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Transforming Finance with Oracle Financials

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Financial management turnover, business reorganisations and major transactions have triggered significant re-evaluations of Finance capabilities for many organisations.  For the organisation to be successful in a rapidly changing environment, it is critical for Finance to go beyond transaction processing and take a strategic role in the organisation.  The changing attitude towards Finance highlights a realisation that Finance is a key component to organisation performance and raises a unique set of challenges that Finance management must face.

Five Typical Finance Management Challenges:

1. Control Challenges:
      How do I ensure the data the company relies on is accurate and provides the most useful information?
      How do I reduce the burden of maintaining my control environment without compromising its integrity?

2. Efficiency Challenges:
        How should I organise Finance to serve the needs of the different stakeholders?
        Given the hetrogenous nature of Finance roles, how do I attract, develop and retain the talent required to fulfill Finance's mission?

3. Performance Challenges:
        How do I create a common language that empowers management to see themselves the way investors do?
        How do I ensure our investments in innovation and growth yield the greatest returns.

4. Execution Challenges:
        How can I partner with other senior managers to drive strategy execution across the enerprise?
        How do I reduce costs while continuing to add value?

5. Change and Transition Challenges:
        How do we determine our key gaps?
        Being "world class" in everything seems expensive and takes too long; where should we focus ?

In a concerted effort to meet these challenges, a number of organisations have undertaken major transformation programmes. These transformation programmes necessarily impact the whole organisation, not just Finance.

HCM 3 Group's approach to Finance  and HR Transformation is unique in its holistic view of the organisation and our realisation of the varied objectives and challenges to the Finance  and Human Resources function.  It is about helping the Finance and HR management with their journey towards developing a world-class finance and human resources function.

Finance Strategy Transformation Model

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The Finance Strategy Transformation Model we use (pictured right)  is based on value drivers and enablers. It is a proven model to track finance objects, improve performance and develop strategies that satisfy the demands of financial management.

Value Drivers and Enablers
Value Drivers represent the six high-level areas of activity (diagram right) through which Finance typically seeks to create value within the organisation. The six areas are not in themselves value drivers but encompass activities that protect or create value for the organisation by contributing to revenue growth, operating margin, asset efficiency and expectations. The financial management will be expected to put in place the necessary capabilities to deliver the desired level of performance for each of the relevant key activities.  

The Enablers are the four areas of capability through which the finance activities are performed and they represent the four key elements of the Finance operating model: people, process, technology & organisation. Achieving these capabilities enables Finance to meet the expectations of its stakeholders. Importantly, these capabilities are related - changing one capability will almost certainly require changes to one or more of the other capabilities.  

The enablers and value drivers must be viewed together.  By taking a holistic view of these factors, we believe our clients can use the FinanceTransformation model to create a world class finance function.

Finance Transformation Value Drivers

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1. Close, Consolidate and Report
 
Faster close, consolidation and reporting leads to agile and responsive decision making

The speed at which decisions are made can be critical to ensuring the success of a business.  Reliable and insightful financial information is the life blood of any organisation. Ultimately it is
the financial management's responsibility to deliver this information in an accurate and timely
way. A recent survey highlighted the top challenges affecting the close process. (see diagram)

There are significant implications for companies that cannot deliver accurate and timely
information through financial reporting to their internal and external stakeholders. We and Oracle Financials  can help meet the high expectations of the business during the close, consolidate, and report cycle.  Thus helping you to produce timely, accurate and trusted financial statements and management reports.

Month-End Objectives
Most close processes are overly complicated with a seemingly endless list of tasks.  As a result, the month-end close is resource intensive and involves
significant time pressures.  There are some fundamental objectives that any organisation should try to hit with its close process - it’s not just about getting over the line.

Flexibility
As businesses grow, whether it is organically or through acquisition, there is always pressure to introduce new processes and systems into your finance
organisation.  This can come from internal sources, like the pressure on Finance to take a business partner role in the organisation or to meet an ad hoc reporting requirement. Pressures can also arise from the need to adopt a new subsidiary or meet new regulatory requirements, such as IFRS.

The key to meeting these challenges is to have a truly flexible set of close, consolidation and reporting processes that are well understood by finance staff and can be easily adapted to a changing environment.

