Technology designed to make our lives more convenient means that we can spend less time planning and more time on what’s important. The same is true for standard financial processes, where Cloud ERP with built-in artificial intelligence (AI) enables enterprises to take the pain out of mundane tasks and invest their time in bigger and better business priorities.
Continuous AI monitoring: Reducing human error
Embedded artificial intelligence works like a fine-toothed comb to continuously monitor enterprise resource planning (ERP) processes such as accounts payable, account receivable, and general ledger. Predictive and generative AI will build on robotic process automation (RPA), which is already familiar to finance teams, to accelerate the automation of more complex financial tasks, including compliance and risk management. Automatically analysing data with machine learning can help businesses reduce the likelihood of fraud, error, policy violations and cash leakage.
With AI and machine learning, businesses are eliminating time-consuming manual data extraction that is prone to human error. Not only does this provide more reliable configuration monitoring, but it also enables real-time prevention of unauthorised access to high-risk data and privileges, which is critical for strong risk management.
Fostering creativity with automation
Utilising AI to perform mundane processes is not about replacing people, but rather freeing their time to get important work done. In the past, it has been all too common for CFOs and financial executives with impressive professional credentials to be trapped spending time and team resources building complex financial models in Excel or manually working through multiple legacy ERP systems.
Not only does AI-enabled ERP monitoring make planning, scenario modelling, and forecasting easier, but it also provides CFOs with better insight about the future of their business to make informed decisions about investments, acquisition or divestiture, debt/equity financing, and what factors are driving profitability. With real-time analytics, automatic cash flow forecasting, and connected planning, CFOs can spend more time each quarter on capital budgeting and M&A strategising, and less time gathering data.
A new era of generative AI
If digital disruption and the catalytic growth of cloud-based technology during the COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything, it is that the only certainty is that the speed of change is only increasing. Helping businesses to remain future-ready is at the centre of Oracle’s philosophy, providing fusion applications with quarterly releases that offer hundreds of new features.
At CloudWorld 2023, Oracle’s Steve Miranda discussed the introduction of generative AI capabilities to Oracle’s suite of applications in his keynote speech, Achieving Lasting Success with Oracle Fusion Applications
“We’ve been using AI and machine learning in the application for several years,” Miranda explains. “You’ve had applications such as IoT in the supply chain, and supply chain planning that is effectively an AI application in itself. We use it for document image scanning and improving character recognition, and we have machine-learning audit capabilities to detect suspicious transactions in finance to facilitate your audit.”
While AI is nothing new, generative AI such as GPT-4 released in 2023, has only leapt to the forefront of digital transformation discussion relatively recently. Leading the way in digital innovation, Oracle announced a range of generative AI capabilities for its Oracle Fusion Applications.
According to Miranda: “In ERP, we use a whole host of generative AI capabilities around summarisation. This includes features that we call management reporting and narrative reporting.
“You can take financial reports, balance sheets, income statements, and AP trial balance reports, and you can have gen AI summarise that report for you in text form. This means that you have the report that the fusion applications produce, and gen AI can supplement that report with a textual summary, including areas that you should look out, to make your job in terms of reviewing reports that much easier.”
Oracle’s Fusion Cloud ERP solution enables businesses to automate up to 90% of their standard financial transactions. Machine learning predictive planning and forecasting can analyse broader datasets, reveal hidden biases, uncover significant deviations, and speed up your overall response time. Risk intelligence goes beyond risk management; reducing the risk of human error, facilitating faster and more accurate analysis of large data sets, and enabling immediate action should issues occur. Fusion Cloud ERP users are automatically alerted to any anomalies so they can immediately be addressed.
To learn more about how Oracle’s Fusion Cloud ERP solution can help your business, download the free whitepaper.
