A business manager’s guide to next generation cloud applications.
Recent global events ushered in an era of unprecedented business disruption. So, ask yourself this: How can we be the “best” in the business and ready for whatever comes next?
Can you rely on your current technology to help you solve problems and change course quickly?
Crisis response begins with recovery and ends with resiliency. But it's just the start of a process that involves rethinking how your business, your partnerships, and your processes run. You need to identify and solve business problems fast. That’s how you begin to build business growth based on continuous innovations so that you can get ahead and stay ahead—no matter what the future brings.
At Oracle we built resilience into our own company by modernizing and innovating business processes in the cloud. What we learned from that experience helps us provide guidance on how to take of advantage of the benefits of the cloud and successfully creating a sustainable, responsible, and digitally transformative business.
Becoming a resilient company involves adopting change and preparing for all eventualities, which might at first seem challenging—yet the rewards are great.Doug Kehring Executive Vice President, Oracle Corporate Operations
At Oracle, we built resilience into our own company by modernizing our business processes in the cloud. What we learned from that experience helps us provide guidance on how to take advantage of the benefits of the cloud and successfully phase in an enterprisewide digital transformation.
Every aspect of Oracle’s business worldwide now runs in the cloud, and we’ve helped more than 26,000 of our customers with their own business application needs.
Get details on Oracle’s transformation
Only Oracle has the deepest, most complete set of SaaS applications for every aspect of business, with the most advanced global cloud infrastructure available in the market today.Larry Ellison Executive Chairman and Chief Technology Officer, Oracle
Matthew Savard, Director of Analytics, Adventist Health
In times of upheaval, businesses tend to focus on solving the urgent issues directly in front of them. Yet many companies are taking a different approach, turning disruption into opportunity by adopting composable thinking and composable business technologies. Composable organizations recognize that business conditions for everything from customer demands to financial models often change. So they empower their employees to respond and adapt to those new conditions. By implementing innovative software that is composable by design, built by a company with a customer-first mindset, you can be prepared to weather difficult conditions and establish a strong foundation for thriving in an uncertain future.
Use your data to solve today’s issues and create resilience
Work with your cloud provider to select the software that will help you surface new insights. Find new ways to use your business data to respond faster to change. You’ll build resilience for your organization.
Think beyond the quick fix: Plan your approach to the cloud
With so many cloud providers available, you may be tempted to subscribe to multiple providers to solve the various issues you’re facing. But an accidental architecture approach can create data silos that prevent you from capturing the full value of your data. It also makes it more difficult to secure and manage multiple integrations.
Consolidate your applications portfolio with a trusted provider
Look for a partner with a customer-first approach, one who is listening and responding to their customers’ issues. For example, when we designed our Cloud Applications, we listened to our customers and built a complete suite of business applications from the ground up. Applications help our customers eliminate data silos, simplify data management, and better protects their data, even as businesses grow and change.
Bill Roy, Senior Director of Enterprise Performance Management, Western Digital
Your organization may be ready for modern cloud applications if one or more of these conditions is present.
Customizations are a very real issue with legacy applications. Many customizations aren’t “upgrade safe,” and every customization or upgrade in your on-premises system incurs extra costs and involves extra time to test.
You’re unable to keep up with the latest security threats.
You struggle to apply emerging technologies, such as AI, to your business processes.
Your company’s physical infrastructure is past due for an expensive capital replacement.
Your system fees and services costs are increasing annually.
Growth in disconnected systems and data silos results in conflicting answers to key questions, added costs, and increased security risks.
International expansion, mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures are hampered by your applications.
Increasing financial and compliance requirements impact your business.
Your business cannot keep up with increasing demands from customers, partners, and employees.
Your existing business model and processes aren’t fast or agile enough to address remote work, virtual connections with customers, or volatile supply chains.
Andrew McGee, IT Manager, Australian Finance Group Ltd.
Our complete cloud suite of SaaS applications brings consistent processes and a single source of truth across the most important business functions—from enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, and human capital management to advertising and customer experience. The applications help you improve your customer engagements, increase your business’s agility, and react to change faster than ever before. And all of these applications sit on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, a foundation built from scratch to support mission-critical applications.
