Now more than ever, there is a demand for organizations to automate routine business processes and harness the power of new artificial intelligence technologies. Especially with the rise of helpful digital assistant tools, users are now more comfortable using machine learning and digital assistants to improve both customer experiences and real-time business processes.
Among these are voice interfaces and virtual private assistants (VPAs) like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple’s Siri, which have become standard fixtures in users’ homes, cars, and pockets. With this increased expectation of convenience and ease of use, enterprise organizations are increasingly turning to automated cloud service systems to foster greater organizational compliance and increase convenience, especially related to timely expense entry and approval prone to human error.
For ERP users who are live on Oracle Cloud, the Expense Digital Assistant can be a worthwhile tool to explore and implement for enterprise resource planning. This new tool will enable the user to make expense reporting submissions and add supporting references more efficiently. Below, we’ll explore the capabilities of the Oracle Cloud ERP Expense Assistant in greater detail.
Overview: What is the Expense Assistant?
Inside Oracle Cloud ERP, the Expenses Digital Assistant skill is the generative AI-powered messaging chatbot feature designed to learn and improve text-based conversational experiences by learning and adapting to the user’s needs and feedback.
As a collective and knowledge-sharing machine learning tool designed to automate and enhance processes over time, the Expenses Digital Assistant works to improve the user experience and processing effort required to create expense reports and other expense-related requests.
Especially when it comes to repetitive and frequently submitted reports, the Expense Digital Assistant can learn and eventually be able to recognize the users’ intentions and submit the report with little to no effort from the user. Here, natural language processing capabilities and project management support can be extremely useful for organizations where employees have a high number of expenses to report due to frequent travel or other circumstances.
Adding to the ease-of-use Oracle also offers mobile apps to users to interact with Digital Assistants on the go. The Expenses Digital assistant goes beyond just having chatbot capabilities and can be equipped with multiple skills like project management covering a range of domains and tasks from one interface.
As the one-stop-shop option for expense-related tasks, this eliminates the need to search for a specific chatbot that supports a singular task or service. Instead, the Expense Digital Assistant is the mobile, single point of contact for all of your employees.
Who Should Use the Expense Assistant
For corporations and organizations already using Cloud ERP, leveraging the power of the Expense Digital Assistant is fairly straightforward. The Expense Digital Assistant is included in the ERP product SKU and is available out-of-the-box to the Cloud ERP customers. If customers want to extend the out-of-the-box Expense Digital Assistant capabilities or build new digital assistants, customers would then need to purchase the Oracle Digital Assistant Platform for SaaS SKU.
As mentioned, organizations that are likely to see the most value and use from implementing the Expense Digital Assistant bots are companies that require a large number of employees completing travel and accruing frequent business expenses to be reported. Compliance with expense reporting can be tricky for medium to large organizations dealing with many expenses.
Often, timely and accurate expense reporting and enterprise resource planning can take time. Incentivizing employees to complete expense entry on time is oftentimes a repeatedly used strategy to encourage policy compliance. Still, often, the same results can be achieved by increasing an ERP system’s ease of use. Reducing the steps required to complete an expense report and making it quick and easy to do on mobile devices can increase employee compliance and lead to more reports being entered correctly and on time.
With the Expenses Assistant, if expenses haven’t been submitted, the mobile application can prompt users to submit the required report and send notifications to managers regarding missed expense reports. If employees are out of the office, the Expense Assistant can send email notifications to managers, who then can complete expense reports on behalf of their direct reports.
With this automated notification feature and workflow design, finance, and accounting departments can save time previously spent tracking down employees who haven’t submitted expense reports on time. This increased compliance can lead to better cash forecasting and reporting capabilities for the organization.
Implementing the Cloud ERP Expense Digital Assistant
When implementing and setting up the ERP Expense Digital Assistant, you’ll need to enable the Oracle Fusion Applications Digital Assistant by using the guide in the “Getting Started with Oracle Digital Assistant for Cloud Applications” document. You should identify specific users within your organization you’d like to assign roles and specified access to the Digital Assistant, such as service developers, service administrators, or service business users.
The setup and implementation of the Expense Assistant require customers to have the correct security requirements and mobile capabilities already in place.
Though this can be a potential barrier to entry for some customers, At Elire, our team of experienced Cloud ERP consultants are here to help organizations unlock the value of Oracle Cloud infrastructure and ERP systems.
For more information or to set up a time to discuss your organization’s unique needs, contact [email protected] directly. To learn more about our Oracle ERP Consulting Services, explore success stories and our cloud ERP Onesheet.
As experts in Oracle digital assistants, we’re here to help problem-solve and aid your organization in getting the most ROI out of your Cloud investment. In the meantime, subscribe to our Cloud Newsletter here and get the latest in Cloud news delivered right to your inbox.
About the Experts:
Jason McCabe is the Oracle Cloud ERP Practice lead for Elire, responsible for managing all clients using Oracle Cloud ERP Applications. Jason delivers ERP solutions for clients looking to strategically align business strategy and organizational objectives through cloud-based application implementations.
Octavio Pedregal serves as a Cloud ERP Managing Consultant. He specializes in financial implementations and is responsible for implementing, maintaining, and coordinating with all clients using Oracle ERP Applications. Octavio has a long professional history and experience with a diverse client base. He works with clients to provide appropriate solutions based on their unique situations and needs.