Reliability
For information to be useful, it must be accurate every time and trusted by Finance and their stakeholders.  A mentality of quality assurance, rather than quality control, is the key to getting things right. Finance must take an active role in the definition of process and system controls across the business as well as within their own area. Having a well understood control framework minimises the checking for Finance at every month-end, improves data quality and helps build the reputation of Finance as a trusted partner in the organisation.

Timeliness

Today, speed is as important as accuracy.  As the old adage says:  ‘right information, at the right time, to the right people’. Having accurate information in a ready and easily accessible format can often mean the difference between the success and failure of an organisation.  This attitude to information should be shared across the whole organisation. If an organisation can turnaround information faster than the competition, having a fast close can be a real source of value. A quick close also frees up Finance staff to spend their time on value-add analysis rather than checking and ticking. With many organisations now seeking to push down their close to three days or less, the pressure is on to meet, and beat, the industry average.

HCM 3 Group has implemented effective financial and HR  processes for organisations in many different sectors.  We have worked with Oracle financial  solutions on a number of occasions to support the entire financial close cycle, specifically targeting the close, consolidate, and report activities.
Making creative use of Oracle technologies, we take an objectives based approach, utilising skills from across our financial implementation  practice, to give a tailored approach that matches your business requirements. 
 
Potential benefits that can be achieved with our help include:
        
        Faster close cycle, freeing up Finance to add value to the business;

        Integrated reporting process that uses a consistent set of tools and provides a single view of the truth;


        Effective and well understood controls framework;

        Reliable data that is trusted by the business and Finance;

        Flexible solutions that can react to a changing environment with the minimum of fuss;

        Compliance with national and international statutory reporting requirements;

        Efficient allocation of staff across the close process.


Oracle Financial Management Solutions 
Oracle Financials supports the complete financial close process from sub-ledger and general ledger close through to group financial consolidation, certification and regulatory filing. Whether you have single or multiple ledger systems, the world's leading organisations, including 85% of the Fortune 500, rely on Oracle's Enterprise Performance Management solutions to meet their complex and ever changing financial reporting requirements, while also lowering the cost of compliance and delivering an unprecedented level of financial data quality. 

This allows these organisations to report to stakeholders in a timely and accurate manner and provides a level of governance, visibility, and transparency into the financial close and reporting cycle that enables management to be confident in the numbers they report to stakeholders.

Oracle provides integrated and market-leading solutions for finance operations; governance, risk, and compliance; performance management; and enterprise analytics:

Finance Operations
        Lower transaction costs and improve efficiency with software designed for shared services.      
        Meet global accounting standards with a rules-based accounting infrastructure. 
        Integrate new businesses and enter new markets with a standard global platform.

Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC)     
        Run your business better and provide it with enterprise-wide risk and compliance intelligence.       
        Simplify GRC and reduce costs with end-to-end compliance process automation.
        Protect brand and reputation with preventive and detective controls enforcement. 

Performance Management   
        Improve confidence with comprehensive financial consolidation and reporting.        
        Deliver predictable results with integrated business planning and forecasting.
        Increase business velocity with seamless integration to familiar desktop tools. 
 
Enterprise Analytics
        Conserve cash and improve cash flow.
        Increase customer profitability, satisfaction, and loyalty.
        Align decision making across all parts of the organisation.
 
Oracle Financial Management Solutions - Complementary solutions to support the close, consolidate and report value driver. The products highlighted below represent the solution components relevant to the close, consolidate, and report value driver in the Finance Strategy Transformation Model.

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2. Risk and Capital

How do you manage risk and use it to create value?
Risk and capital management is not a new challenge but with recent events in the global economy and subsequent changes to regulation, even the best finance organisations have had to rethink their attitude to risk. Risk is often not seen as a shared responsibility but rather as an unavoidable burden on the organisation.  As a result, those tasked with highlighting risks are seen as naysayers and become isolated from day-to-day business operations.  This attitude leaves a small part of the organisation battling against a tide of new regulation and negative internal attitudes to risk.  
 
Ultimately, this approach is counterproductive, increases the cost of compliance and carries significant reputational risks.  Any issue that has such pervasive effects cannot be seen just as the responsibility of the financial management or risk management team.

