Authored by – Prasad Rai, Vice President, Applications, Oracle
Digital and emerging technologies have changed the way we work. Many enterprises have transitioned to operational investments with lower costs rather than using the capital-intensive technologies. This trend has paved the way for a technology which is both financially viable and can be implemented faster. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) has played a key role in this transformative journey. ERP has helped organizations manage all their operations – right from procurement to manufacturing to finance and reporting. Old and complex implementations are becoming a thing of past, while giving way to new generation cloud-based ERP, that offers automation and AI based analytics.
Emerging technologies propelling cloud ERP
While companies in emerging markets are in the early stages of cloud ERP adoption, CIOs and CFOs have realized the myriad opportunities it brings to the table, especially in improving business processes and reducing capital investments in the data centers and other systems that will be used to manage on-premise software.
One of the main reasons business leaders prefer cloud ERP over on-premise software is that the former is future-ready and already benefiting from emerging technologies including artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain. Cloud-enabled emerging technologies play a key role in changing the way companies operate and compete. A CFO could now use AI to automate and improve the accuracy of routine financial management tasks. For example, an ERP system with AI capabilities embedded could learn what a standard expense (and expense report) looks like and flag suspicious expenses to the manager – significantly reducing the time managers need to spend on reviewing expenses.
With such ERP cloud solutions, organizations in emerging markets can go the distance in their respective business sectors and Oracle plays a key role in this market by helping to modernize organizations through our in-depth ERP Cloud suite.
Clover Infotech, one of India’s leading IT services providers has implemented ERP Cloud for Financials, Project Contracts Billing and Project Financials. The implementation was done by Clover Infotech’s team in just three months. The ERP Cloud implementation enabled Clover Infotech to support localized tax rules, capture revenue and expenses at a granular level, and significantly reduce data processing time. As a result, Clover Infotech’s senior management and decision makers can get a holistic and customized view of business data for better analysis, decision-making, and reporting.
Kumanti Consulting Services Pvt., Ltd. is one of our partners, which has specialization in providing consulting services for Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Cloud solutions, and other mobile and web applications. Kumanti Consulting themselves moved to Enterprise Resource Planning Cloud. They are able to make more informed decisions faster as they have access to real time information via single dashboard.
Compliance drives cloud ERP adoption
In emerging markets, the solution to business challenges is often associated with rapid expansion into digitally-driven global marketplaces. While these organizations grow, they have a huge burden to face: complying with new and changing regulations at country, regional and industry levels.
From hiring to accounting, material purchasing to electronic payments, different regulations in different markets can pose as difficult hurdles. Noncompliance to regulations is not an option, as it results in unnecessary fines, affecting the bottom line and the reputation of a company.
According to Constellation’s 2018 survey of CFOs, compliance has become a key factor in driving cloud ERP adoption across emerging markets and 42 percent of participants have pointed out that regulatory compliance is a top priority
Cloud ERP is the Future of Finance
ERP of yesterday often required expensive and lengthy reimplementation to upgrade but with cloud coming into the fore, it will be the last upgrade you will ever need. A recent study revealed that cloud delivers 3.2 times the return on investment (ROI) compared to on-premise software, while lowering total running costs by 52 percent. Cloud ERP provides automatic and continual updates to our latest best practices, as well as technology upgrades to security, functionality and capabilities. And of course, it’s scalable.
Finance executives have emerged as powerful digital stewards—according to a recent report from Accenture—using data to drive greater efficiency and foster new, digitally-driven business models. The report, titled ‘The CFO Reimagined: From Driving Value to Building the Digital Enterprise’, states that nearly half of all tasks in corporate finance departments will be automated within three years, freeing up capacity that finance chiefs can redeploy to develop the business. Today, 34 percent of finance tasks are carried out by technology; by 2021, almost half (45 percent) of these duties will be taken over by automation, says the report.
With such developments happening in the finance space, cloud ERP will be the ideal disruptor that will increasingly usher in digitization for finance functions and find new ways to use technology to transform finance leaders into change agents. Continuous innovation with a trusted ERP partner, unleashes finance teams to become strategic contributors to the organization’s needs of tomorrow. When finance leaders become true change agents by embracing innovation, they can drive greater business insights, manage regulatory requirements and will never lose ground with obsolete technology again.
For the businesses in emerging markets, cloud ERP is an opportunity to add value from the get-go. Once their cloud ERP is in place, organizations can begin to deploy advanced technologies such as intelligent automation, cognitive and artificial intelligence tools, chatbots, and advanced analytics. Not only can these tools help further reduce the cost of finance but they offer the potential to fundamentally transform the business.