You get the latest advances in the best technology-ready when you need it. You’ll spend less time analyzing requirements and integrating, managing and upgrading hardware and software.
You don’t have to compromise by choosing between breadth and depth or short-term needs and long-term priorities. A fully integrated cloud suite enables you to bring teams together, create a single source of truth, and experiment with process and business model innovation.
Deep integrations between applications, as well as a common data model, common workflow engine, and a consistent user interface ensure that data is not trapped in silos. Your teams can quickly and easily work together. Business users across your organization have equal and consistent access to the latest capabilities to put your business on a path to reinvention. Collaboration across departments improves and enables roles and responsibilities to evolve as you continue to define what’s next for your business.
With the most comprehensive and robust technology portfolio, unmatched security, and future-proof innovations built in. Oracle’s complete SaaS suite helps you outpace change and be ready for the future. Why deal with the headache of multiple software providers? Eliminate headaches, lower costs, and gain the increased functionality, innovations, and security that your business needs.
We deliver the most complete cloud available today, from Financials, Supply Chain and Manufacturing, Human Resources, Sales, Service, and Marketing—all on a unified technology stack, all on best-in-class technology—which allows you to adopt the most complete solution, not just disparate products that you have to weave together into a solution. This gives you a better experience, better cost, better performance.Steve Miranda Executive Vice President, Oracle Applications Development
A complete business application suite can offer you the following important advantages:
As customers demand instant delivery and more transparency about their products, an agile supply chain can keep you on top of customer demands while responding to ever-changing capacity and supplier performance within your supply chain.
With a supply chain that is responsive from end to end, you can make faster decisions and drive process efficiency while improving your profit performance and managing your working capital. Extend your supply chain with Oracle’s embedded advanced technologies, such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain, to adapt to changing conditions with new capabilities.
A resilient end-to-end supply chain embedded with IoT enables you to track where your products go, see when they move across borders, and visualize journeys such as a farm-to-table path in real time. Oracle Blockchain enables you to look back historically to where your product or materials were sourced.
A complete, connected solution can help you understand how well your entire business is operating at any given moment, enabling more insightful, intelligent decision-making. At-a-glance dashboards, data analyses based on AI and machine-learning (ML), rule-based financial consolidation, and more informed forecasting, modeling, and reporting across the enterprise are all possible. A further advantage is that you can easily model business continuity and recovery scenarios to prepare for the next disruption.
Technology that frees your finance and operations talent from mundane tasks can bring both resilience and cost savings to your business.
Today, more than ever, supply chain and finance professionals need full visibility and high performance across their applications to make critical business decisions fast. Transparency, collaborative planning, speed, and accuracy are all crucial elements of an innovative and agile supply chain.
With a complete, connected ERP solution, you can close your books in days, not weeks. You can account for different businesses when you make new acquisitions. From sharing information across departments to improving forecast accuracy, a connected ERP solution accelerates insights and collaboration.
Siloed HR and finance systems create mismatched data, making it difficult to analyze workforce costs, assess the impact of potential changes, and scale the workforce up or down in response to business needs. Bringing your HR and finance systems together will provide your business with the following benefits:
• Break through operational silos
• Reduce integration complexity
• Deliver a simple and engaging experience to all your employees
One cloud can strengthen alignment between finance and HR to realize better business outcomes.
Digital transformation is about finding ways for humans and machines to work together to get work done fast. A complete, connected human capital management (HCM) solution connects every human resource process from hire to retire—including global HR, talent management, and workforce management. When systems are easy to use, your people can focus on business resilience and transformation.
In the Experience Economy, using the right data at the right time enables you to give your customers with great experiences. A complete, connected customer experience (CX) solution makes it easier for you to acquire new online customers globally and provide new products or services to them quickly. Deeper data insights can also enhance your understanding of your customers and provide a clear view of front and back-office operations.
When AI and ML are embedded into SaaS applications, you’ll access adaptive, artificially intelligent applications and digital assistants that are purpose-built to solve specific business challenges. AI discovers insights and amplifies customer value across CX, HCM, ERP, and SCM with dynamic decision science. An application-focused approach delivers cutting-edge AI and ML to you with minimal cost and effort.
