Recently, we had the opportunity to hear Barry Greenhut, Director of Product Strategy and Aman Desouza, Director of Product Strategy, at Oracle present how organizations are supporting their Oracle ERP implementations/upgrades while improving ongoing compliance.

Desouza begins the presentation with a shocking fact. You’d think executives and auditors would be paying attention to the most common cause of market decline – strategic business risks. You’d think. In fact, though, the area given the most attention, according to sources Desouza cites during this webinar, is operational risks and a close second is financial reporting risks. These are not the areas most responsible for the decline of a business.

“Why is that?” asks Desouza when looking at the numbers reflecting how executives spend their time instead of where they need to spend time, “It is because these risks – managing them – are often compliance requirements. They must be done. If people are using outdated tools – inefficient tools – it takes a lot of time and detracts from their ability to address strategic business risks.”

By streamlining processes and using automation with standardizations and simplicity, you free up time and resources to address the biggest risks for your market gap. During this webinar Barry Greenhut and Desouza explain how the Oracle ERP can help your business achieve this.

Desouza opens the webinar by giving a brief description of the audiences for effective risk management. He also outlines the elements of the risk management cloud which he breaks into three categories: financial reporting, access controls and financial controls.

Greenhut talks about common experiences he learns from his customers, system integrators and business process experts about their ERP projects – from implementation projects to upgrades. Most successful ERPs share the same goals – all of which are related to business performance, accurate financial reporting, and satisfaction of business mandates and needs.

You’ll find Greenhut’s recommended steps useful for the various stages of project planning, before go-live and after go-live. He emphasizes the need for streamlining and review in all stages. He stresses the need for repeatable and rigorous actions to design security, track ERP behavior, and awareness of effects of changes as they arise. This results, he says, in improved business operations, business performance and control.

Desouza starts his half of the presentation with a graph illustrating the state of risk management maturity. The great majority of businesses are still using spreadsheets and are largely siloed although some have a small degree of standardizations and organization-based solutions. Outdated tools and processes, though, have high costs and scary possibilities including adverse ICFR audit opinions, profit losses, lawsuits etc.

The Oracle solution to the siloed, outdated and disorganized approaches to risk management:

1. Risk and compliance management to streamline risk processes to promote collaboration, transparency and accountability.
2. Advanced controls monitoring for early detection of potential issues through automated data collection and analysis.
3. Library of best practice controls for rapid deployment designed for targeted risk areas.

Desouza gives common excuses for not testing. They’re great examples. You have heard business process managers say these exact things. Basically, the managers are not seeing changes because they aren’t doing the testing and documenting that is required to recognize when your business has become siloed and disjointed that leads to a loss of control and risk of being out of compliance. In contrast, the Oracle financial reporting compliance process streamlines controls management with steps for documenting risks and controls, assessing control effectiveness, addressing issues and certifying risks and controls. Moreover, the information is recorded in an organized, sophisticated manner instead of a clumsy spreadsheet with multiple worksheets.

Automated data analysis is one of the outstanding features of ERP. It includes security and transaction data, a data analysis engine, algorithms, etc. “The beauty of it, though,” says Desouza, “is that none of this is stuff you have to worry about. The typical user can use the workbench… so that you are focusing just on incidents and the way to remediate them.”

The fine-grained embedded analytics of the ERP makes it possible to have a secure, compliant system. This also makes it possible to fulfill one of the promises of the Oracle ERP cloud: Any person can do any task. “Our customers love that,” says Desouza. The ERP cloud services can work very effectively for different business units. Oracle provides tools to anticipate and simulate potential issues to determine remediation techniques.

Desouza summarizes the three main services areas of financial reporting, access controls and financial controls and talks about the indirect benefits of the Oracle ERP Cloud that resonate with customers. To learn these benefits of optimizing ERP and get all the details, check out the Optimize ERP Processes and Streamline Compliance webinar video replay in the Quest Content Library.