During the upcoming holiday season 77 percent of consumers surveyed said they plan to return a portion of their gifts, with nearly 20 percent expecting to return more than half of their presents (sorry grandma!). This is both a blessing and a curse for retailers planning for the holiday season. While 32 percent of those polled noted they plan to return gifts via mail, 65 percent intend to return them to the store, giving brick-and-mortar retailers another opportunity to engage customers and boost post-holiday sales.

“Retailers need to seize the moment when shoppers return gifts. The traffic generated by holiday returns holds significant opportunity for retailers to build better customer profiles and generate new opportunities for engagement by personalizing the returns experience,” said Jeff Warren, vice president of retail solutions management, Oracle Retail. “Preparing for returns is a best practice, leveraging returns intelligence to inform product development and new customer acquisition strategies is next practice retail.”

The Reality of Returns

According to survey results of consumers worldwide, Generation Z plans to return the most presents this year. Returns are simply a fact of life for retailers, but a select few have started to reimagine their returns process to capture essential information and inform other parts of the business and improve customer satisfaction. When a consumer visits a store to return a purchase, that customer comes with a history and therefore opportunity. Well-informed store associates, with the right technology, are key to identifying next best offers to save the sale or upsell at the point of service, and positively influence essential key performance indicators (KPIs), like net promoter score (NPS).  Arming associates with technology that provides customer profile data and suggestions aligned with availability of inventory and promotions is crucial to successful execution. The right technology can also reinforce important procedures and mitigate the risk of loss which is another cringe-worthy albeit stark reality of the holiday season.

In-Store Holds Its Stance

Despite the rhetoric around store traffic slowing, in-store is still the preferred way to shop.  According to the survey of consumers worldwide, 75 percent noted they will shop in-store and bring purchases home compared to 55 percent who said they will shop online and ship to their home. For many, in-store is still the most direct way to ensure that ‘must-have’ gifts will be in hand during that critical holiday moment.

Shipping Preferences Getting More Complex

According to the survey, while Generation X (ages 35-54) led the way in shopping online and shipping to home at 57 percent, baby boomers (ages 55+) were a close second at 56 percent and actually topped both millennials (ages 25-34) at 53 percent and Generation Z (ages 18-24) at 46 percent in embracing home delivery. Generation Z and millennials also demonstrated a stronger desire to pick up the gifts they ordered online in the store, with 25 and 30 percent respectively stating they head to the stores to collect purchases, while only 14 percent of baby boomers opted for this approach. 

Among consumers who choose to ship rather than shop in-store, millennials are sending 33 percent of purchases to locations other than their home, with many instead shipping to work (18 percent) or to pick up lockers (15 percent). Baby boomers, who were the second most-likely generation to ship to their homes, were by far the least likely (13 percent) to utilize an alternate location for online purchases.

The survey, which was independently conducted in 2019 by Savanta, polled 15,800 global consumers in the US, EMEA, LATAM, and JAPAC.

This week, Oracle honored a diverse set of customers and partners for outstanding and innovative use of Oracle technologies. Culled from hundreds of nominees across industries and around the world, those selected were recognized as Excellence Award recipients at Oracle OpenWorld 2019.

The winners selected all had one thing in common. They excelled in their use of Oracle solutions to accelerate innovation, drive business transformation and create value by increasing agility, lowering costs and reducing IT complexity. Oracle is honored to congratulate each and every one of this year’s winners. 

Oracle recognized winners in eight customer categories:

Chief Information Officer of the Year – awarded to individuals for excellent performance and vision in the role of a CIO of an enterprise that uses Oracle products and services. This year’s winners include:

• Akash Khurana, GVP, CIO and chief digital officer, McDermott International, Inc.
• Cinthya Carolina Sanchez, CIO, Universidad de los Andes
• Sally Gilligan, CIO, GAP, Inc.

Cloud Platform Innovation – awarded to organizations for their leading-edge solutions using the Oracle Cloud Platform to drive business transformation and value by increasing agility, lowering costs and reducing IT complexity. This year’s winners include:

4Ward Servicos e Comercio de Equipamentos Ltda, 7-Eleven, American Axle & Manufacturing Holding Inc., Australian Finance Group (AFG), Autostrade per l'Italia, Aviva, Banco Daycoval S.A., Caesars Entertainment, Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry (CRIEPI), City of Las Vegas, Comcast, Comptroller of Public Accounts, CoreLogic, Datalynx, Educational Testing Service (ETS), Exelon, FabIndia, Ferrari, FireEye, Gallaudet University, Globo, HighJump Software Inc., Hindalco, Honeywell, IFFCO, Illycaffè S.p.A., JASCI Software, PT. Tiki Jalur Nugraha Ekakurir (JNE), Laureate International Universities, Maritz, McMaster University, Nationwide Insurance, NRMA, Office Depot, Oi Telecom, OUTFRONT Media, Panasonic Manufacturing Limited, Pioneer Natural Resources, Qatar Foundation, Rabobank, Ricoh USA Inc., Riverbed Technology Inc., Rosendin Electric, Ruralco Holdings Ltd, Skanska Group HQ, Southern Company, Standard Chartered Bank, Stitch Fix, Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association, The Co-op, The University of Adelaide, TIA Technology, Tokyo Gas i Net Corp, Underwriters Laboratories (UL LLC), Unicoop Firenze, UST Global, Veritas Technologies, Vertiv, Western Digital, and Youngone Outdoor.

Chief Data Officer of the Year – awarded to individuals for their outstanding ability to recognize and successfully use data as a key asset within their organization. This year’s winners include:

• Alberto Camardelli, CIO, SKY Brasil
• Alexander Ryabov, head of data services, Wargaming.net
• Pencho Tzonev, head of data analytics and development, Europe, PaySafe
• Richard Kudakwashe Bururu, managing director and regional head, Decision Management Group Consumer, CIMB Bank

Cloud Architect of the Year – awarded to leaders on the front lines of driving successful cloud deployments, specifically in data management and analytics, through their strong technical skills, adaptability and strategic thinking. This year’s winners include:

• Hernan Antolini, enterprise architecture - technology manager, DIRECTV LATAM
• Mangesh Deo, senior director, Global Corporate Solutions Technology, TIAA
• Oscar Jalón Arias, IT director, Casa Santiveri S.L.
• ZhiLiang Yang, CIO, ChinaGas Holdings Ltd.

Data Warehouse and Big Data Leader of the Year – awarded to individuals for their technical ability and superior knowledge of Oracle data warehouse, big data and analytics implementations within their organizations. This year’s winners include:

• Alain Fuhrer, head of databases, Die Mobiliar
• Derek Hayden, VP, data strategy and analytics, OUTFRONT Media
• Jesus Ramirez, big data, BI and automation director, Ripley
• Pawarit Ruengsuksilp, business development analyst, Forth Corporation PCL

Leadership in Infrastructure Transformation – awarded to leaders who deliver value to their company by leveraging multiple Oracle technologies to reduce the cost of IT operations, improve time to deployment, and benefit from performance gains and enhanced end-user productivity. This year’s winners include:

• Jan-Pier Loonstra, enterprise infrastructure architect, KPN
• Laszlo Beres, engineering manager, GVC Holdings
• Prasanta Kumar Nayak, deputy general manager (systems), State Bank of India
• Ryan Lea, solution consultant, CCL: Together with Revera
• Sumesh Vadassary, software development director, PayPal, Inc.
• Suping Dong, CEO, Bowmicro Ltd.
• Yasushi Taki, CEO, CTO and founder, JustPlayer Co., Ltd.
• Vivek Jaiswal, group general manager DevSpecOps Shared Services, National Roads and Motorist Association Australia

Proactive Support Champion – awarded to Oracle customers or partners who advocate for the adoption and effective use of proactive support tools and resources within their enterprises, or for their clients. Recipients are selected for the breadth and depth of proactive support tool usage, the demonstrable business benefits they achieve, and the level of impact they realize relative to the size of their organizations. This year’s winners include:

• Hiroyuki Ishino, president and CEO, Ricoh IT Solutions Co., LTD.
• Renata Fontana, Group CIO, Grupo Arcor S.A.
• Jerry Ames, IT functional excellence and quality leader, Cummins Inc.

