Guardian Life unlocks greater financial insights with Oracle Cloud

Backed by more than 160 years of experience, Guardian Life helps consumers and business owners plan for their financial future. The mutual company offers life insurance, disability insurance, dental insurance, and other benefits.

Guardian Life’s years of success can be attributed to its fiscal integrity and also its constant push for innovation. A few years ago, that drive prompted the company’s decision to modernize its financial processes and systems. The company managed an environment of disparate systems, including Oracle PeopleSoft on-premises, that resulted in expensive operations, manual processes, and siloed data sources. Moreover, outdated analytics tools limited finance teams to surface level analysis and hindered their ability to generate deeper insights that could unlock further business opportunities.

Guardian Life recognized the need for an integrated system that could foster more efficient workflows, deeper analytics, and more accessible data. The company selected Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), and Oracle Fusion ERP Analytics for its value as a unified financial platform.

The breadth and depth of Oracle’s cloud offering was particularly attractive, with cutting-edge capabilities on a single platform that would help eliminate the company’s need to maintain costly legacy systems and would establish a foundation to standardize best practices across teams. Advanced capabilities and built-in automation would reduce manual tasks and gives users more time to focus on their roles instead of taking time to jump between different tools. In addition, automatic quarterly updates would provide new functionality every few months to help the company adapt to evolving business needs.

Data from a single, secure home for financial information would feed into Oracle Fusion ERP Analytics, which provides prebuilt cloud native analytics to help teams uncover deeper insights and gain visibility across the business.

The speed with which Guardian Life went live was a win in and of itself. The company worked with Deloitte to deploy core financials across Oracle Cloud ERP and Oracle Cloud EPM in nine months. This rapid implementation provided faster time to benefits. Finance teams quickly gained access to greater functionality to speed up core processes using automation and simplifying their work environment with one consolidated platform. Moving to Oracle Cloud Applications also decreased the company’s total cost of ownership because it no longer had to maintain and upgrade multiple on-premises legacy systems. Lower operational costs translated to higher dividends paid out to customers.

Guardian Life is a Fortune 500 company, yet it was managing its taxes using spreadsheets due to aging systems. Using the dedicated tax module within Oracle Cloud EPM, the tax department automated data collection, journal entries, and calculations, and gained access to the most current data, which improved tax reporting speed and efficiency.

The cloud-based platform established a central source for all financial information, and helped other departments more easily access appropriate data to accelerate their own business processes. For example, FP&A teams can plan, budget, and forecast with greater accuracy while accounting teams apply rules within Oracle Accounting Hub to automatically transform transaction information into detailed accounting entries.

All the data housed in the platform feeds directly into Oracle Fusion Analytics to aid advanced financial analysis and data visualization. Guardian Life capitalizes on the tool’s prebuilt KPIs and machine learning capabilities to conduct trend analyses at the policy holder level and drill down to the geography code where each insurance claim was submitted. This level of visibility helps the company uncover the underlying drivers of profitability and business expenditure for a clearer view of overall performance.