What is Oracle Modern Best Practice?

In a nutshell, Oracle Modern Best Practice (MBP) refers to the end-to-end business processes enabled by Oracle applications and technologies. By embedding next-generation digital technologies—such as cloud, mobile, artificial intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT)—into our applications, Oracle Modern Best Practice automates daily business activities, enabling organizations to achieve more, faster, and with less resources. From the inception, MBP processes were always available in the public domain, frequently updated, and designed to evolve with our customer needs.

Common practice vs. best practice

With industry and market leaders regularly challenged by newcomers offering new products and services enabled by new technologies, we need to rethink whether established common practices are truly best practices. When revolutionary new technologies are available, how can business processes optimized with old technology be best? As more emerging technologies reach commercial availability, today’s best practices may be out of date. To stay competitive, organizations need to continuously innovate and incorporate new technologies to their best practices.

MBP approaches common business processes as historic input, but factors in what could be done with new technologies. Based on this an approach, Oracle Modern Best Practice:

• Evolves with organizational needs as market dynamics change
• Works end-to-end, across the organization to eliminate departmental silos and ensure operational agility
• Uses emerging technologies, such as AI, to automate the mundane and unlock human creativity for new value and insight
• Incorporates next-generation, digital technologies to enable radically superior, measurable results

The technology enablers

What makes Oracle Modern Best Practice uniquely modern are the enabling technologies that are embedded into operational processes:

• Cloud: Cloud computing enables organizations to purchase business applications as a service, or software-as-a-service (SaaS,) with a “pay-as-you-go” model, lowering upfront adoption cost.
• Mobile: Mobile capabilities help you access data, conduct business transactions, and connect with your colleagues anywhere, anytime.
• Analytics: Embedded analytic capabilities enable you to monitor business performance and make better decisions with real-time KPIs and metrics on dashboards.
• Social: Embedded social collaboration for any documents in any business processes enable you to collaborate with stakeholders—regardless of location.
• The Internet of Things (IoT): The data provided by sensors and devices provides visibility and insights through real-time monitoring, operational insight, and early issue detection.
• Big data: Big data services help you uncover trends, patterns, and new opportunities by harnessing timely insights from high-volume, complex data from various sources.
• Artificial intelligence/Machine learning (AI/ML): Smart digital assistants, recommendation engines, and predictive analytics that use AI and ML help organizations automate operations, drive innovation, and make make better decisions, faster.
• Blockchain: Blockchain provides a collaborative framework to streamline record sharing and reduce transaction costs within business network with a trusted, distributed source of truth.
• Augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR): AR and VR offers more efficient ways to acquire new skills and resolve issues requiring hands-on intervention by providing immersive experiences and direct overlay of real-world environments with actionable information.

Oracle Modern Best Practice explained

The processes in Oracle Modern Best Practice are designed to exploit new capabilities made possible by digital technologies. Each process contains:

• Process steps and descriptions highlighting the use of technology to achieve the tasks
• A list of applicable enablers for the process
• Oracle product(s) to execute the process
• Popular KPIs to keep taps on the progress

For example: the requisition to receipt process in finance. Most companies have procurement processes that involve the procurement department reviewing, approving, and managing requisitions, and distributing POs to suppliers. While it’s a good approach to manage costs, it may cause delays when purchase requests need more reviews and approvals.

Oracle Modern Best Practice harnesses IoT, AI, ML, mobile, social, and analytics to speed up the process by automating manual intervention and delivering needed information to the right people.

Here’s how it works: Sensors on storage racks notify the inventory manager when the stock levels are low. POs are created automatically and sent to suppliers electronically for routine requisitions. The inventory manager gets alerts about any unusual demand. To ensure that supplier deliveries meet anticipated consumption, the inventory manager works with procurement using social collaboration (available on any device). An AI-enabled digital assistant quickly serves up supporting documents during reviews and approvals.

Opportunities exist to review every process, procedure, policy, dashboard, report, and make improvements to leverage the enablers we’ve mentioned.

Oracle Modern Best Practice—Predicted

The Oracle Modern Best Practice–Predicted ebook explores the future state of business processes where the human workforce focuses on decision-making, creative thinking, and personal contact. With the progression of embedded AI/ML and automation, the business processes of the future will be automated and able to learn as it operates.

Example: a new intelligence-driven requisition to receipt process

As you’ll discover, we see the main task for human in the requisition to receipt process will be exception handling and fine-tuning of business rules assisted by analytics and AI/ML. When an organization takes full advantage of digital technologies to create, approve, and dispatch POs based on business rules, there will be no need for manual intervention until the receiving of goods and services. Replacing the steps between requisition and receipt will be the human oversight addressing exceptions such as delivery delays caused by a hurricane. With the help of AI recommendation, the inventory manager may issue a one-off PO to resolve immediate shortage. For a long-term solution, the inventory manager can choose to set the critical component stock levels during hurricane seasons by leveraging insights from predictive analytics and the production and procurement colleagues.

Use Oracle Modern Best Practice

You can use Oracle Modern Best Practice in every stage of the cloud journey to:

• Educate stakeholders on leveraging technologies to achieve their business objectives
• Demonstrate business processes enabled by new capabilities
• Plan an adoption path
• Structure implementation scope and effort
• Benchmark progress and benefits.

At Oracle, we use MBP to lay the foundation for our own cloud transformation and embed MBP in the True Cloud Method to help our customers achieve their cloud journeys.