Sustainability Innovation – awarded to organizations for excellence in environmental leadership, cost reduction and improvement of business efficiencies through the use of Oracle products, thus ensuring that sustainability remains a fundamental tenet of enterprise social responsibility. This year’s winners include:

• BSH Hausgeräte GmbH
• BSES Rajdhani Power Limited
• Consolidated Edison Company of New York
• Evreka
• Greengo Car Europe
• Hrvatska elektroprivreda d.d.
• Land O’Lakes
• LiDestri
• Recology
• Southern California Edison
• Southern California Gas Company

Oracle recognized Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) members across four global award categories:

Partners were recognized for their excellence in the development and delivery of solutions that demonstrate customer success. The global award categories included the Cloud Transformation Global Partner Solution award, Oracle Cloud ISV Partner of the Year award, Partner of the Year VAD award, and the Partner of the Year Solution awards. This year’s winners include:

• Accenture, Partner of the Year: CX - Marketing – Global
• Amberleaf, Partner of the Year: CX - Service – Global
• BIAS Corporation, Partner of the Year: OCI – Global
• Deloitte, Cloud Transformation Global Partner Solution
• Deloitte, Partner of the Year: SCM Cloud – Global
• Digital China (China) Limited, Partner of the Year: VAD – Global
• Evolutionary Systems Company Limited (Evosys), Partner of the Year: HCM Cloud – Global
• HighJump, Oracle Cloud ISV Partner of the Year – Global
• Infosys, Partner of the Year: CX - Sales – Global
• InterRel Consulting, Partner of the Year: Business Analytics– Global
• Inspirage B.V., Partner of the Year: ERP Cloud – Global
• K.K. Ashisuto, Partner of the Year: ODA – Global
• KPMG, Partner of the Year: EPM Cloud – Global
• Mannai Trading Company, Partner of the Year: Engineered System – Global
• OneGlobe Systems, Partner of the Year: Autonomous Database – Global
• Services & Processes Solutions SA DE CV, Partner of the Year: Emerging Technologies – Global

Oracle Excellence Award winners represent a wide range of customers and partners, from small-to-medium businesses to the largest global enterprises. For more information, visit https://www.oracle.com/corporate/awards.

Oracle today announced a collaboration with Box that will allow customers to connect their cloud and on-premises Oracle and third-party applications with Box via Oracle Integration. Through this integration, enterprise customers will be able to seamlessly connect applications with Box as their unified cloud content management layer to power secure collaboration and workflows around their most valuable content in the cloud.

“We see time and time again that customers are demanding a single source of truth for all their content needs,” said Suhas Uliyar, vice president, Digital Assistant and Integration, Oracle. “Now customers can be sure that they can access their business-critical content across all applications and help ensure it is synced with Box. This dramatically reduces the time and effort spent on reconciling content versions across various business processes and will allow teams to focus on creating new innovations.”

With this connector, thousands of organizations will be able to simplify and standardize line-of-business processes with Oracle and Box. The new Box connector for Oracle Integration will allow IT teams to easily integrate on-premises and cloud applications with Box. By empowering IT teams to automate workflows across Oracle and Box, the connector dramatically simplifies the process of integrating everyday content-driven business processes. For example, HR teams will be able to deploy workflows to automatically create Box folders whenever new employee records are added to Oracle PeopleSoft, streamlining the onboarding process and eliminating time-consuming manual work. Similarly, finance teams will be able to accelerate external collaboration by automatically pushing invoices generated from Oracle Cloud ERP into Box to share securely with vendors. The Box connector for Oracle Integration enables IT teams to bridge content in the cloud and mission-critical systems, ultimately creating more efficient processes for line-of-business teams.

“Today’s fast paced work environment demands seamless internal and external collaboration and& best-of-breed app integrations so that enterprises can get their most critical work done in a simple and secure way,” said Jeetu Patel, chief product officer, Box. “We’re excited to be working with Oracle so that teams can quickly and easily integrate Box with Oracle on-premises and cloud solutions to centralize, manage and secure their data in the cloud.”

“To be as productive as possible, it's imperative that companies leverage a seamless and interoperable tech stack,” said Mohamed Ayadi, senior director, Enterprise Architecture, Vertiv. “We’re excited that Box and Oracle have partnered together to make it easier for companies everywhere to integrate content across their applications.”

Oracle Integration

Oracle Integration provides intelligent automation and integration to enable customers to deliver their digital modernization projects faster and easier. Through a combination of innovative machine learning, prebuilt integration business processes and a powerful library of run-ready application adapters, Oracle Integration unifies SaaS and on-premises applications, robotic and human process automation and business partners into a connected business.

From purchasing to human resources to supply chain planning, applications teams can leverage the intuitive Oracle Integration platform to easily integrate applications such as Oracle ERP Cloud, Oracle Engagement Cloud, Oracle Marketing Cloud, Oracle E-Business Suite, Siebel, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards—and many non-Oracle applications, including Salesforce, ServiceNow, and SAP. The embedded machine learning recommendation capability learns from other users to make recommendations for mapping.

Utilities today have an incredible opportunity to engage and serve their customers as leaders in a clean energy future. New energy resources like electric vehicles, solar, and smart home devices are making it more essential than ever for utilities to connect with an increasingly savvy customer base. Oracle Utilities Opower is empowering utilities to do exactly that with new capabilities and new integrations for innovating at utility scale.

With new combined solutions with EnergyHub, Powerley, and Agentis, as well as new Opower capabilities for EV and solar customer engagement, behavioral load shaping, and digital marketing automation, utilities can use Opower to rapidly expand the breadth and depth of their customer engagement initiatives and gain new levels of visibility into their grid operations.

“With an evolving customer base, utilities need an enterprise-grade platform that both continues to pump out innovative functionality and enables them to easily plug in new offerings to extend the value they can deliver to every customer,” said Scott Neuman, Opower group vice president at Oracle Utilities. “As a single platform, Opower is helping utilities bring customer engagement into their core business operations and deliver new customer-facing services that can enhance the relationship they have with their customers.”

Customer engagement has become fundamental to utility operations. Utilities need to be able to coordinate all their customer touchpoints and get a 360-degree view of every customer. To enable that, Oracle continues to enhance how Opower integrates with other utility systems and incorporates third-party applications, further enhancing the customer engagement system of record for customer operations and experience.

Expanding Ecosystem Accelerates Customer Value

Recent Opower collaborations with EnergyHub, Powerley and Agentis offer utilities:

• A broader portfolio to drive energy efficiency and peak demand savings. Opower's residential behavioral programs have driven over 24 terawatt-hours in energy savings, considerably more than any other provider. By combining these behavioral programs with EnergyHub's bring-your-own-device (BYOD) DER programs and Powerley’s smart home engagement solutions, Opower is helping utilities supercharge enrollment in device programs and create deeper, automated energy savings. And in partnership with Agentis, Opower now offers utilities the industry’s only verified behavioral energy savings for both residential and commercial customers.
• Effective behind-the-meter engagement at scale: The Opower platform creates personalized customer journeys across moments that matter, including peak days, high bills, smart meter roll-outs, and solar installations. Opower’s partners extend those journeys into the connected home. Powerley and Oracle have created a cohesive customer journey, tapping the potential of real-time energy data to help utility customers create smarter homes that uncover energy waste and deliver energy savings automation. EnergyHub and Oracle are also unlocking new value for utilities from connected utility customers by combining effective engagement, adoption, and orchestration of distributed energy resources (DERs), leveraging EnergyHub’s network of distributed energy resource providers and Opower’s millions of consumer touchpoints.
• A more complete customer experience: Oracle provides frictionless online transactions and a seamless web experience for all classes of customers, as well as deep energy and billing insights for residential customers. With Agentis, Oracle extends these insights to meet the unique needs of business customers. These personalized analytics and tools are proven to drive energy-saving actions among a utility's commercial customers.
• Better visibility and control over Distributed Energy Resources (DERs): The proliferation of DERs is also driving the need for increased visibility not just across customer systems, but across grid management systems as well.  The combination of EnergyHub’s Mercury DERMS and Oracle’s Network Management System provides distribution operators the ability to visualize and orchestrate grid-edge DERs, enabling integrated grid operations.

