FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT UPDATE

Three Strategies for Greater Business Insight

By Chris Leone, group vice president, Applications Strategy, Oracle Corporation

Faced with greater demands to drive profitable growth, value-driven CFOs are stepping up their investments in business intelligence as part of a greater organizational focus on decision support in the finance function. According to the CFO Executive Board (CFOEB), investments in decision support are expected to grow from 20 percent of total finance resources today to 39 percent by 2009. The payoff for investing in greater business intelligence is surprisingly strong: the more you invest, the higher EPS growth rates you'll earn against your industry peers.

Challenges to Greater Business Insight
Although the value of investing in business intelligence is clear, the majority of business decision makers today are often pressured to make critical business decisions without high-quality information on operational and financial performance.

That information is only available through truly information-driven applications that are built on a unified information architecture with preintegrated analytics that take full advantage of the knowledge stored in underlying transactional systems. The resulting greater business insight lets employees drive continual improvement, create decision-oriented cultures, and align with key organizational objectives.

This focus on greater business insight suggests strategies that are helping Oracle customers today.

Deploy Intelligent Business Processes
In a highly competitive global marketplace, companies must be able to build and deploy smarter and more dynamic workflows to adapt and respond to change quickly. For example, each step in an order capture process takes a certain amount of time. If one or more of these steps is creating a bottleneck in the process, managers should automatically be notified so that they can take corrective action before the problem materially impacts the bottom line.

By ensuring the tight coupling of business insight with process execution, information-driven applications provide the missing link to continuously drive process improvements and allow employees to respond and adapt to changing business circumstances.

Develop Stronger Customer Relationships
Providing relevant and timely information promotes a decision-oriented culture that can enhance customer relationships and lead to greater profitability. It can be as basic as informing a manager about which orders are on credit hold, or more complex, such as alerting customer service representatives about which customers have contractual service-level agreements that require immediate responses to service calls. Information-driven applications embed this type of intelligent information throughout the workflow to drive the user to the most informed decision.

Increase Employee Productivity
Information-driven applications provide the insight employees need to change their behaviors, ensuring greater accountability and better alignment with key organizational goals. Making team budgets available internally, for example, can help motivate more-efficient budget management. Sales executives who can watch goals change over time can be energized to help meet those goals. And teams with access to centralized information about workflow and objectives will waste less time worrying about process and more time being productive.

For more information on how Oracle's information-driven applications can provide greater business insight and help you create more value for your organization, download these resources:

Video: Toyota Gains Continual Improvement with Oracle PeopleSoft (3 min.)

Video: Creating Value: The New Mission for Finance (5 min.)

White paper: Fusion Applications: Delivering Greater Business Insight

Video: Oracle Business Intelligence Strategy Briefing, New York City, March 2006

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