Making risk work
The key to risk management is not just about compliance but using the organisation’s approach to risk as a source of competitive advantage. We encourage our clients to view risk management as a pervasive activity that needs to be understood and managed at all levels of the organisation.  We aim to change the way your business thinks about risk, not just get you compliant. Enterprise Risk Management encourages clients to build continuous improvement into their risk management strategy.  This is done by embedding a risk plan that aims to create risk ownership, risk infrastructure and risk governance.  

Principles of Enterprise Risk Management
By adopting this risk plan to risk management our clients can realise a productive risk strategy, including:   
        
        A common definition addressing value preservation and creation, used throughout the organisation;
     
        A common risk framework supported by standards;

        Clearly defined roles, responsibilities, and authority for risk management;

        A shared risk management infrastructure to support business units and functions;

        Transparency and visibility into risk management practices for governing bodies such as Boards and Audit Committees;

        Executive ownership of risk programmes;

        Business unit-level responsibility for performance and risk management;

        Strong support from key functions such as Finance and Legal in managing risk;

        Objective assurance and risk monitoring from specific functions to support management and other governing bodies.

 
We focus on building intelligent risk management solutions, utilising Oracle’s risk and compliance software to help clients determine their appetite for risk, anticipate compliance challenges and react quickly to new regulation.  This can help to reduce the costs of compliance and make risk management pursuit
that reaps benefits beyond the avoidance of litigation.

The ever changing global economy creates a complex financial environment for all companies.  With Oracle Treasury and Oracle Risk Management, you can proactively monitor and adjust currency and interest rate exposure across your entire enterprise while complying with your internal risk policies. These sophisticated tools enable you to make informed investing and borrowing decisions on a timely basis.  They help you to achieve greater profitability by eliminating undesirable positions, minimising funding costs, and maximising investment returns.

Oracle  Financial Management – Complementary solutions to support the risk and capital value driver. The boxes highlighted in grey below represent Oracle’s solution components relevant to the risk and capital value driver.
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3. Strategy and Execution

Aligning business strategy and finance strategy to deliver real value
Setting the direction of a business is about many things: finding the capital to invest, budget management, project analysis, getting the right people, choosing the right technology... the list can be endless.  However, irrespective of the course chosen, there will almost certainly be a financial impact on the organisation.  

Increasingly business leaders are recognising that their strategies for growth and investment require finance management to provide financial insight and align their strategy in a direction that meets the wider objectives of the organisation.  This change in attitude has implications for the manner in which Finance operates:

        Finance will be required to react faster and make quick decisions in response to the changing external environment;  
         
        Resource plans for Finance will need to fluctuate in response to expected demand for financial insight.; 
         
        Finance staff will be required to provide insight into planning and monitoring sessions;

        Technology utilised by Finance will have to keep pace with the changing demands of a fast moving business;

        Processes will have to be as efficient as possible to reduce transactional overhead.

Most transactional finance functions will struggle to meet these demands without a wholesale review of people, process and technology.
Although difficult to achieve, driving strategy and execution through financial insight can result in numerous benefits to the finance organisation. 
Our Finance and Human Resources Strategy Transformation services can assist our clients in a number of ways:

         Defining a pre-emptive finance and HR  organisation that can react quickly to changes in business strategy;
            
         Conducting a wholesale review of existing technology and identifying areas for improvement;

         Implementing innovative software solutions that improve Finance and HR transaction processing and facilitate detailed analysis;

         Building a detailed finance and HR roadmap that explains resource requirements and anticipated benefits;
        
         Setting expectations in the wider organisation about the value that Finance and HR can offer;

         Empowering Finance  and HR staff to make strategic decisions.


Based on prior experience, in only six to twelve weeks, we can help you redefine the finance and HR function and set priorities for improvement. We
understand that all organisations are different and that providing a ‘boiler-plate’ design for your team will not help you align Finance and HR with your
organisation’s wider strategic objectives.  

Oracle Hyperion and Business Intelligence Software

Oracle Hyperion Strategic Finance software is a financial modelling application that lets executives identify and understand the full financial impact of alternative corporate strategies.  The software delivers pre-packaged modelling and forecasting so your finance experts can better spend their time testing alternative strategies, building contingency plans, and understanding the impact on your company's long-term performance.
 