“Regulations, rate changes, the addition of new energy resources – utilities today are in the midst of a perfect storm of challenges that point solutions just can’t address. Only Oracle offers the end-to-end solutions to help utilities foster better, more valuable relationships with customers which, in turn, help the utilities drive down service costs and balance demand on the grid,” added Neuman.

Spanning more than 60 million households globally, Opower is the most widely used customer engagement platform of record in the utility industry.

To help organizations across industries unlock growth and take their business to the next level, Oracle NetSuite today announced a series of new enhancements within the NetSuite solution. The latest enhancements include new industry cloud solutions that help customers achieve the benefits of the cloud in as little as 45 days and more than 65 new and updated features for customers to core business management capabilities within NetSuite.

“Running a growing business can be overwhelming without the right levels of visibility and control,” said Evan Goldberg, EVP, Oracle NetSuite. “Our goal is to help our customers focus on what matters and unlock new opportunities by giving them the solutions needed to be agile and adapt to changing business dynamics. The latest updates to NetSuite build on that goal and our commitment to delivering customers in all industries a roadmap for success.”

Key updates to NetSuite include new financial, analytics, HR, supply chain, nonprofit, project management and commerce capabilities. The new capabilities help organizations streamline business operations, improve decision making, enhance the employee experience and help nonprofit organizations easily track resources.

• Analytics: Enhancements to SuiteAnalytics querying, pivoting, and charting plus 17 new pre-built Industry & Role SuiteAnalytics Workbooks make it easier than ever for customers to gain visibility into key business metrics by providing insights into commerce search results as well as procurement, inventory and supply chain processes.
• Supply Chain: Predictive risks have been added to the Supply Chain Control Tower. This enables planners, buyers and operation users to increase on time delivery and optimize supply chain efficiency by being proactively alerted to potential supply chain issues and being prescribed potential actions to avoid the problems in the first place. This is built on the Intelligent Suite Machine Learning and AI platform.
• Distribution: New warehouse management system (WMS) features give customers more control when allocating current and future inventory across the business by optimizing product allocation.  In addition, a new order release capability provides better control of what is released to the warehouse, and a new mobile app improves operational efficiency.
• Advanced Project Budgets: New project budgeting capabilities enable customers to make more informed decisions by providing a single view into all aspects of project budgeting, including the ability to create multiple versions of the budget plan.
• Commerce: New features enable customers to streamline operations by using merchandise attributes such as color, size and pattern to quickly and easily access sales and inventory insights. In addition, Personalized Catalog Views help merchants personalize the customer experience by providing selective access to catalog items based on user preference.
• Nonprofit: The new program outcomes feature allows nonprofit organizations to monitor the health and measure the outcome of their key programs, ensuring that they are staying true to their objectives and show donors the effectiveness of their funding.
• HR: New capabilities within SuitePeople help customers enhance the employee experience, gain deeper visibility into HR processes and empower HR teams. The new capabilities include an employee timeline to easily view key milestones, an improved payroll experience for administrators and employees, and new HR dashboard capabilities.
• Financials: New advanced banking data import features help customers reduce manual and time-consuming tasks associated with bank or credit reconciliation. In addition, new multi-subsidiary management and accounting capabilities help finance teams streamline the management of intercompany business processes.

To help customers achieve the benefits of the cloud in as little as 45 days, NetSuite continues to accelerate its investment in SuiteSuccess. SuiteSuccess is a pre-configured industry cloud solution, built on industry-leading practices, that combines deep domain knowledge with pre-built workflows, KPIs and dashboards. The latest additions to SuiteSuccess include expanded vertical capabilities across more than 10 industries. 

• SuiteSuccess for Restaurant & Hospitality: New innovations around menu technology, supply chain and customer experience increase transparency and operational efficiencies. Organizations benefit from a unified hospitality management software platform that combines financials, inventory management, procurement, multiple location/franchise management and point of sale integration with Oracle MICROS.
• SuiteSuccess for Planning & Budgeting: Is now available for customers in seven industries and includes new data modelling capabilities that enhance company-wide and departmental planning. Customers in the software, agency, social impact, services, retail and wholesale distribution can now take advantage of SuiteSuccess for Planning & Budgeting to facilitate real-time decision-making, gain instant visibility into forecasting subscription and non-subscription revenue performance.
• SuiteSuccess for Food & Beverage: New forecasting, supply chain planning, co-packer visibility, shop floor scheduling and work order management enhancements give food and beverage organizations a real-time view into the health of their organization.
• SuiteSuccess for SuitePeople: New pre-configured roles, dashboards and forms help customers streamline the management of employee records and improve strategic decision making around employee job insights and efficiency. In addition, payroll management enhancements help customers make informed budgeting decisions within their workforce.

To help nonprofits and social enterprises across the world accelerate their missions, Oracle NetSuite continues to expand the NetSuite Social Impact program. Since introducing the program in 2006, NetSuite has helped more than 1,500 nonprofits and donated more than $100 million in software. To increase its impact and help nonprofits of any size spend more of their time and resources on changing the world, NetSuite has expanded its Suite Pro Bono program, donated software to more than 300 new nonprofits globally, and increased its investments in partnerships through #ImpactCloud in the last year.

“For more than 10 years, we’ve dedicated time and resources to building a framework of solutions that can empower nonprofit organizations to focus their time on changing the world,” said Evan Goldberg, EVP, Oracle NetSuite. “We’re proud of what we’ve achieved and know there is so much more to be done. That’s why we continue to expand our Social Impact program to help apply the power of technology to some of the world’s most critical problems.”

The Power of Three: Creating Lasting Impact for Social Good

The NetSuite Social Impact program helps nonprofits streamline business processes and focus time and resources on their core mission. To date, the program has helped deliver impact in three key areas:

• Suite Donation: To help nonprofits rapidly implement new business systems in the cloud, NetSuite continues to offer Suite Donation globally, a program which gives social enterprises and nonprofits access to NetSuite’s Nonprofit Solution. This has enabled NetSuite to support over 300 new nonprofits, including organizations in EMEA, APAC and Latin America, within the last year.
• Suite Pro Bono: In the last year, NetSuite employees contributed more than 6,000 hours across the globe through Suite Pro Bono, a program that gives nonprofits access to the skills and expertise of NetSuite employees. Building on its success, NetSuite has expanded its Buildathon 4Good events which have served 82 customers in the two years since its launch. At SuiteConnect San Francisco, attendees can participate in the latest Buildathon4Good with Bay Area nonprofits including, Creativity Explored, Positive Coaching Alliances and California Association of Food Banks.
• Suite Capacity: To help nonprofits build organizational capacity, NetSuite has re-launched Suite Capacity, a program that helps organizations share best practices with each other and learn how to best leverage NetSuite for their operations.

 

Building a Better World with Partners

To help nonprofits enable organizations through the power of technology, NetSuite continues to partner with #ImpactCloud, a coalition of technology companies built to accelerate the impact of leading nonprofits. Recent projects include:

• Full Circle Fund: NetSuite has invested $15,000 in a new tech accelerator fund with the Full Circle Fund, as part of a collaboration with 10 other Silicon Valley companies from #ImpactCloud. The program will go beyond traditional skill-based volunteering to deliver resources and intellectual capital to Bay Area nonprofits leveraging tech solutions for good.
• NetHope Center for the Digital Nonprofit: To provide nonprofits with ongoing guidance, consulting and technology expertise, NetSuite has become a founding member of NetHope’s Center for the Digital Nonprofit. NetHope is a global consortium that delivers over 60 percent of all international and nongovernmental aid to the nonprofit sector each year.

 

Supporting Quotes from Nonprofits

Full Circle Fund is a nonprofit community that leverages its professionals’ time, resources and intellectual capital to help nonprofits increase their impact and build a better Bay Area.

“Silicon Valley has the power and access to solutions that can change the world,” said Dan Steif, Head of Business Development, Full Circle Fund. “It’s our responsibility to help bring this community together to build a better Bay Area by providing the resources, intellectual capital and expertise to ensure nonprofit leaders can achieve their missions. We’re excited to see all the ways we’ll be able to accelerate nonprofit organizations with the help of NetSuite’s investment, people and time for a lasting community impact.”

