Avis Budget Group gains AI-powered automation with Oracle Cloud ERP

Video: Avis Budget Group Streamlines Global Finance with Oracle Cloud ERP (2:53)

Avis Budget Group is a provider of global mobility solutions, with a fleet of more than 600,000 vehicles. To support its high rental volumes, Avis needed a better way to manage vehicle operations, planning, and maintenance. It also needed to consolidate and coordinate financial data and standardize its financial management processes globally. The company moved to Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM). In doing so, it gained greater visibility into and data around fleet vehicle purchases and associated costs—the company’s largest expense. Avis Budget also uses the embedded AI features in Oracle Fusion such as account combination defaulting, Intelligent Document Recognition, and supplier summarizations to improve and automate financial processes and enhance operational efficiency.

For years, Avis Budget Group managed its financial monitoring and reporting via multiple on-premises systems and charts of accounts spanning numerous regions and business units globally. This resulted in time-consuming processes for consolidating data and performing necessary reporting across the different transaction systems, requiring a lot of labor-intensive mapping. Avis Budget Group also lacked a single platform for managing projects and assets across the organization—one that could enable centralized approval and tracking of project budgets, expenditures, and asset capitalization around major initiatives, such as rental counter remodels.

Seeking a new and more unified approach, Avis Budget Group chose Oracle Cloud ERP and EPM to help the company standardize global processes, gain better visibility into and control over financial data and operations worldwide, and support AI adoption. Oracle Fusion Cloud Project Management was also a key factor in Avis Budget Group’s decision to adopt Oracle Cloud ERP, as it provides a central hub for managing the company’s capital spending and projects.

With Oracle Cloud ERP and EPM, Avis Budget Group has seen improvements in efficiency, data quality, visibility, and its ability to effectively manage global operations. The company has standardized financial processes, reduced general ledger accounts by 70%—as well as the overall volume of manual journal entries—and cut down the time required to close the books and update forecasts by 60%. Avis Budget Group is using the AI-powered account code combination feature in Oracle Cloud ERP to boost efficiency in payables and Intelligent Document Recognition to automate 90% of invoice processing. The company is also using generative AI tools to help summarize supplier registration attachments and highlight key information from purchase order documents, allowing Avis Budget Group’s teams to operate more efficiently and make well-informed decisions.

With Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP, Avis Budget Group can more effectively keep financial transactions flowing amid high volumes of invoices. The standardized chart of accounts and single platform have made onboarding acquisitions easier and more efficient for the company. Avis Budget Group has also improved financial controls by consolidating and reducing global entities by 60%. Gaining a clear, global view of its fleet vehicle purchases and associated costs has led to more insight into and control over a critical aspect of the company’s operations.

“We now have a complete view of what we spend and where we spend on these fleet vehicles, which are obviously the biggest expenditure for the company,” says Hendra Susanto, Director of Financial Systems.

Avis Budget Group now tracks all project-related costs through Oracle Project Management within Oracle Cloud ERP. This includes projects such as remodeling facilities and adding offices. Oracle Project Management integrates with other systems for labor costing, purchase orders, and accounts payable to capture all relevant cost data, which is then fed into Oracle EPM to support analysis and reporting on project financials across the organization.

Avis Budget Group is also using Oracle Fusion Data Intelligence to gain deeper analytics capabilities, drawing on data from Oracle Cloud ERP and EPM. The expansive insights and up-to-date dashboards provided by the platform help the company track key metrics around financial performance such as accounts payable processing and invoice approvals. The company also intends to take full advantage of the AI agents that Oracle currently offers and continues to develop to further reduce manual administrative work.

Oracle partner KPMG supported Avis Budget Group in implementing Oracle Cloud ERP and EPM. KPMG guided Avis Budget Group through the overall transformation of its finance and accounting functions, while Oracle Customer Success Services (CSS) continued to provide post go-live support, enhancements, and innovations.

Since its founding in 1946, Avis Budget Group has become one of the best known and most preferred brands in the car rental industry, with loyal customers worldwide.

Learn more about Avis Budget Group