In a financial climate where agility, precision, and insightful decision-making are pivotal, businesses are leveraging advanced technological solutions to stay ahead. Oracle Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Cloud emerges as a transformative tool in this landscape, centralising and optimising financial processes and data. As we previously discussed in “Top Indicators Your Business Needs Oracle EPM Cloud“, Oracle EPM is instrumental in navigating away from the chaos of spreadsheets and the inadequacies of outdated systems, providing a modernised approach to financial management. 

Moreover, our dedicated endeavour to deliver innovative solutions was recently acknowledged as Version 1 secured the 2023 Oracle EMEA Partner of the Year Award for Innovation, affirming our commitment and expertise in Oracle Cloud services. 

Revisiting the Indicators for Change

Our last blog highlighted the critical indicators signalling the necessity for a more modern financial system, like Oracle EPM Cloud. The burdens of spreadsheet overload, ineffective reporting, and the struggle with rigid legacy systems resonate now more than ever. Oracle EPM Cloud answers these challenges by offering real-time insights, advanced reporting capabilities, and a secure environment for all financial data, allowing finance leaders to make informed and proactive decisions. 

Oracle EPM: A Focal Point for Innovation 

While our award-winning approach incorporates solutions like the Cloudbridge Suite, which accelerates integration and data migration, the emphasis here is on how Oracle EPM becomes a beacon for financial transformation. The system goes beyond merely addressing the pain points, evolving into a comprehensive solution that refines every facet of financial management.  

Oracle EPM’s blend of AI and machine learning unleashes unprecedented advantages, allowing organisations to tap into advanced analytics features, automate data gathering, and derive actionable insights. This centralisation and securing of financial data mitigate the risks and inefficiencies associated with disparate data management tools. 

The interoperability of Oracle EPM with various Enterprise Resource Planning systems (ERP) elucidates its versatility and adaptability. Whether entering a new market or introducing a new product line, Oracle EPM adapts and scales according to evolving business needs, reducing the cost, time, and resources required for upgrades and migrations. 

Oracle EPM stands not as a compartmentalised solution for the finance department but as an organisational catalyst. It ensures accurate, consolidated, and real-time data, facilitating informed decisions across different organisational sectors, and emphasizing the holistic transformation that Oracle EPM brings about in the business landscape. Oracle EPM Cloud, with its transformative capabilities, propels organisations into a new era of financial management.  

Version 1 & Oracle EPM Capabilities: A Deep Dive

Version 1 synergises with Oracle EPM to offer a suite of capabilities, meticulously designed to streamline financial processes, enhance organisational efficiency, and ensure compliance. Let’s delve deeper into the transformative potentials of this integration across different dimensions of Enterprise Performance Management.  

Connected Planning: Revolutionising Traditional FP&A 

Connected Enterprise Planning is an advanced version of traditional Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A). It bridges data from various sectors like sales, HR, operations, and the supply chain to enhance decision-making and overall performance: 

  • Unified Vision: Finance teams, traditionally the central custodians of planning data, need enhanced coordination with other departments. With Oracle EPM, this coordination is not just a step forward; it’s a leap towards holistic decision-making, ensuring every department aligns seamlessly with the organisation’s goals.
     
  • Dissolving Data Silos: Oracle EPM believes in a world where data isn’t isolated in silos. Serving as the main data hub, finance connects every department, ensuring the information is streamlined, accessible, and actionable.
     
  • Reaping Benefits: Oracle’s approach is more than just about integration; it’s about transformation. This strategy has yielded impressive results: Oracle customers have seen a 35% improvement in margins and a 30% reduction in planning cycle times. The power of connected planning lies in its ability to offer a holistic view, enabling businesses to gauge the ripple effects of changes across all departments. 

Oracle EPM’s Connected Planning is like laying the foundation for a robust financial structure. It’s about ensuring synchronisation across various business sectors to stay ahead, driving both agility and innovation. 

Financial Consolidation & Close: Streamlining Finance Functions 

Oracle EPM’s Financial Consolidation and Close platform empowers businesses to leverage a comprehensive and robust system to streamline the financial close process, reducing time and risk, while ensuring accuracy and compliance: 

  • Precision & Compliance in Financial Close: With Oracle EPM, conducting complex consolidations and creating regulatory reports is no longer a daunting task. The platform allows easy storage of all supplementary data, enabling faster and more accurate financial closes, and ensuring companies remain compliant with current regulations.
     
  • Modernising Finance Functions: The platform addresses the increasing demands placed on the Finance function. It enables businesses to reduce financial close cycles, manage supplemental data effectively, and provide rich reporting that drives a deeper understanding of financial performance, allowing Finance to evolve from a deadline-chaser to a strategic business partner.
     
  • Optimised Processes & Global Support: Businesses can leverage out-of-the-box best practice consolidation processes, requiring minimal customisation. It supports intercompany transactions, multi-currency considerations, and multiple accounting standards, providing a global solution to consolidation needs.
     
  • Enhanced Control & Visibility: The platform provides extensive control across the entire close process, allowing visibility into the progress of tasks by user and region, and facilitating the seamless collection, tracking, and auditing of all supporting supplemental data.
     
  • Streamlined Workflows & Secure Integration: Oracle EPM promotes enterprise-level collaboration with dynamic, data-driven approval orchestration and detailed security models, allowing the integration of data from various Oracle applications or other native databases, eliminating manual data preparation errors and risks.
     
  • User-Friendly Interface: The intuitive, role-based user interface increases user adoption and productivity, offering flexibility and personalisation whether accessed on a tablet or a PC, ensuring smooth navigation and a consistent experience. 

