Implementation of Financial Cloud like an on-premise Oracle E-Business and expecting it to deliver results to modern CFO is turning out to be over demanding when compared to the Oracle Financial cloud. Cloud brings entirely new methods of working. For example, in Oracle E-Business, most of the reporting and customization requirements are addressed by IT team. The business users are expected to define the framework of their requirements; the business analyst is expected to convert into a technical framework and the support team is scheduled to deliver. There is nothing “agile” in this method, and hence there is a risk of change requests popping-up even before delivery.
We have now reached towards the last few weeks of our first-year use of Oracle Financial Cloud. Before we renew the contract with Oracle, we decided to measure the success of our adoption. We launched simple measurement criteria in following areas:
- How much productivity of business users is increased in terms of the number of hours/days. For example key processes vs time matrix of the old system and new Financial Cloud system.
- How much more workload business users can take next year, e.g how many more invoices the same team can process next year with a further reduction in billing-to-AR process
- Percentage increase in efficiency in receivables management
- Decrease in time to complete regulatory periodic compliances
However, our adoption doesn’t end here. We know that the additional value of Financial Cloud can be drawn by enhancing and enriching our applications. Our plan to improve Financial Cloud further consists of the following :
- Deeper integration with our HR system
- Deeper integration with Salesforce Automation (SFA) system
- Provide CFO Dashboards for measurement of crucial KPIs
- Provide additional mobile extensions to Financial Cloud for business users to reduce time to access dashboards and workflows
In summary, we would like to highlight our philosophy of “adoption of Financial Cloud” and not “implementation of Financial Cloud.”