Jason Ringgenberg, CIO, YRC Worldwide
We replaced 20+ legacy systems with Oracle's ERP, EPM, and HCM Cloud. A turning point for our organization was accepting that this was not an IT problem but an overall business problem. We realized what the cost of not acting was.
CFO and Executive Vice President, TrueBlue
Subscriptions can provide a path to greater revenue predictability, so even B2B organizations such as industrial manufacturers with complex goods and services are pursuing these newer business models. Managing subscriptions successfully, though, requires unified data across your business. Only with unified data can you deliver hard goods, digital goods, and services in a single subscription and track, process, and manage recurring revenues accurately and efficiently. Oracle Subscription Management integrates front and back-office processes on a unified platform for centralized control so that your teams can maintain revenue recognition and deliver a more consistent customer experience.
86% of CX leaders agree that five years from now, their company will leverage AI and machine learning to customize every product, service, or offer.
Make AI work for your business and IT operations. Accelerate smart automation, eliminate human errors, surface anomalies and risks, get better business insights, and deliver personalized recommendations across Oracle Fusion Cloud CX, HCM, ERP, and SCM Applications.
With embedded adaptive intelligence and machine learning, these applications are ready to go and do not require any configuration or model tuning to deploy. This enables a faster time to business insights, acceleration of processes, faster time to market, improved customer experiences, and competitive advantage—all while reducing costs and improving productivity.
Oracle's pervasive AI delivers advanced financial and operational insights, personalized customer and employee experience, and helps companies to address constant changes, be more resilient and agile, mitigate risks, and develop new business models.
68% of people would trust a robot more than their manager, and 63% say AI has increased their productivity at work.
51% of organizations are already using AI to manage financial processes and 85% of business leaders want help from a robot for finance tasks.
86% of CX leaders agree that five years from now, their companies will leverage AI and machine learning to customize every product, service, or offer.
Users of AI within supply chain systems report an average 25% reduction in fulfillment errors, a 26% reduction in manufacturing downtime, and a 30% reduction in stockouts.
As a business user, why should you care about the technology your cloud applications are running on?
As organizations rebuild and recover from disruptions by reconfiguring their supply chains, moving customer and employee engagements to virtual work, and closing their financial books remotely, it is critical to partner with a technology provider that owns the entire technology stack.
Built on our own next-generation cloud infrastructure, we can support customers of all sizes and industries and enable them to benefit from the latest advances in technology. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) gives you everything you need to build new applications and extend your existing ones. You can run your applications more economically and with the performance, resiliency, and security that enterprises need. And, you can bring your enterprise applications to the cloud without refactoring or rewrites.
At Oracle, we own all of the technology stack that powers our suite of cloud applications. And because we own the stack, we pass our cost savings on to you. Your business no longer needs to worry about maintaining a data center, hardware, operating systems, database, network, or all the security.
What if you want to extend your Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications or build your own? Now, you can do that without considerable technical resources or staff.
The Oracle Applications platform is a user experience (UX) design system and a collection of tools that enable enterprise developers to create consumer-grade user experiences engineered to scale with Oracle Cloud Applications. These are the same tools used by our developers, now made available to customers and partners.
With the new applications platform, you can:
The Oracle Applications platform provides the tools that address your unique needs, including Redwood UX building blocks, telemetry, intelligent search, business logic engine, digital assistant, low-code development, and data visualization.
Discover how Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure can help you recapture growth and transform your business.
Our highly automated and secure cloud infrastructure is designed to run the most mission-critical, high-volume, and high-performance applications for customers of any size, and our cloud applications suite was developed with a focus on security first. An isolated design improves data protection, scalability, and performance. As part of a global ecosystem, the suite can connect securely to multicloud environments and other systems.
Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite enables customers to benefit from the latest advances in the best technology, including industry-leading security, enterprise-grade scalability, and mission critical performance—all in a connected ecosystem. We do it all, so you can focus on innovation and serving your customers.
Simply, Oracle’s tradition is to deliver the best technology to our customers.Steve Miranda Executive Vice President, Oracle Applications Development
Build AI-driven, conversational experiences for your business processes. This emerging technology interprets the user’s intent, automating processes and delivering contextual responses to voice or text commands. Discover how many forward-thinking businesses are using digital assistants, or chatbots, to gain efficiencies and offer smart customer experiences.
