Oracle makes its ERP financials smarter -- and talkative

Financial ERP upgrades

Steve Miranda

Oracle's Modern Business Experience event is the first time the company brought together its human capital management, ERP financials and supply chain customers. While past events were separate conferences, this year's conference is recognition that underlying ERP technologies cut across the platform. Nonetheless, the upgrades announced at the event highlighted a specific ERP functionality, especially to Oracle ERP financials.

Oracle detailed "advanced financial controls" that use machine learning to analyze financial ERP transactions and detect anomalies. Oracle's broader goal is to get users comfortable with automation. Once that happens, users may be open to automating more of their ERP financials.

For now, Oracle's ERP financial systems are augmenting ERP decision-making, said Juergen Lindner, senior vice president of product marketing for SaaS, in an interview. As users "extend more trust into the capabilities of the system, then you can decide at what pace of automation you want to progress," he said.

Oracle's gradual approach to automating financial ERP makes sense, Jac Amerell said from the Las Vegas conference. As the vice president and corporate controller at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, he is leading a project to move the insurer's ERP financials, along with other systems, to Oracle's cloud-based platform.

The ultimate vision is more automation

Amerell said he would love to get to a point where a transaction arrives "and I don't have to touch it once," he said. "That would be the ultimate vision."

But Amerell said automation also poses major change management issues. He said he can see reluctance from peers, including regulators and auditors, to trust machine learning technologies.

"They don't believe that a machine can do what actuaries can do in projecting our claims costs, in forecasting what our revenue's going to be," Amerell said.

Amerell's firm plans to go live with its move to Oracle Cloud in the first quarter of 2020, and he is leading the shift. The new Oracle system will be a dramatic change from the current on-premises financial systems that rely on multiple vendors, he said. His firm has about $30 billion in annual revenue and 5 million policyholders.

The new system is challenging people to think about the possibilities, Amerell said. It is also prompting the company to think about retention and training.

"We've sent people to robotics process automation [RPA] training. We've sent people to learn about blockchain, and we've sent people to learn about artificial intelligence," Amerell said.

They have adopted some RPA tools and have been challenging people to figure out what processes they can build bots for. The goal is to "teach people already on staff those new skills," he said.