Creativity Explored is a nonprofit art center in San Francisco that gives artists with developmental disabilities the means to create and share their work.

“Before NetSuite our finances and databases looked like a Jackson Pollock painting, the data was connected but void of any real organization. We had the donor info in one place, customer info in another and our payment system to artists somewhere else. There was zero integration,” said Ann Kappes, director of licensing, Creativity Explored. “NetSuite gives us real-time visibility into our organization, which allows us to operate more efficiently and report the outcome of all financial operations to our staff, donors and board of directors.”

Precision Medical Products, a leader in deep-vein thrombosis (DVT) prevention and supplier of durable medical equipment that assists over 140,000 patients per year with post-surgery recovery, is using Oracle NetSuite to streamline core business operations and create a platform for sustainable growth. With NetSuite, Precision Medical Products (PMP) has been able to increase efficiencies and enhance the customer experience as its business has grown 70 percent over the last three years.

Founded in 2010, PMP is focused on helping patients recover from surgery and prevent DVT, a blood clot that forms in a vein. Although DVT is the most preventable cause of death in surgical facilities, it affects as many as 900,000 Americans each year and leads to nearly 100,000 premature deaths according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. To help save lives and cost-effectively provide FDA-quality products and services to its customers within two days, PMP needed a unified business platform that could automate processes and scale to support its future growth. After careful evaluation, PMP selected NetSuite over Xero and Zoho.

“More Americans die from DVT than breast cancer, AIDS and traffic fatalities combined, and it’s our mission to help patients recover as quickly and pain-free as possible,” said Bruce Capagli, COO, Precision Medical Products. “In a single platform, NetSuite gives us the visibility and control we need to reduce operational costs, maintain our customer promises and enhance decision making. NetSuite is helping take our business to the next level as we expand to help our customers achieve positive outcomes post-surgery and aim to assist 5 million customers.”

With NetSuite, PMP has been able to take advantage of an integrated platform to automate and centralize key business functions including financials, CRM, order management and inventory management systems across its five brands. Fully rolled out in less that 60 days, NetSuite has enabled PMP to reduce shipping costs and meet customer expectations for rapid delivery by routing orders to whichever warehouse offers the best shipping costs based on zip code. In addition, NetSuite has enabled PMP to more than double the average order value without increasing operational costs by launching a new online store in just 23 days that eliminates manual data entry with online orders. 

“Precision Medical Products is doing amazing work to help patients quickly recover and its business has grown rapidly over the last three years,” said Jason Maynard, SVP of Global Field Operations, Oracle NetSuite. “To support its growth and manage operational costs as order volume continued to climb, PMP selected NetSuite to create a platform for sustainable growth. With NetSuite, the PMP team can cost-effectively grow their business while continuing to focus on what they do best—protecting patients on their road to recovery.”

Creativity Explored, a nonprofit art center in San Francisco, is using Oracle NetSuite to support its mission to provide artists with development disabilities with the resources needed to create and share their work with the community. With NetSuite, Creativity Explored has been able to show how art and science can work together to impact lives as it has expanded its services to help more than 130 artists and increased funding from institutional and government funders by over 300 percent.

Established in 1983 by an artist and psychologist Florence Ludins-Katz and Elias Katz, Creativity Explored was founded on the belief that everyone has the ability to create and that visual artistic expression enhances personal identity and growth. The idea has proved to be very successful, but as Creativity Explored continues to expand its presence in the local community, the nonprofit needed an integrated platform that could streamline business processes, increase visibility across the organization and organize financial data. To support these goals and ensure it could quickly and efficiently report the outcomes of its work to benefactors, Creativity Explored selected NetSuite.

“Before NetSuite our finances and databases looked like a Jackson Pollock painting, the data was connected but void of any real organization. We had the donor info in one place, customer info in another and our payment system to artists somewhere else – there was zero integration,” said Ann Kappes, director of licensing, Creativity Explored. “NetSuite gives us real-time visibility into our organization, which allows us to operate more efficiently and report the outcome of all financial operations to our staff, donors and board of directors.”

With NetSuite, Creativity Explored has been able to take advantage of nonprofit accounting, customer relationship management, inventory tracking, ecommerce and point of sale capabilities in a single platform to improve the efficiencies of its day-to-day operations. The powerful financial management capabilities of NetSuite have helped Creativity Explored automate financial reporting across two art studios, one onsite gallery and its popular online marketplace. This has allowed Creativity Explored to provide the transparency requested by donors, trace dollars from donation to results and double the the number of programs that support artists with developmental disabilities.

“Creativity Explored has developed meaningful art practices and it is increasingly recognized for its contributions to the art world and our Bay Area community,” said Evan Goldberg, EVP, Oracle NetSuite. “We’re incredibly proud to work with organizations like Creativity Explored that are changing lives through the power of art. By enabling the Creativity Explored team to streamline business operations, we are helping them spend more time and resources on growing their organization and executing on their vision.”

NetSuite supports more than 1,500 nonprofits and social enterprises globally. Creativity Explored most recently benefitted from Suite Pro Bono as part of the NetSuite Social Impact program, which provides nonprofit and social enterprises with coaching and support from NetSuite employees. Creativity Explored worked with NetSuite team employees to customize its CRM solution to track grant deadlines and contracts with funders. This work is what led to the 300 percent increase in grant funding.

The amazing artwork of Creativity Explored’s artists will be showcased at SuiteConnect San Francisco. Attendees will have the opportunity to meet to learn more about Creativity Explored’s program offerings and meet a few artists at the event. There will also be a creation station where attendees can channel their inner artist and create personalized buttons to take home with them.  

Demonstrating its leadership and vision in the Cloud ERP market, Oracle today announced the latest updates to Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Cloud and Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Cloud. The updates enable organizations of all sizes to enhance productivity, reduce costs and improve controls by introducing both product innovations and industry-focused solutions.

“Oracle continues to extend its lead in the Cloud ERP market with powerful new innovations to support the changing demands placed on finance and operations teams,” said Rondy Ng, senior vice president, Oracle Applications Development. “Integrating intelligent assistants and machine learning capabilities into Oracle ERP Cloud enables customers to reduce the number of mundane—but important—tasks for their employees. This improves productivity and accuracy, enhances business insight and decision making and helps free up employees for strategic, creative and fulfilling work.”

The latest product and machine learning updates to Oracle ERP Cloud enable organizations of all sizes to quickly and easily take advantage of innovations in artificial intelligence, digital assistants, natural language processing, and the Internet of Things.

• Digital Assistants: Reduces the effort required to submit and review time sheets, track the status of projects and escalate time entry and project management issues. Users can interact with the assistant via a conversational user interface for an improved user experience and heightened business efficiency.
• Intelligent Document Recognition: Improves the accurate and efficient ingestion of financial information from pdf and other popular financial document formats to reduce or eliminate manual invoice entry. Using self-learning capabilities, the system recognizes and processes supplier invoices and adapts to changes within invoice formats over time for superior accuracy, faster access, and a reduction in manual entry errors.
• Predictive Planning: This new capability in Oracle EPM Cloud helps customers identify and leverage trends and patterns in financial and operational data. Auto Predict improves the quality and timeliness of planning decisions by enabling customers to access predictions at data load time, see prediction and forecast variances, identify variance patterns and make plan revisions on the fly.
• IoT Monetization with Subscription Management: Allows customers to drive new revenue streams by feeding IoT data through usage meters to improve product insight and bring usage-based monetization models to market. Integrated with Oracle Cloud Applications, users can create flexible new upsell and cross-sell offers with consumption-based charging, while seamlessly managing billing and revenue.
• Lease Accounting with IFRS 16 Support: Improves insight into lease renewals and enhances business decision making via a single repository for all lease contracts, automated lease accounting and disclosure reporting in compliance with IFRS 16, ASC842 and GASB87 accounting standards.