65% of workers are excited to welcome chatbots as their coworkers.
Users of digital assistants within financial systems report an average 36% improvement in productivity and 38% faster analysis capabilities.
87% of firms using voice assistant and chatbot technology will realize significant business value within one year of deployment.
Most companies have invested years of effort into implementing the enterprise software applications that run their business. They want to leverage the data in these applications to generate insights and create reports, but most analytics ventures require complex data models, custom-developed interfaces, and highly skilled IT professionals to guide the effort.
An added value of Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite is that companies that use embedded reporting within Oracle's Cloud ERP, HCM, CX, and SCM applications can jump-start these analytics endeavors with Oracle Fusion Analytics. Designed for line-of-business managers, executives, and analysts who want to go beyond the standard reporting in Oracle Cloud Applications, Oracle Fusion Analytics includes tools, such as out-of-the-box dashboards, reports, and key performance indicators (KPIs). You can quickly start analyzing your application data to enhance business operations in finance, HR, sales, marketing, supply chain, and other domains.
Oracle’s prebuilt analytics environment complements and extends the reporting capabilities embedded in Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications—and takes these reporting capabilities to the next level.
Oracle Fusion Analytics is prebuilt and integrates seamlessly with Oracle Cloud applications to help you get real-time access to unified company data so you can make more informed business decisions.
In addition to fast, accurate insights, Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) application capabilities, such as scenario planning are essential for organizations looking to increase growth and define their own future. Scenario planning tools and other performance management features can add tremendous value to the financial planning process.
With these tools, you can analyze the impact of outlier economic events, supply chain disruptions, and other unpredictable business changes. They also help you to align plans across not only finance, but all lines of business.
When executed properly, scenario planning is more than a financial tool. It’s an integrated approach to dealing with uncertainty and visualizing the future, enabling finance organizations to build agility and move the business forward. With a modern EPM solution, CFOs can model multiple scenarios, which is a capability that has become a requirement in a time when historical trends and assumptions are no longer reliable.
Scenario planning and related EPM software solutions offer key ways to enhance the role of finance teams—so they can take actions that will drive smarter, more accurate decision-making.
Jeff Blattner, Director of IT, Titan International
Do you have strict data privacy or regulatory concerns? Do you want the benefits of SaaS applications (speed, innovations, automatic updates, and lower costs), but in your own data center? With Oracle Cloud@Customer, you get all the benefits of SaaS applications in your own data center. No more worrying about traditional IT problems, such as maintenance and upgrades or administering SaaS applications.
What is the Redwood design system?
Redwood is Oracle’s next-generation user experience. An essential part of the Oracle Applications platform, the Redwood design system is a collection of prefabricated components, templates, and patterns that enable Oracle customers to extend their Fusion Cloud Applications or build their own Redwood apps.
Creating state-of-the-art user experience at scale requires careful collaboration and coordination, a shared vision around high-end quality, and lots of patience and discipline. That’s why we invest in Redwood as the foundation for the development of Fusion Cloud Applications. With Redwood, Fusion Cloud Applications developers can create very sophisticated and polished interactions quickly—and now you can too.
Here are a few reasons why applications built using the Redwood design system deliver extraordinary results:
“By using a thoughtfully designed set of pre-defined components and patterns in our code, we do a little more work up front, but we can then scale quickly with quality, consistency, and coherence. And ultimately, having a suite with a coherent and unified experience, means less confusion, and more satisfaction for our end users.”
As the business environment keeps changing—quickly and unpredictably—businesses are using software to be more competitive and meet evolving stakeholder demands. Cloud application software provides built-in innovation and gives you the ability to respond faster to a dynamic marketplace.
Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications delivers the right technology at the right time via a consistent and modern user experience. This makes it easier for people to complete their tasks, whether they’re at their desks or on the go. They also do tasks for your people: using powerful AI and machine learning that’s already embedded in the applications to automate manual work and enable new business capabilities that weren’t possible before.
Customers also automatically receive new innovations and functionality 4 times a year, with no effort on their part. They know that Oracle has a long track record of anticipating their needs. But at the same time, they don’t want to be constantly updating their business processes. That’s why we ship all of our new functionality as opt-in features and allow our customers to adopt at their own pace.
