When it comes to taking advantage of your Oracle Cloud investment, how to properly leverage the power of automation within your ERP and EPM applications is an important consideration. Using your Cloud ERP and EPM applications in tandem can offer your organization a fully integrated Enterprise solution, allowing for accurate forecasting and reports which will help you to get the most ROI out of your Cloud software.
What is Oracle Cloud EPM?
Cloud EPM or Enterprise Performance Management is the software solution created by Oracle to help organizations plan, budget, forecast, and report on their financial performance. EPM works as a tool to help consolidate and finalize financial results, providing stakeholders and decision makers with the most up-to-date numbers and forecasts.
EPM solutions are primarily used by CFOs and employees in the organizations’ finance department. Other key areas that will find value in utilizing Cloud EPM are HR, Sales, Marketing, and IT. These departments are able to use EPM for operational planning, budgeting, and reporting.
EPM is encompassed of elements such as:
- Module Based Planning
- Capital
- Financials
- Projects
- Workforce
- Strategic Modeling
- Hybrid BSO Cubes and ASO Reporting Cubes
- Account Reconciliation
- Financial Consolidation and Close
- Narrative reporting
Through these modules, CFOs and key organization decision makers are able to make projections and informed decisions. EPM has a wealth of out of box functionality, but some set up and effort is required if your organization is not already live on EPM.
How Can Cloud ERP and Cloud EPM be Used Together?
Your Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (Oracle Cloud ERP) and EPM solutions will work best in tandem. EPM holds no data by itself, so users will need to load data from Cloud ERP and set up their particular configurations. This process of loading data from ERP to EPM can be automated, and the benefit of using EPM is that the receiving format for data will be the same as the data sourced from Cloud ERP.
Even though Oracle ERP and Oracle EPM are two separate applications, they both have the same underlying tables and data structures so no data mapping is required when importing data, making automation easier. The data should be 1:1, and you’re able to segment the specific data you’d like to import from ERP to EPM. This means you’re only bringing in just the data you need and you’ll reduce unnecessary data clutter.
Though you have the option to import as much data from ERP as needed, the ability to select only the data you need is a key aspect of using ERP and EPM together. An example of this is instances where you’re bringing in information to EPM from a specific time period. Your info needs to also exist in EPM, and this transfer process can be automated and achieved relatively seamlessly.
EPM gives you the option to merge data from different points of view, and can then build automated reports based on your set criteria.
What are the Key Advantages of Using ERP and EPM Together?
By using EPM and ERP together, you’ll gain advantages such as the ability to consolidate data from multiple sources. Data doesn’t need to originate in your ERP application, but can come from other sources such as Excel spreadsheets. Using ERP and EPM together also gives users the ability to link reports created in Cloud EPM to Cloud ERP. Though EPM doesn’t have the ability to send specific data back to ERP, it can send and store those reports.
Oracle’s planning and budgeting applications (PBCS) give users the ability to long-range planning to bottom-up budgets and forecasts. Learn more about Oracle PBCS in our blog post, “The agility of using these applications together allows you to respond to change quickly and effectively. Leveraging these reporting capabilities means you’ll gain access to sophisticated, built-in scenario modeling technology.
ERP and EPM will help you gain insight into your organization’s costs and profitability to determine how to allocate and invest your company’s limited resources. The automation aspect of ERP and EPM offers automation and the ability to take ownership of allocation-based business processes. These could be processes like customer and/or product profitability, management allocations, shared service costing, and cost transparency initiatives.
Automation and maximizing ROI is at the forefront of every enterprise software user’s mind. Automating reports and processing can help maximize decision-making capabilities and protect your bottom line.
For users not utilizing EPM or automating reporting, Elire is here to help. Reach out to [email protected] to get in touch with our team of Cloud experts and discuss how you can improve your application utilization. In the meantime, register for our upcoming April 19th “Modernizing IT with Oracle Government Cloud” webinar here.