To help customers improve business processes and achieve faster time to value, recent and upcoming updates to Oracle ERP Cloud also address several industry needs. These include:

• Vocado Student Financial Planning for Higher Education: Enables informed academic and financial decisions, reduces time-to-aid eligibility and first disbursement for students, and improves efficiency of financial aid processing to help higher-education organizations meet compliance requirements. Automated financial aid packaging that supports programs with real-time synchronization with Federal data sources reduces institution overhead and time to aid processing.
• Labor Distribution for Higher Education, Healthcare & Public Sector: Allows users to accurately distribute payroll costs, reduce errors via labor schedules, and satisfy audit and reporting requirements for improved cost transparency and analysis. This enables customers to improve budgeting processes, leading to informed resourcing decisions, and a better understanding of profit margin drivers.
• Joint Venture Accounting for Oil & Gas: Helps customers reduce partner disputes, improve cash flow and gain real-time visibility into the financial state of joint ventures by automating transaction processing and introducing role-based tools to manage exceptions. This enables customers to improve transparency and collaboration with joint venture partners.

Oracle ERP Cloud was named the sole Leader in Gartner’s October 2018 Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Midsize Enterprises. In addition, Oracle (ERP Cloud) has been named a Leader for three consecutive years in Gartner’s May 2019 “Magic Quadrant for Cloud Core Financial Management Suites for Midsize, Large and Global Enterprises”. Oracle was also named a Leader for three consecutive years in Gartner’s August 2019 “Magic Quadrant for Cloud Financial Planning and Analysis Solutions.”

For additional information on Oracle ERP Cloud applications, visit Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Cloud’s Facebook and Twitter or the Modern Finance Leader blog.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

To help organizations attract the best talent and meet evolving employee expectations, Oracle today announced a series of new features and machine learning capabilities within Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) Cloud. The additions empower employees to seek internal career growth, encourage cross-team collaboration, and simplify and streamline workflows to help HR teams save time.

To attract and retain talent amid record low unemployment and skyrocketing employee expectations, HR teams are under pressure to rethink traditional practices and deliver new workplace experiences. At the same time, HR leaders need to streamline time-consuming processes so they have the flexibility to react quickly to changing business needs and drive meaningful outcomes. The latest updates to Oracle HCM Cloud address these challenges and enable HR professionals to create intuitive and personalized experiences for employees.

“Employees expect the same experiences that they have in their personal lives to be reflected at work, including interaction using voice, access to everything on their mobile phone, and behavior-based recommendations,” said Chris Leone, senior vice president of development, Oracle HCM Cloud. “At Oracle, we’re building on our culture of innovation to give our customers more of what they want and need. They want access to the latest technology tools and  the ability to compete with agility, while delivering a seamless experience for their workforce. And with Oracle, they can.”

To keep employees engaged, Oracle HCM Cloud helps businesses create workplace experiences that are more conversational, comprehensive, and connected:

• Conversational experiences with Digital Assistant: To provide actionable support for workers, Oracle Digital Assistant can now suggest next steps and recommendations within the context of employee conversations. New capabilities include access to onboarding tasks, goals, and performance evaluations, and the availability of manager self-service actions via Oracle Digital Assistant.
• Comprehensive experiences with LinkedIn Profile Import and Recruiter System Connect: Oracle and LinkedIn customers can now import information directly from their LinkedIn profile into Oracle HCM Cloud. This helps employees find new growth opportunities and provides employers with the insights they need to encourage more internal mobility. And, with Recruiter System Connect, customers can now connect Oracle’s recruiting solutions with LinkedIn Recruiter to improve recruiting efficiency.
• Connected experiences with the new Oracle Connections: To help businesses build a stronger workplace culture, Oracle Connections makes it quick and easy for employees to connect with team members from across the organization. Every employee has a profile page to share skills, interests, successful projects and more. Oracle Connections also provides a new consumer-like experience to the employee directory and lets teams provide and collect feedback within the Connections network.

In the latest updates to Oracle HCM Cloud, workflows are automated to help HR professionals save time by simplifying and streamlining tasks:

• Event-Based Processes: New features automate multi-step processes for event-based tasks. For example, when an employee gets married they have to change their name, address, tax forms, etc. With Event-Based Processes, the system simplifies the process for employees by aggregating all necessary steps and automating mundane tasks.
• HCM Experience Design Studio: Updates to HCM Experience Design Studio help HR teams quickly and easily design comprehensive business processes and workflows, as well as create customer-defined defaulting and validation logic. For example, customers can use conditional defaulting to automatically set full- or part-time status based on work hours, without the need for IT support.
• Intuitive Self-Service for complex, industry-specific workflows: New self-service capabilities improve ease-of-use for position management. This is particularly beneficial for position-run organizations in higher education, healthcare, and public sector industries where HR needs to set up automatic rules and position progressions when managing headcount.

To learn more about these innovations, go to oracle.com/hcm-update

To help brands ensure that each and every customer interaction is data driven, Oracle today announced a series of new data-first updates across Oracle Customer Experience (CX) Cloud. The latest updates include new digital assistants for sales, customer service and marketing professionals, new data enriched B2B sales capabilities, and new industry solutions for telecom and media, financial services, and public sector.

“At Oracle, we believe the only way brands can make every customer interaction matter is to take a data-first approach to managing the customer experience,” said Rob Tarkoff, executive vice president, Oracle CX Cloud and Oracle Data Cloud. “The latest updates to Oracle CX Cloud are fueled by data and machine learning to help our customers take advantage of powerful data insights to get ahead of customer needs and ensure a positive, unforgettable customer experience.”

Oracle CX is an integrated set of applications across marketing, sales, service and commerce. The latest updates to Oracle CX include enhancements to Oracle CX Unity, Oracle’s enterprise-class customer data management platform, as well as:

• New Digital Assistants: The Oracle Digital Assistant is now available across the entire Oracle CX Cloud, enabling sales, customer service, and marketing professionals to use voice commands to quickly and efficiently drive outcomes and actions.
• Digital Assistants for sales teams: Sales teams can leverage the Oracle Digital Assistant to create configured quotes using voice commands.
• Digital Assistants for customer service teams: Service teams can leverage the Oracle Digital Assistant to get answers to questions stored in the knowledge repository. In addition, service teams leveraging Oracle Intelligent Advisor to model and deploy interactive advice can use the Oracle Digital Assistant’s conversational UI to deliver rich data-connected self-service on chat channels.
• Digital Assistants for marketing teams: Marketing teams can use the Oracle Digital Assistant to get help and support when using Oracle Responsys to create promotional campaigns. In addition, brands can increase customer engagement by enabling customers that receive promotions via Oracle Responsys to speak with the Oracle Digital Assistant to redeem or gather additional information on a promotion.


• New Data Enriched B2B Sales Capabilities: A new integration with Oracle DataFox delivers AI-sourced company data and signals that bridge the gap between marketing and sales teams. The integration also helps marketing teams optimize targeting and sales teams enhance engagements to bolster customer relationships and win more business.
• B2B Campaign Orchestration: By helping ensure leads are connected to accounts, the new Oracle DataFox integration increases alignment between marketing and sales teams when executing account-based strategies.
• Account Enrichment: By enriching account records and providing a deeper understanding of customers, the powerful insights from Oracle DataFox enable sales teams to better profile and classify a customer base or leverage data for campaign segmentation and accurate territory definitions.
• Account Prioritization: By helping sales teams rank accounts and focus on high-value prospects and key targets, the integration with Oracle DataFox helps sales teams improve go-to-market efficiency and achieve a faster path to revenue.
• Smart Talking Points: Real-time alerts on market changes of target accounts delivered by Oracle DataFox help sales teams help increase conversion rates of emails and phone calls with more personalized and contextual talking points.

New Industry Solution Capabilities: New AI-powered industry-specific solutions help customers in the telecom and media, financial services and public sector industries deliver innovative customer experiences and achieve predictable and tangible business results.

• Telecom and Media: New Enterprise Product Catalog gives customers increased flexibility and reduced time to market by enabling new products and offers to be rapidly defined and published across sales, procurement, fulfillment and billing catalogs.
• Financial Services: New AI recommendations help banking associates increase new offer uptake and customer satisfaction, while one unified UX design environment across marketing, sales and service applications increases productivity by simplifying complex processes.
• Public Sector: New chatbot capabilities help cities personalize the citizen experience and simplify incident reporting by citizens, field visits by case workers, payouts and more.