Making the choice to plan for continuous innovation now will help you turn changes in business and technology into an opportunity. Compared to on-premises systems, cloud software makes it possible for you to spend less time maintaining and upgrading systems and more time focused on driving innovation and serving your customers.
Oracle’s success depends on innovation that matters, and we help our customers achieve the same through our commitment to research, rapid development, and rollout of new features, sustainability, and more.
Committed to innovation that matters, including strategic solutions for key industries including healthcare, utilities, government and more.
Embed sustainability into our business —our innovations extend across cloud operations and cloud applications that help our customers run their own businesses at lower costs and with less energy use.
A complete SaaS suite built on an advanced cloud infrastructure is a good choice to gain business agility and be ready for growth. But the reality is that your business may not be ready to use all of the technology or all of the business processes available across finance (ERP), SCM, HCM, and CX. That’s why it’s important that your solution makes it easy to modernize key business processes and activate application capabilities as you need them.
An end-to-end suite of applications gives a way to move your business forward. With modern, fully connected business processes that are continuously updated in your applications software you don't have to reinvent the process wheel. Yet if you want to extend or create new applications, you can do that, too.
We truly have a system that touches every aspect of our business.Jyoti Sidhu Vice President of Operations, Ballard Power Systems
Every organization can leverage Oracle Cloud Applications. With more than 1,100 cloud applications, you have unparalleled choice through the world’s most complete suite of applications. Built on the best technology, Oracle Cloud Applications delivers continuous innovation with applications across every business function—and you gain the business resilience, security, and flexibility your business needs.
Get started with cloud applications that enable you to respond to market demands faster, present more targeted offers to customers, manage your finances better, and empower your workforce with modern software solutions.
Our sales teams and partners will get you started on your journey to the cloud to build a foundation for your growth and success.
The time is now—your journey to Oracle Cloud starts today.
Whether you want to improve an existing or new business process, innovate in one key area, or reduce data silos with a unified suite of applications, we are here to support your journey every step of the way. Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite is a complete, connected suite of cloud applications and the best technology, with comprehensive security, scalable deployment, and high performance for:
Gain the resilience and agility you need and position your organization for continuous innovation and growth. Move to the cloud faster, more easily, and with less risk than with other ERP providers.
Seamlessly connect finance with every part of your business for enterprisewide agility, alignment, and insights. Analyze, plan, budget, forecast, and generate reports by using embedded intelligence to drive better decisions with scenario modeling and built-in, advanced analytics.
Deliver a consistent experience across devices with a single source of truth for better-informed decision-making. Easy access, simple and intuitive AI, and personalized experiences increase business agility and help your workforce do their best work.
Proactively adapt to changing conditions with the latest innovations at your fingertips. Make faster decisions with agile manufacturing and supply chain execution and planning that meets the demands of connected sales, service, and supply chain.
Develop strong and lasting customer relationships with personalized experiences built on intelligent interpretations of customer signals. Unify your systems and applications across the organization to deliver real-time personalized customer experiences.
“We know that we can’t sell you software and say ‘good luck to you.’ We are here to serve you. Ultimately, for us, our greatest success is when we see you successful.”
Maz Songerwala, SVP Cloud Service Excellence and Steve Miranda, EVP Applications Development, discuss how unified customer service helps your Oracle Cloud Applications deployment deliver measurable success.
The foundation of Oracle's customer-first mindset is a unified approach to customer service and success. Oracle product development, support, and customer success teams align within the same organization and focus on common goals. We start with designing products from the customer's perspective. We engage our customers with a continuous proactive and predictive engagement model for support that goes beyond problem resolution and ensures that our customers are using the products according to industry best practices and deriving value from the solutions.
Partner with Oracle
Jaime Vogel, CIO, AFG (Australian Financial Group)
Our customer-first mindset is evident across all aspects of Oracle, from our customer success and Iimplementation teams to support and product development. Customer Connect, our 310,000 strong customer community, helps drive innovation and new feature creation for all upgrades.
Your success in the cloud is our priority
Everything you need
Innovation that matters
Committed to your success
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For more information, visit Oracle.com/applications