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Preview Oracle Financials Release 12 with Oracle Development SVP Steve Miranda
From support for shared services and diverse regulatory requirements to global tax compliance, Oracle's hotly anticipated Financials Release 12 enables organizations to operate well in even the most complex global environments. Read the exclusive interview with one of Oracle's top development executives to get an inside look into Release 12 and how it gives finance organizations a competitive edge.
Q: How will Release 12 help finance organizations play a more strategic role in the enterprise?
Steve Miranda: Release 12 helps finance do the things that it must do well do even better, such as meeting compliance and reporting requirements and recording transactions accurately and efficiently. Once your finance team has mastered the basics, you can then focus on driving more value for the business. For example, a new product that is planned for availability as part of Release 12, Oracle Profitability Manager, enables finance to partner with the business to understand sources of profitability. Today's business intelligence and performance management applications make it easier to provide this kind of financial insight to business managers.
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| Steve Miranda is senior vice president of ERP application development for Oracle Corporation |
Q: How will Release 12 enable finance to operate more efficiently?
Steve Miranda: Release 12 plans to deliver enhanced support for shared services, streamlined reconciliation and close, and a simplified process of complying with diverse external reporting requirements. Our customers are increasingly moving to a shared services model in order to gain productivity savings, capture economies of scale, and dedicate resources to strategic support, and Release 12 must evolve with them. Now shared services staff process transactions and run reports without worrying about organizational boundaries. The new bank model that is planned as part of Release 12 would allow shared services staff to process payments and receipts for different entities with a single instruction to the bank. And transaction taxes would be calculated automatically based on the place of supply, parties involved, and other rules. The rules-based accounting engine, global tax engine, and new bank model planned for Release 12 are some of the key accounting structures that are meant to streamline transaction processing and promote greater information reliability, consistency, transparency, and auditability. Reliable and transparent information is at the core of Release 12.
Q: How will Release 12 make it easier to meet regulatory and reporting mandates?
Steve Miranda: We plan to replace Sets of Books with Ledgers in Release 12 to support parallel accounting. For example, the primary ledger could be used to represent International Financial Reporting Standards and an alternate representation could be stored in a secondary ledger for local reporting requirements. The transaction tax engine planned for Release 12 would also support global tax compliance out of the box. Finally, we plan to add new capabilities to Oracle Internal Controls Manager for managing compliance processes. This is intended to provide the ability not only to detect segregation of duties violations, but also to prevent incompatible user functions up front.
Q: Historically re-architected applications meant disruption to the business. How will the new architecture in Release 12 impact a customer's upgrade?
Steve Miranda: We're committed to providing customers with continuity and choice in the Release 12 upgrade progress. First, there will be an automated upgrade path in order to minimize manual intervention. Second, we will provide continuity so that customers can run their businesses the same way as they did on 11i. And third, we will let customers take advantage of the new features and structures in Release 12 at their own pace. So even though Release 12 will add a lot of new capabilities, it's up to the customer if and when they change their processes.
Q: How will Release 12 move customers farther down the path to the next generation of Oracle Fusion applications?
Steve Miranda: We plan to certify Release 12 on Oracle Fusion Middleware and leverage several of its components. A cornerstone of Oracle Fusion Middleware is a service-oriented architecture that supports lower cost integrations and adaptable business processes. For example, organizations that have consolidated Oracle Financials and PeopleSoft HCM in shared-services centers could create cross-application flows using Oracle BPEL Manager. In Release 12, we plan to build these cross-application flows between Oracle Retail and Oracle Financials for retail customers. We also plan to create a library of Web services for our trading community architecture so that customers will be able to build processes that are more interoperable with trading partners. Finally, we plan to replace many standard reports with data extracts that can be formatted by using desktop tools such as Microsoft Word, Excel, or Adobe Acrobat.
Q: Will there be any new products available in Release 12?
Steve Miranda: Yes. I mentioned plans to release Oracle Profitability Manager earlier. Two others, Oracle Financial Consolidation Hub and Oracle Financial Services Accounting Hub, are currently available to customers, and we plan to also incorporate them into Release 12. Oracle Financial Consolidation Hub helps organizations with complex legal entity structures and disparate data sources to have a single view of financial information across the enterprise. Oracle Financial Services Accounting Hub enables financial institutions to create detailed, auditable, and reconcilable accounting for a variety of source systems.
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