To help organizations create experiences that build, protect, and differentiate their brands, Oracle today announced powerful new updates to its enterprise-class customer data management (CDP) platform. By bringing together customer data from marketing and advertising systems, the latest updates to Oracle CX Unity enable organizations to provide personalized and contextual experiences across all customer interactions, from website visits and online ads to customer service calls and in-store transactions.

Oracle CX Unity provides B2B and B2C brands with a complete customer intelligence platform for managing all their customer data. It brings together online, offline, and third-party customer data sources and then applies built-in machine learning to prescribe the optimal experience within existing business processes. This enables brands to create a single and dynamic view of the customer in real time and then use that customer intelligence to deliver experiences that increase sales, improve satisfaction, and grow customer lifetime value.

ShopBack, a loyalty and discovery platform with over eleven million members across eight countries in the Asia-Pacific region, selected Oracle CX Unity to unify its customer data and deliver a personalized service to its customers. 

“Managing data across multiple countries, languages and applications has always been a focus for us. In order to create a personalized customer experience at scale, we needed to aggregate our data to create one system of record,” said Scott Tan, head of CRM, ShopBack. “Oracle CX Unity will not only allow us to weave our customer data together to create a single source of truth, but will also provide the insights needed to deliver richer interactions with our customers.”

Oracle CX Unity connects with Oracle’s Data Management Platform (DMP) and ID Graph solutions to enable brands to bring together traditional marketing and advertising data, including online, offline, and third-party customer data sources. By delivering known and unknown insights from disparate adtech and martech systems in milliseconds, the new integrations enable B2C and B2B brands to orchestrate personalized, in-the-moment experiences whenever and however a customer or prospect chooses to interact.

“Unifying customer data from different marketing and advertising systems is the only way brands will be able to eliminate blind spots and make every customer interaction matter,” said Rob Tarkoff, executive vice president, Oracle CX Cloud and Oracle Data Cloud. “At Oracle, we are uniquely positioned to bring those worlds together, and that enables us to provide brands with the most trusted, proven, and complete customer intelligence capabilities available today.”

Launched in October 2018, Oracle CX Unity is pre-integrated with Oracle Customer Experience (CX) Cloud. Oracle CX Cloud is an integrated set of applications that helps customers reduce IT complexity, deliver innovative customer experiences, and achieve predictable and tangible business results.

To help organizations plan and execute more efficient and agile supply chain operations, Oracle has expanded Oracle Supply Chain Management (SCM) Cloud with new collaboration, integration, and digital assistant capabilities. The latest updates to Oracle SCM Cloud include the introduction of Oracle Business Network, a B2B network, and a new digital assistant for supply chain.

“In many cases, the natural complexity of an organization’s supply chain is made worse by the complexity of the technology used to manage it,” said Jon Chorley, chief sustainability officer and group vice president, supply chain management, Oracle. “To outpace change and stay ahead of competitors amid changing market conditions, organizations need technology that removes complexity and provides clear and actionable insights into their business. The new innovations within Oracle SCM Cloud help customers streamline collaboration with new trading partners and improve operational intelligence so they can move faster and outperform the market.”

Oracle Business Network

Oracle SCM Cloud includes comprehensive capabilities to connect various trading parties for B2B collaboration, either directly or through third-party networks, such as Transcepta for e-invoicing, Justransform for logistics and GHX for healthcare. The release of the Oracle Business Network further simplifies this process by enabling customers to easily search for and connect to trading partners who are already registered on the network directly from within Oracle Cloud Applications. This enables seamless electronic exchange of business documents and removes the complexity of establishing and supporting these trading relationships. In addition, a planned integration with Oracle DataFox will enable real-time trading partner insights from DataFox’s AI-sourced-and-managed firmographic dataset to reduce risk and to further improve business agility.

Oracle Digital Assistant for Supply Chain Management

Digital assistants represent a new paradigm for user interaction, where there is a “conversation” between the user and the digital assistant with “skills” to monitor activity and spot and solve problems rapidly and effectively. Oracle Cloud Applications are developing digital assistant skills across a wide variety of use cases, including supply chain. Oracle Digital Assistant for Supply Chain Management provides an intuitive and conversational user interface to help customers simplify root-cause analysis for improved supply chain performance. Initial functionality will focus on logistics uses cases (including checking on status, tracking deviations from plans, and reporting incidents), with plans to expand to all aspects of supply chain.

Oracle was named a Leader in Gartner’s recent “Magic Quadrant for Supply Chain Planning System of Record.” Oracle was named a Leader in the “Magic Quadrant for Warehouse Management Systems” and “Magic Quadrant for Transportation Management Systems.”

For additional information on Oracle Supply Chain Management (SCM) Cloud, visit Facebook, Twitter or the Oracle SCM blog.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Sales and operations planning—or integrated business planning—are well-documented processes and relevant to all organizations. However, most organizations still manage these processes on a spreadsheet or in siloed systems that are expensive and/or obsolete.

The struggle to get the right data at the right time and in the right format is well known, and as the pace of change increases, it is only going to become a bigger and bigger headache.

Data cannot be trapped in silos while organizations ask people to work across departments and business units. At the same time, organizations cannot afford to have disconnected systems that present one reality to one group and a different reality to another group when employees, customers, and partners expect organizations to operate as one. It not only increases costs, but also creates the risk of falling behind competitors that are able to use real-time data to plan and execute. 

To address this challenge and help customers anticipate changing market conditions and adapt plans and forecasts accordingly, we are announcing a solution for Integrated Business Planning and Execution. By integrating elements from Oracle Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Cloud and Oracle Supply Chain Management (SCM) Cloud, this solution helps customers improve operational efficiency, reduce costs and improve business agility by integrating financial planning with supply chain operations.

With Oracle’s solution for Integrated Business Planning and Execution customers will be able to:

• Consolidate planning in a single hub: This will allow customers to deploy and integrate multiple planning elements – financial planning and budgeting, sales and operations planning, sales and operations execution, marketing, new product/service introduction, etc. – within a single place.
• Integrate planning with execution: This will allow customers to eliminate latency and ensure no business value is lost due to delays in consolidating insights and adapting to changing conditions. Or put another way, the left hand will finally meet the right.
• Predict and prevent performance issues: This will help customers identify future performance gaps and offer alternative solutions by using embedded machine learning capabilities to address problems before it is too late.
• Escalate issues from machine to human intervention: Customers will be able to detect unexpected events and either automate the responses or select exceptions for cases that will require human intervention.
• Benefit from one unified data model: Our unified data model provides customers with a single view of data across multiple departments and lines of business while also ensuring that changes to data points are reflected across all applications and views.
• Choose modules and deployment options: Customers will have the flexibility to choose from a range of planning and execution modules and deploy the solution in the way that best fits with their business.

Oracle customers who are already using both Oracle EPM Cloud and Oracle SCM Cloud can take advantage of this functionality today. If you are attending Oracle OpenWorld this week, please attend my session, “Oracle’s Integrated Business Planning Evolution: Agile Planning and Execution,” Tuesday, September 17, 11:15 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. in Moscone West, Room 3010.

Future Product Disclaimer

The following is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, timing, and pricing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products may change and remains at the sole discretion of Oracle Corporation.

At Industries for the Blind and Visually Impaired (IBVI), there is one ultimate measure of success: jobs created.

More than seven million US adults are blind or visually impaired and an estimated 70 percent of them are not employed full-time. IBVI employs people who are blind for a wide range of jobs, from assembly of tool kits for military troops to various customer service and office roles. IBVI is always looking for ways to improve product quality and accuracy around factors such as shipment status and inventory. Unlike most companies, however, IBVI is not looking to cut its labor costs. Its mission is to create opportunities.

“If we don’t employ an additional person, it doesn’t help us,” IBVI chief innovation officer Emmanuel Vouvakis says. “In order for us to scale and grow, we needed a solid and accessible platform.”

The problem and the solution

IBVI sells products in part under a US government program called AbilityOne, in which government and defense agencies buy products from contractors that create jobs for people with disabilities. IBVI sees opportunities to expand into new markets. It’s also facing new online competition that is starting to sell into its markets.

