Embracing Oracle Cloud: Unlocking new potential for your organization

In the current digital age, businesses across all industries are constantly seeking new ways to streamline operations, drive innovation, enhance scalability and improve profitability. As technology becomes increasingly interconnected and data-driven, migrating to the cloud has become a strategic imperative for organizations looking to reduce risk, improve efficiency and stay competitive. Cloud technology has emerged as a way to revolutionize the way that businesses store, process and utilize data, enabling them to innovate and stay ahead of the competition.

At a recent Oracle User Group conference, Baker Tilly’s Brad Fisher, Director and Steve Salata, Manager, discussed the benefits that implementing a “best of breed” cloud technology, like Oracle Cloud, can provide organizations. In the session, the Baker Tilly team outlined the top three drivers that prompt organizations to move to Oracle Cloud and the motivations behind these strategic decisions.

1. A single centralized platform

The market leaders in back-office cloud technology integrate various offerings such as Enterprise resource planning (ERP), Supply chain management (SCM) and Human capital management (HCM) into a unified platform that enables a seamless management of these functions all on one data model. This combined cloud platform is customized to suit the specific needs of businesses, providing them with all the tools needed to manage their people and processes across the entire back office, ultimately optimizing employees’ productivity by reducing administrative tasks via automation and artificial intelligence (AI). This centralized platform is accessible in the office and remotely for work in the 21st century and doesn’t require a slow VPN login to get into a server behind a company’s firewall, ensuring flexibility and convenience in a world moving towards a hybrid work environment.

Director, Brad Fisher, stated, "One of the pitfalls organizations fall into when selecting technology is siloing each line of business. When HR only looks at HR software, Finance only looks at financial software etc., organizations forget to see the forest through the trees. There are significantly more vendors in each pillar that can NOT work across the entire back office, leading organizations to pick different technologies with different data models. This results in organizations needing to integrate systems while still getting clunky data that is not in real-time and needs IT to maintain integrations.” To avoid this pitfall, organizations should turn their focus to one harmonious platform across their entire enterprise, such as Oracle Cloud.

The Oracle Cloud platform has a variety of functions that help to reduce the administrative burden on employees and allows them to become more strategic workers, such as the employee and manager self-service function. What self-service is doing is giving some time back to the organization by making it more efficient for the employees to track down information. From a managerial perspective, when you and your employees have access to this information, you can focus on other strategic projects within the organization. Similarly, automated transaction matching in your ledger helps to reduce manual debits and credits being monitored and posted, alleviating large amounts of time for accountants. Finally, having automated back-ups and system updates, which allows information to remain consistent and accessible across the organization, enhances data integrity and reliability.

2. Modernize processes and solutions

In the ever-evolving business landscape, businesses need to prioritize keeping up to date with the latest technological advancements to ensure continued streamlined processes and innovative solutions. Companies who have not yet moved to the cloud may have manual processes that are hindering employee efficiency. Director, Brad Fisher, explains that moving to Oracle Cloud for many is like “taking organizations from the Flintstones era to the Jetsons era,” by modernizing their workforce endeavors and moving their old manual tasks to the future with machine learning (ML) and AI, automated approval processes and guided journeys to provide accurate forecasts and predictions.

When a platform brings these processes together and streamlines them, businesses can enhance their operational efficiency. Whether it is through automating repetitive tasks (such as accounting journal entries, creating manual job descriptions, or replenishing inventory levels) or facilitating seamless collaboration, leveraging the cloud empowers organizations to embrace agility and flexibility in an increasingly digital world.

3. Cost efficiency

Although implementing cloud technology requires an initial financial investment, businesses that make this strategic choice can achieve significant cost savings by eliminating the need to maintain hardware infrastructure or local data centers. This allows employees to focus their time on essential business projects instead of hardware maintenance tasks. Oracle Cloud, unlike some other cloud technology providers, offers a pay-as-you-go model, meaning that organizations only pay for the resources that they utilize, allowing them to optimize their IT budget. This SaaS model also prevents large capital expenditures from happening in the future. Expensive and time-consuming on-premise upgrades of the past are now free quarterly updates integrated within the software and is included in the licensing costs. Organizations can regularly benefit from the most advanced functionalities developed and implemented by the software company every three months, so leaders can rest at night knowing their technology platform is constantly upgraded to the latest and greatest version keeping their organization competitive.

How we can help

A successful implementation of Oracle Cloud requires both industry expertise and technology consulting capabilities. No matter where you are in your cloud journey, Baker Tilly can help your organization identify and navigate a clear path forward to start unlocking the benefits of the cloud today. Learn more about Baker Tilly and the industries we serve here.

Interested in learning more? Reach out to our professionals today!