Oracle EPM’s Financial Consolidation & Close platform is a versatile solution, providing precision, compliance, and enhanced control in financial consolidation processes. Its modern, integrated, and user-friendly approach empowers Finance teams to be more proactive and strategic, driving business success. 

Account Reconciliation: Enhancing Efficiency  

Oracle EPM offers a proficient Account Reconciliation platform, enabling businesses to automate and refine reconciliation processes down to the transaction level, ensuring both accuracy and efficiency are maximised while risks are mitigated effectively: 

  • Efficiency & Accuracy in Reconciliation: by leveraging Oracle EPM, companies can enhance the efficiency and precision of the account reconciliation process. The system’s automation capabilities eliminate the need for manual efforts, integrating data directly from ERP, EPM, and other source systems to ensure completeness and accuracy in account inclusions.
     
  • Navigating through Regulatory Pressures: In an era of increasing regulatory demands and pressure on finance to deliver optimal results with fewer resources, Oracle EPM stands out as a tool that guarantees efficiency without compromising on integrity. It applies reconciliation best practices and leverages transaction matching and other automated functions to streamline performance.
     
  • Enhanced Compliance & Accountability: The platform offers comprehensive reconciliation compliance features, allowing users to monitor, report, and analyse the account reconciliation process effectively. It creates rule-based thresholds for automated risk assessments and certifications and keeps a log of preparer and approver assignments, ensuring enhanced accountability and visibility into the entire reconciliation lifecycle.
     
  • Granular Transaction Matching: Users can define matching rules to a very detailed level, allowing flexibility in creating matches with acceptable tolerances. It provides interactive tools for suggesting matches and balances the period-end reports to meet accounting compliance requirements while optimising the number of matches created.
     
  • Seamless & Secure Integration: Oracle EPM’s strong integration capabilities allow businesses to utilise existing IT investments by integrating data from various applications or databases, removing all possibilities of manual data preparation errors and risks. The system’s seamless integration and data optimisation tools ensure that all enterprise data impacting finance decisions are considered and properly integrated.
     
  • User Convenience & Office Integration: The platform enhances user convenience by allowing access to the financial close process and data directly from the Office Smart View Add-in, leveraging existing Excel skills and making the process more user-friendly and efficient. 

Oracle EPM’s Account Reconciliation platform is instrumental in offering automated, secure, and efficient reconciliation processes, ensuring compliance, accuracy, and optimal resource utilisation. Its advanced features and user-friendly approach make it an indispensable tool for finance teams striving for excellence. 

Narrative Reporting: Streamlining Compliance 

Oracle EPM’s Narrative Reporting solution empowers organisations to navigate the intricate landscape of today’s regulatory environment. It ensures organisations can meet legal and regulatory requirements, enhance stakeholder relationships, and communicate their commercial value more efficiently and effectively: 

  • Meeting the Growing Demand for Narrative Reporting: The complexity of today’s accounting and regulatory standards necessitates secure, collaborative, and process-driven solutions for creating and publishing financial and management report packages for a multitude of stakeholders.
     
  • Holistic Information Access: Oracle EPM integrates data from multiple sources such as EPM, ERP, and familiar tools like Microsoft Office, whether they are on-premises or cloud-based, ensuring a seamless flow of information.
     
  • Authoring & Document Management: This solution enables distributed authoring of content in a report package, setting up dates, approval levels, user roles, and task deadlines, maintaining multiple versions, and allowing for centralised maintenance of common data and text, combining structured and narrative content to produce a single stylised report package.
     
  • Review, Commentary, and Collaboration: It facilitates collaborative yet secure reviews of content, allowing participants to share and respond to feedback. Users can review and comment on individual report sections or the entire package, with notifications on task due dates and the ability to monitor overall report completion status on various devices.
     
  • Publishing & Secure Distribution: After the sign-off, reports can be published and securely shared with internal and external stakeholders, accessing reports using various platforms and grouping them to produce executive briefing books and other significant financial records.
     
  • Comprehensive Regulatory Reporting: The solution leverages Disclosure Management for developing regulatory filings in a unified, collaborative document creation environment, providing XBRL tagging and validation, managing taxonomy, and publishing in multiple formats, ensuring compliance with various regulatory requirements.
     
  • Enhanced Collaboration and Workflow Management: Narrative Reporting allows multiple users to manage the distributed development of report sections and approve report sections while receiving notifications about upcoming deadlines and deliverables. 

Oracle EPM’s Narrative Reporting solution is a robust tool designed to help organisations efficiently navigate through complex regulatory requirements, ensuring accurate, compliant, and effective communication of commercial value to stakeholders. Its multifaceted capabilities in integration, authoring, review, publishing, and regulatory reporting make it an essential component in the modern financial ecosystem. 

Advancement Through Oracle EPM 

Each component within Oracle EPM’s suite plays a critical role in creating a more integrated, efficient, and informed financial environment. They work synergistically, ensuring organizations have a clearer, more coherent view of their financial landscape, and empowering them to make strategic decisions that drive innovation, growth, and success. Whether it’s through enhancing compliance in financial consolidation, improving efficiency in account reconciliation, or fostering collaboration in narrative reporting, Oracle EPM is leading the charge in transforming financial landscapes and paving the road to innovation. 

Embark on a Transformation Journey with Version 1 

Delve into the world of Oracle EPM and initiate your transformation journey towards financial excellence with Version 1. The accolade we received attests to our proficiency, but the real motivation stems from the advancement and growth of our clients, fueling our innovative journey forward. 

For deeper insights into our Oracle capabilities and to progress further in your digital transformation you can:

  • Book a demo to see EPM in action.
  • Get in touch to discuss with our Oracle experts how your organisation can thrive with a modern approach to financial management.