CACTUS Communications closes books faster with Oracle Cloud
The technology company automates its finance processes and eliminates unnecessary maintenance work by moving to Oracle Cloud.
“I found the entire dashboard setup and UI very appealing. You are able to get a snapshot of key metrics, the key takeaways, and action items. That really caught my attention.”
Business challenges
CACTUS Communications was founded by Anurag Goel and Abhishek Goel in 2002 with the aim of helping researchers bring their work to a global audience. The company’s first offering, an academic translation and editing service branded Editage, paved the way for those researchers to get published in prestigious English-language journals.
CACTUS offers a variety of solutions for academia, the life sciences, and the publishing industry, including author training and education, editing, and post-publication support. It has a global in-house team of more than 1,000, including editors, linguists, trainers, technologists, research communicators, digital content strategists, and publication support experts, all with specialized backgrounds. CACTUS is supported by 2,000-plus freelance editors, translators, medical writers, scientific reviewers, and other experts in more than 70 countries.
With the company’s rapid growth and expansion into new lines of business and countries, it needed to update its financial processes to support faster, more informed decision-making by its management, sales, product development, research, and other key teams.
Oracle Cloud ERP has helped in automating and standardizing our financial and purchasing business process globally, thereby increasing our agility and operational efficiency through timely, actionable data insights.
Why CACTUS Communications Chose Oracle
But after managing those on-premises applications for years, CACTUS decided to hand over updates, patching, integration, support, and other manual tasks to a cloud service provider—and Oracle Cloud ERP was the natural choice. CACTUS particularly liked the Oracle application’s real-time dashboards and its scalability. Cost was also an important consideration.
Results
CACTUS estimates that Oracle Cloud ERP has enabled the company to close its books each month four days earlier than before. Also, the finance team is now more efficient and can deliver higher output in the same time frame. CACTUS now consolidates all of its group financials on Oracle Cloud ERP monthly, as opposed to the irregular cycle it followed earlier.
CACTUS has implemented Oracle Cloud ERP’s procurement module to streamline vendor onboarding and procurement-to-pay cycles and eliminate manual effort. That implementation is likely to reduce by 20% the amount of time the finance team spends on such processes. CACTUS also expects to realize a “sizable reduction” in the number of unapproved payments and those not based on purchase orders, thanks to the clearly defined workflow and rules in the Oracle Cloud application.
Even more important than wringing out hard savings is the application’s ability to relieve finance department stress, as the Oracle system allows employees to focus more on strategic work and less on learning and managing the application itself.
“Operationally, the team is feeling much better,” says Karthik Balakrishnan, assistant vice president of finance and accounts. “A lot of their manual effort is replaced with an automated flow or spreadsheet-based uploads. It’s definitely improving morale.”
CACTUS also expects to see savings on personnel: Without the efficiencies gained from Oracle Cloud ERP, the company likely would have had to hire three additional finance people to keep up with expanding business volumes.
Partners
“The experience was fantastic,” he says. “From day one to even after going live…our success was their success.”