Oracle Hyperion Scorecard is a balanced scorecard, collaborative, certified application that helps companies to clearly articulate strategy and goals.  It then helps clients communicate objectives across the enterprise, monitor key performance indicators and improve business alignment.  The software offers you complete strategy-and accountability-mapping capabilities, as well as web-based message boards, forums and discussion threads.

In addition, Oracle’s Business Intelligence foundation allows KPI dashboards to be deployed across the enterprise that reflect the strategic goals and metrics of an organisation.

Oracle Financial Management – Complementary solutions to support the strategy and execution value driver. The boxes highlighted in grey below represent the solution components relevant to the strategy and execution value driver.
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4. Transaction Processing

Turning transaction processing into value generation
Transaction processing in areas such as Fixed Assets, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable and Project Accounting, is normally deemed to add little value.  However, efficient transaction processing can make a real difference to costs and free up resources across the organisation to focus on revenue-generating business activities.

Finance management continue to face demands to reduce the cost of processing and improve efficiency. Numerous challenges often act as barriers to progress in this area:
 
        Inadequate global processes, procedures and policies; 
     
        Lack of senior stakeholder involvement;  
 
        Poor planning;

        Resource availability to support design and delivery;

        Rapidly moving technology solutions;

        Moving organisation strategy and markets.


Even with great ideas, these barriers continue to reduce the benefits realised by small scale projects that tackle a single area of the transaction
lifecycle.

Improving Efficiency
There is no quick fix to creating an efficient transaction processing environment.  As with all the elements of the Finance Strategy Transformation Model;, transaction processing requires a concerted review of people, process and technology.

Process and Technology
Technology vendors will claim to be able to fix all your problems in a single hit.  Whilst there’s no doubt that today’s technology can provide a much needed boost to improving transaction processing efficiency, without the right processes in place even the best technology will come up short.   Organisations need to start with a clear understanding of their business goals, and how their processes should be aligned to achieve those goals.  Only then can they make the best decisions about which technology will build on this process and provide a long-lasting foundation.

Data Governance
Dealing with data quality issues costs time for Finance to reconcile the problem records and explain to the rest of the business what they’re seeing. 
It is important that all business units and functions understand how financial data is created so they’re comfortable with what’s hitting their cost centres.  
With their existing focus on regulation and compliance, Finance is best placed to develop the right data governance policy to address how financial master data is created and changed.

Reporting
The benefits of having a great process, innovative technology and effective data governance is lost if it takes three days to produce a critical month-end
report. Scenarios like this are common and can damage the reputation of the underlying technology. The most effective reporting solutions will be flexible enough to deal with ad hoc reporting needs and provide a good level of reconciliation and drill-down as standard. Reporting products should take the effort out of number crunching and be able to cope with Finance’s statutory reporting requirements as well as giving the rest of the business access to the information and context they want, when they need it. 
 
We have extensive experience in delivering quality back-office processes and technology solutions to problems that affect every organisation. We have developed tried and tested solutions that have been adapted to a variety of clients in different industries. Our practitioners have extensive experience of integrating Oracle’s products with legacy systems allowing us to tailor the solution to your existing systems, processes and regulatory requirements. 

Oracle Financial Management – Complementary solutions for the Transaction processing value driver. The boxes highlighted in grey below represent the solution components relevant to the transaction processing value driver.
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5. Performance and Decisions

Data is a commodity but information has real value

Never before has the phrase ‘knowledge is power’been so applicable.  An integrated approach to enterprise performance management has become of paramount importance to any successful organisation, yet many spend a disproportionate amount of time and resources on manual number crunching.  That may be acceptable if the resulting information was accurate, but the result tends to be inconsistent and ambiguous. 

The solutions adopted by many organisations can leave them unable to quickly produce core reports and deal with ad hoc reporting requirements. 
This can have a significant financial impact.  The conclusion for organisations is that they need to improve information quality and build the capabilities to get the right information, at the right time, to the people who need it.

With a wide range of new and innovative technical solutions to the reporting problem, the time has never been better to embark on a turning your data into
information. However, the vast range of reporting products and underlying technologies makes choosing the right solution for your organisation a hazardous task.
 