To meet those challenges, IBVI has moved from a collection of disparate legacy software systems onto the full suite of Oracle Cloud Applications for functions including financials, supply chain, product configurations, human resources, and customer experience. The company chose Oracle Cloud Applications because the integrated platform makes it easier to access its sales and operations data and it is compatible with accessibility tools such as JAWS (text-to-speech) and ZoomText.

The past and the present

In the past, most of the jobs available to the blind community were limited to manufacturing and assembly. Jobs in customer service and finance required the assistance of one sighted person for every four blind employees. Since implementing the new Oracle Cloud Applications system, IBVI has been able to create new independent roles (no sighted assistance required) in customer service, human resources, and financial management. Sandra Teague-Martin, for example, had worked in a real estate office for years until losing most of her vision to glaucoma. She joined IBVI doing assembly work and then was promoted to an office role, where she now uses Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Cloud to enter and track orders.

“I didn’t think it would be possible to find employment like this where I’m accepted, where I’m equal to people who are sighted,” Teague-Martin says.

Deborah Ambro-Crandell lost her sight at age 16. But this hasn’t stopped her on her quest to become a CEO. Currently, she leads IBVI’s customer success team, managing 12 employees—all team members are blind except one.

“Anything can happen to any of us at any given moment. But every limitation in life comes with a choice. You can let it stop you, or you can fight and overcome it,” says Ambro-Crandell. “It’s incredible what humans can do when faced with a challenge.”

About Industries for the Blind and Visually Impaired (IBVI)

IBVI’s values include creating and growing employment opportunities for people who are blind or visually impaired; providing the best, most cost-effective industrial supplies and friendly customer service; and to be the leading voice in educating businesses on how to create, design, and build accessible workplaces for the blind and visually impaired.

The TrueBlue family of staffing companies connects more than 700,000 people with jobs around the world every year. Whether providing temporary workers for a local business or filling permanent professional staff for a multi-national brand, TrueBlue’s information management needs are complex.  

TrueBlue’s technology expertise centers around innovation that is reshaping the staffing industry, such as its AI-powered Affinix application that accelerates sourcing and hiring for customers of its PeopleScout brand; and JobStack, a mobile app that fills a job every nine seconds, 24/7, in the PeopleReady brand. So when it came to simplifying and modernizing its core corporate information systems, TrueBlue turned to the expert in business systems innovation: Oracle.

TrueBlue, based in Tacoma, Wash., has grown through acquisitions and organic expansion, leaving it at one point with more than 20 legacy financial and HR systems that sometimes overlapped or conflicted with one another. Even a simple query about hourly workers might require accessing three separate time-entry systems. Unified reporting across the company’s brands involved time-consuming manual workarounds.

TrueBlue replaced all of those legacy HR and finance systems with Oracle HCM Cloud, Oracle ERP Cloud, and Oracle EPM Cloud. “We didn’t integrate our old applications with Oracle applications,” says TrueBlue CFO Derrek Gafford. “We are replacing all of those applications entirely.”

“Oracle Cloud for HR and finance has been transformational, helping us align our people strategy to support key business priorities, including aligning the right people to the right projects. It’s something that our previous systems couldn’t do,” adds Randy Rothschiller, CHRO, TrueBlue.

TrueBlue (NYSE: TBI) is a leading provider of specialized workforce solutions, helping clients improve growth and performance by providing staffing, workforce management, and recruitment process outsourcing solutions through its PeopleReady, PeopleScout, Staff Management SMX, Centerline, and SIMOS brands.

More details on TrueBlue’s story here: https://video.oracle.com/detail/video/6045077432001

What do Bell vertical lift products, Cessna and Beechcraft aircraft lines, COMMANDO Elite military vehicles and E-Z-GO golf carts have in common? Not only are they iconic and powerful brands, but they are all part of Textron’s diverse, multi-industry business product portfolio.

Textron has had a long history of success. Founded as a small New England business in 1923, the company has since grown into a network of businesses with total revenues of $14 billion, and approximately 35,000 employees with facilities and presence in 25 countries, serving a diverse and global customer base. A Fortune 500 company, Textron consists of numerous subsidiaries and operating divisions, which are responsible for the day-to-day operation of its businesses.

While growth has been consistent, Textron’s corporate office, which houses many support functions, such as finance, treasury, executive rewards, IT, legal and environmental, health and safety, was struggling to keep up. The company needed to find a way to automate core business processes and improve decision making. Holding it back from realizing this vision was its outdated on-premises business management system.

Textron was looking for a cloud-based solution with built-in functionality to automate core business processes and improve decision making through real-time insights and reporting. In addition, it needed to eliminate the costly and time-consuming application updates its previous system required so it could adopt the latest technology innovations and adapt to changing business demands. After an in-depth vendor evaluation, Textron replaced its corporate office’s 20-year-old legacy system with Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Cloud – all in just 14 weeks.

Live for almost a year now, Textron’s corporate office is now able to increase productivity, reduce costs and improve controls by streamlining financial processes and reporting while taking advantage of cloud innovations and automatic upgrades.

“With Oracle ERP Cloud, we've been able to save time and significantly reduce costs. Instead of upgrades taking nine months and thousands of dollars to implement, we are able to upgrade features in a day and a half with no business disruption,” said Kelli Gudz, senior finance systems manager, Textron.

Building on the success of its Oracle ERP Cloud implementation, Textron is currently in the process of enhancing its Oracle Cloud Applications footprint to include Oracle Tax Reporting Cloud Service.

Titan International, Inc., a leading global manufacturer of off-highway wheels, tires, assemblies and undercarriage products, has started moving its core business and manufacturing processes to Oracle Cloud Applications. With Oracle Cloud Applications for finance, supply chain and manufacturing, Titan International will be able to take advantage of an integrated suite of applications to break down silos, quickly and easily embrace the latest advancements in machine learning and Internet of Things technology, and improve user engagement, collaboration and performance.

Headquartered in Quincy, Illinois, Titan has been manufacturing wheels and tires for the farming and construction industry for more than 125 years. To meet changing customer expectations and improve business performance, the Titan team decided it was time to replace their existing systems with a cloud-based platform that could improve visibility into core business processes, enhance reporting, reduce costs and improve production quality. After a careful evaluation, Titan selected Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Cloud, Oracle Supply Chain Management (SCM) Cloud and Oracle Internet of Things (IoT) Cloud to meet these needs and take its first step in a journey towards Industry 4.0 capabilities and building a “smart” factory.

“To better support our customers, we needed to move from multiple systems to a single platform that would give us better visibility into our business,” said Jeff Blattner, Director of IT at Titan International. “We wanted to standardize on an ERP system that could grow with us and ensure our systems are always up-to-date. Oracle Cloud Applications gives us access to constant innovation and enables us to benefit from emerging technology, such as IoT, to gain an advantage over the market.”

With Oracle ERP Cloud, Oracle SCM Cloud and Oracle IoT Cloud, Titan will be able to take advantage of a single integrated cloud platform to break down organizational silos, standardize processes and manage financial, supply chain and manufacturing data. By automating manual processes and using data from sensors to improve insights into inventory, Titan’s production and shipping teams will save time by streamlining processes. A second phase will introduce this automation to more production areas. The final phase of the rollout will include machine monitoring on the shop floor so that Titan can better understand the health of its machines and do predictive maintenance to reduce disruption of production. Titan International is working with Deloitte to implement and deploy the new Oracle Cloud Applications.

“The potential of emerging technologies like IoT and machine learning in manufacturing is starting to be realized as organizations like Titan International move their core business applications to the cloud,” said Rick Jewell, senior vice president, Supply Chain & Manufacturing Applications, Oracle. “With a single platform for finance, supply chain and manufacturing data, Titan will be able to benefit from real-time visibility and responsiveness at every step of the production process—from raw materials to customer fulfillment. By delivering real-time data streams and predictive insights, Oracle Cloud Applications help customers improve business processes and achieve a quick ROI.”

For additional information on Oracle Cloud Applications visit oracle.com/cloud/applications.

To learn more about how Titan International is using Oracle Cloud Applications, watch this video.

Building on Oracle and Microsoft’s cloud interoperability partnership, Oracle today announced the availability of an integration between Oracle Digital Assistant and Microsoft Teams. Enterprise customers can now access Oracle Cloud Applications through an AI-powered voice experience in Teams.

