
• Automate – Automate the end-to-end experience with Oracle Cloud

Specifically, this approach was used in delivering an accelerated buying experience to make purchasing fast and simple. Oracle corporate ended up fully automating purchasing for 70 percent of orders with Oracle CX Cloud. Here’s how the approach worked:

• Streamline – Simplified agreements and removed tiers of approvers
• Empower – Gave salespeople contract language options
• Delight – Provided in-app learning and chat
• Automate – Enabled salespeople to complete the quoting and contracting process without intervention in Oracle CPQ Cloud

Additionally, this approach was employed to deliver an accelerated hiring experience that was delightful and enabled new hires to contribute on Day 1. Oracle now saves more than 20,000 hours of manager time each year on the hiring process with Oracle HCM Cloud. Here’s how the systematic approach worked on this initiative:

• Streamline – Simplified tasks and removed tiers of approvers
• Empower – Gave managers end-to-end visibility
• Delight – Provided new hires the ability to complete tasks in preparation for Day 1
• Automate – Enabled managers to complete the requisition and offer process without intervention in Oracle HCM Cloud and gave employees the ability to seamlessly onboard so they are ready to contribute on Day 1

Today, Oracle Cloud powers Oracle. The following stats about Oracle show that Oracle Cloud can be used for the largest companies in the marketplace.

• Operating in 175 countries
• Managing 22K new hires/year
• Serving 430K customers
• Driving $40B revenue
• Partnering with 40K suppliers
• Handling 30K employee expenses/week
• Employing 138K employees
• Completing 10-12 acquisitions/year

After the corporate team transitioned to the cloud, they identified four main takeaways:

• Design with the user in mind
• Ruthlessly simplify
• Nail the experience and continuously innovate it
• Leverage the Oracle Cloud

The Oracle@Oracle mission is to educate, engage, and empower internal and external audiences on the benefits achieved by leveraging Oracle Cloud. You can find more insights on the Oracle@Oracle journey at oracle.com/oracleatoracle.