Getting it right
Reporting is the basis upon which information delivers value and financial insight. There are several important considerations that need to be taken into account when undertaking a programme to improve your organisation’s reporting capabilities:  

Build statutory and regulatory into the reporting requirements, particularly the  transition to IFRS;

Ensure that appropriate time is spent on analysis and that the Business Partners focus on the KPI and performance metrics necessary to run the business;

Don’t necessarily leave your operational reports in legacy systems.  If you’ve got a great new solution, use it.  These reports can often be fairly simple to deliver and could lead to a quick win;  
 
Trust your reporting solution so that you can design and build reports that reduce the manual effort needed to access information;

Build a solution that can grow and meet future requirements without a major overhaul;

Provide self service access to information wherever possible.  Make the IT overhead of managing the solution as low as possible.
 

HCM 3 Group provides solutions to help our clients in their efforts to manage information more effectively and deliver key business information from a wide range of sources. We build solutions that can be used more efficiently and effectively to make business decisions.

The Finance Strategy Transformation model provides all the components to successfully deliver an enterprise performance management programme including: planning, reporting maturity assessment, industry reporting, good practice, information governance, master data management, business intelligence, enterprise content management and data warehousing.  By taking a complete view of the Finance process, we ensure that clients get reports that deliver across the whole spectrum of our clients’ many and varied reporting requirements.

In summary, HCM 3 Group  has a complete set of skills to provide assurance, advisory, design, build and implementation capabilities to any Oracle-based reporting solution.

Oracle Financial Management – Complementary solutions to support the performance management and decision support value driver. The boxes highlighted in grey below represent the solution components relevant to the performance management and decision support value driver.
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6. Regulation, Governance, and Controls 

Making governance and controls work for you
Whilst Financial Services has made the news, regardless of industry, regulatory bodies are tightening their requirements and administering harshe penalties.  With many of these regulations having a financial impact, the burden is falling on Finance management to ensure their organisation is compliant.

In an environment of cost cutting and efforts to strengthen the balance sheet, many organisations continue to rely on costly and time consuming manual processes to meet new regulatory requirements.  As new regulations are released, deadlines for compliance draw nearer and businesses continue to cut costs, the governance position for many organisations could soon become untenable.

Cost effective governance
Unlike economic conditions, governance doesn’t go away.  It is important that organisations take the time to build effective governance processes and technology that can meet existing and future obligations.  In order to provide a cost effective solution there are several areas to focus on.

Understand the regulations

Too often ill-defined or misunderstood requirements become regulatory requirements within the organisation.  Ensure that you understand the regulatory requirements for your industry, so you can challenge the business and ensure only the appropriate requirements for your industry and business are implemented.

The regulations that are making the headlines are not necessarily your immediate concern. Have you hit the regulations announced two years ago?  Ensuring you prioritise delivery will help you avoid chasing the next regulatory announcement.
 
Implement technology
Embed control and governance within the systems that you use to manage your organisation. This is a great way to minimise costs and achieve the governance and control requirements necessary for any industry.

Everyone’s concern
Governance is the responsibility of the organisation as a whole, not just the Finance and Risk teams.  Ensuring governance is embedded within everyone’s objectives and this is recognised across the whole executive team, will reduce the costs of compliance.
 
Oracle Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC)
Oracle’s GRC solutions help companies run their business better and provide it with a robust, enabling platform that not only meets current regulatory requirements, but also forms a roadmap for embedding control, security, and predictability into the very fabric of the organisation.

Oracle provides the industry’s only comprehensive enterprise GRC platform that integrates business intelligence, process management, and automated continuous controls monitoring and enforcement to enable sustainable, consistent, and efficient risk and compliance management. The boxes highlighted in grey below represent the solution components relevant to the regulation, governance and controls value driver.
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HCM 3 Group is fully knowledgeable and up-to-date with the latest Oracle Financials  offerings and solutions for Oracle EBS & Fusion Applications. If you would like our help advising you about Oracle Financials and HCM  and how it fits with your enterprise, we would like to hear from you below in the Message Us footer.
 HCM 3 Group           

Experts in Oracle HCM and ERP Applications
EMEA : Covent Garden  London  WC2B United Kingdom

APAC:   Manly Sydney NSW 2095 Australia

info@hcm3group.com


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