“Using Oracle Digital Assistant, business users can simply and conversationally interact with business applications directly from their Microsoft Teams interface just as they would collaborate with their fellow employees or other productivity tools,” said Suhas Uliyar, vice president, AI and Digital Assistant, Oracle. “Completing daily work tasks becomes much more efficient as the AI-trained conversational access doesn’t require additional employee training on different applications. This is yet another way we are enabling customers to run mission-critical enterprise workloads across Microsoft 365 and Oracle Cloud.”

Once Oracle Digital Assistant is enabled from the Teams App Store, users can query Oracle Cloud Applications, such as CX and HCM, through a bot conversation. Skills from Oracle Digital Assistant are auto provisioned and auto configured, tapping into the richness of the Teams experience. “Together, Oracle Digital Assistant and Teams enable our customers to transform existing workflows and save time,” said Bhrighu Sareen, general manager, Microsoft Teams Platform. “This integration reduces context change for people since it eliminates the need to switch between applications, enabling them to complete tasks like viewing a sales pipeline in Oracle CX without leaving Teams.”

Today, the integration of Oracle Digital Assistant and Teams provides customers with a frictionless work environment to boost productivity and faster decision making. In the future, out-of-the-box skills or chatbots for Oracle ERP Cloud, Oracle HCM Cloud and Oracle CX Cloud are planned to be available in Teams via the Oracle Digital Assistant. These pre-built features can enable employee self-service for scenarios spanning sales, project management, expenses, productivity, time and absence management, compensation and benefits, and recruiting.

“We’ve been working closely with our partner IntraSee to create a HR digital assistant for our global employee base and Oracle Digital Assistant was the natural choice for us because of its ability to securely operate in our hybrid cloud infrastructure,” said Mark Burgess, senior director, HR Technology Solutions, Honeywell. “Our aim is to have it be the preferred method to get questions answered 24x7, access to policies and an amazing end-to-end approach for completing transactions with more speed and accuracy. We knew we wanted our HR digital assistant to be available where employees spend their time online, and an integration with Teams was therefore essential. Our vision is to have it become to employees what J.A.R.V.I.S. is to Iron Man.”

“We are excited to hear that Oracle Digital Assistant will support Teams,” said Sayan Ray, vice president, IT, SRF Ltd. “We’ve been using Oracle Digital Assistant to deliver conversational interfaces to our backend systems with great success. We also use Teams to collaborate so this partnership will help take Oracle Digital Assistant implementation to new levels in productivity gains.”

For more information on Oracle Digital Assistant for Teams, please sign up for private preview today.

Oracle today announced availability of its AI-trained voice with Oracle Digital Assistant. Now, enterprise customers can use voice commands to communicate with their enterprise applications to drive desired actions and outcomes, enriching the user experience with conversational AI, simplifying interactions and improving productivity.

“Enterprises are demanding an AI-powered voice assistant that understands their specific vocabulary and enables naturally expressive interactions for its users,” said Suhas Uliyar, vice president, AI and Digital Assistant, Oracle. “Most of all though, enterprises value a highly secure AI-powered voice assistant that stores their business’ sensitive data in Oracle’s second generation cloud infrastructure.”

Built on Oracle’s next-generation infrastructure, Oracle Digital Assistant applies AI with deep semantic parsing for natural language processing (NLP), natural language understanding (NLU) and custom machine learning (ML) algorithms. This combination allows Oracle Digital Assistant to understand a user’s natural conversation, derive intent, produce compositional logical forms, and identify and learn user behavior patterns in order to proactively take action on behalf of the user. A no-code tool that allows enterprises to build conversational experiences, Oracle Digital Assistant can also integrate with human agent work-flows and business processes without any coding required.

Oracle’s intelligent voice assistant for the enterprise brings conversational AI to new applications by analyzing enterprise-specific and domain-specific vocabulary on which open and consumer-oriented domain models are not trained on. Oracle Digital Assistant, the only enterprise digital assistant on the market today, makes voice and user interactions more expressive by processing complex queries and deriving intelligence from all available enterprise applications, such as ERP, CRM and HR systems to respond in the context to the request made.

The NLP engines that power today’s traditional messaging-based channels lack the ability to handle highly expressive sentences. Voice interactions, however, enable expressive conversations which require NLP engines to manage much more complex constructs. Linguistic constructs like relative clauses, comparatives, superlatives, negation, anaphora, ordinals, cardinals, superlatives, ellipsis, quantifiers and conjunctions now need to be processed by the NLP engines that require more sophistication than the simple intent classification and slot-filling engines available today.

Oracle Digital Assistant NLP now comes with a semantic parser that understands these complex linguistic constructions and produces compositional logical forms that go beyond slot-filling. A sales key account manager can, for example, use Oracle Digital Assistant to schedule a lunch meeting with the Key Account Director or “KAD” and locate the most convenient parking garage for the meeting. Asking the Oracle Digital Assistant to “Find the address of the closest parking garage near the Japanese restaurant by Japantown’s Peace Pagoda” will return directions to the nearest parking garage not the Japanese restaurant. In addition, the acronym “KAD” is a contextual and enterprise-specific term which consumer-grade voice systems typically misinterpret. Oracle Digital Assistant is uniquely able to distinguish enterprise- and domain-specific vocabulary that various HCM, ERP and CX systems use regularly.

Oracle Digital Assistant is pre-built with AI-trained enterprise skills across ERP, SCM, HCM and CX and can connect to multiple back-end systems simultaneously to orchestrate user interactions across various application skills. With these plug-and-play skills, line-of-business users only have to interface with one digital assistant that can source the right information from employee directories, expense management systems or an assortment of other enterprise applications, including Oracle Cloud Application offerings. Oracle Digital Assistant can also be deployed to popular conversational interfaces, such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, Facebook Messenger, WeChat and across voice interfaces like Siri and Alexa.

Customer Spotlight

Customers in various industries showcase the power of Oracle Digital Assistant.

“We consider voice powered assistants to be a game-changing element with our customers,” said Kumar Thakur, principal architect, Exelon Utilities. “No apps to download or launch, just simply talk to the Oracle Digital Assistant, just as if you’re talking to the help desk and get your problems addressed automatically. When you scale that to millions of customers, the savings are easy to see.”

“Deploying the chatbot is going to make significant savings this year,” said Chris Ashworth, CIO, Hermes. “Oracle Digital Assistant now handles 38 percent of our customer queries providing us with significant cost savings and an increase in our customer satisfaction levels.”

“We will be using Oracle’s new voice recognition technology to ‘understand’ the beekeeper’s spoken words,” said Sabiha Malik, founder and executive president, The World Bee Project CIC. “We have developed ‘The World Bee Project Bee Assistant’ in collaboration with Oracle.  The new voice recognition technology does radically improve the ease and accuracy of hive inspections as beekeepers are guided by voice responses and can effortlessly record the data from their inspections. Thanks to this contribution from Oracle, we will be able to use our ‘World Bee Project Bee Assistant’ to help beekeepers and bee-keeping farmers worldwide to develop best beekeeping practices to improve the health of their bee colonies by better understanding the relationships between bee health, hive conditions and hive environments.”

“Oracle Digital Assistant has given us tremendous results by helping to scale up our service delivery to prospective students,” said Catherine Cherry, director, Prospect Management, University of Adelaide. “Our International Eligibility chatbot has enabled us to improve our student experience for international students. With this brand-new service, we are able to answer the most critical question prospects will ask us – ‘am I eligible?’ – 24/7 around the globe. In terms of business outcomes, the Eligibility chatbot allows us to extend our workforce and deal with higher enquiry volumes. It is also bringing us new leads from new geographic markets and leads that have a qualification level that would not be possible to gather any other way at the speed and scale of the chatbot. The new sophisticated voice capabilities of Oracle Digital Assistant offer us the ability to extend this new service to our second most used channel – phone – which simply would not be possible for us without a virtual agent.”

Industry Accolade

Oracle has been recognized by industry analyst reports for its multi-channel and digital experience development platform.

• Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Multiexperience Development Platforms, July 10, 2019