Augmented Financial Analytics with Oracle Analytics

Augmented Financial Analytics with AI and Oracle Analytics for Applications (OAX).

Author: Benjamin Arnulf. Estimated time to read: 5 minutes.

2020 is just starting and corporations need augmented analytics to predict fraud, spends, risks and to take decisions. Oracle just released Oracle Analytics for Applications (OAX) for Fusion ERP offering Augmented Financial Analytics!

Augmented analytics use large amounts of structured and unstructured data to provide insights that help make better decisions. This is a new era for financial analytics.

While executives struggle with legacy systems, we see Artificial intelligence, RPA, blockchain, and prescriptive analytics starting to provide a competitive advantage to top innovative Fortune 500 corporations.

The new challenge is to deliver out-of-the-box analytics with automatic drill-down, machine learning, autonomous insights, and AI-powered decisions.

Reporting Technology to Analytics

In the past decade, corporations focused on upgrading reporting/business intelligence systems to data visualization and next generation analytics platforms, preferably in the cloud, in order to scale on demand. While this seems to have been a successful challenge for IT teams, this change has simultaneously been a struggle for finance, FP&A and senior management teams.

One of the big shifts in material investment has been to move data to a single cloud and to recreate all of the integrations, databases, semantic layers, reporting, dashboards, security, analytics as well as recruit data scientists, ETL specialists, architects, business analysts, project managers, and analysts to control, maintain, support and recreate this analytics architecture in the cloud.

Descriptive to Prescriptive Analytics

Initially, corporations focused on using descriptive analytics to answer the question: "What is happening in my company?" Descriptive analytics provides year-over-year insights, as well as historic metrics.

Machine learning offered a quick way to apply predictive analytics and to answer the question: "What will happen to my company?" Predictive analytics provides insights on forecasted metrics, allowing companies to predict the future and gain an advantage.

Now, prescriptive analytics can answer three questions: "What will happen? How will it impact my business? And what should I do?" Prescriptive analytics is the process of turning data into insights and decisions. Actions —  as well as their implications — are suggested based on predictions, with implications also shown. 

Prescriptive analytics is simply the process of turning data into insights and decisions.

New wave of Executives

Chief Information, Financial, and Executive Officers are drastically changing the way Fortune 500 corporations operate and use analytics.

CIOs, CFOs and CEOs are drastically changing the way Fortune 500 corporations operate and use analytics.

Corporations run increasingly complex enterprise resource planning (ERP) and enterprise performance management (EPM) systems. Transitioning ERP and EPM to the cloud has allowed CEOs to stop struggling with support, maintenance, patching, upgrading as well as sourcing armies of IT resources.

CIOs requested to have autonomous technologies applied to analytics. Augmented Analytics is needed to accelerate the digital business transformation.

CFOs do not want to spend millions of dollars and accumulating purchase orders to support and maintain their analytics projects. They do not want to hear about ETL, ELT, Semantic Layers and other technical terms. They just want analytics and one version of the truth.

A new wave of executives want their autonomous financial analytics to aggregate, predict, and also make out-of-the-box decisions for their corporations. This will make it possible for them to take action on never-ending technology projects and weekly PO approvals.

Autonomous Analytics

According to Larry Ellison, autonomous technology offers "no human error, no mischief, no mistakes.” Autonomous analytics provide one version of the truth without the pain of overseeing maintenance, support, data transfer, a semantic layer, KPIs, and more.

No human error, no mischief, no mistakes.

The vision is to ensure that corporations own their data, insights and decisions without needing to manage the IT side. It provides one autonomous version of the truth.

One autonomous version of the truth

Augmented Financial Analytics

Over the past few years, Oracle has listened to analytics leaders share their challenges with ERP, EPM, advanced analytics, and decision-making.

Oracle Analytics for Applications (OAX) is the first autonomous and augmented analytics system built on top of a cloud Fusion ERP.

Augmented Financial Analytics are built on top of the revolutionary Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse!

This is a new separate product that complement the Oracle Fusion ERP suite using multiple autonomous layers:

• Interface with Fusion Cloud ERP
• Autonomous Data Warehouse
• Autonomous ETL (Data transfer between ERP and Data Warehouse)
• Autonomous Analytics (Oracle Analytics managed instance)
• Managed best in class Key Performance Indicators (100+ KPI managed by Oracle)
• Autonomous data model, semantic layer and artificial intelligence
• Autonomous security, backup, upgrade, patching and disaster recovery

OAX can be implemented in few clicks with daily refreshes. The augmented analytics platform shown above provides prebuilt dashboards that display best-in-class financial metrics and KPIs such as revenue, operating expenses, EBITDA, cost of revenue, payroll cost, net income, and more.

No more ETL, no more semantic layer maintenance, everything is managed by Oracle!

OAX is allowing to assigned targets to any metrics. Users can see in 1 second if the target is green, yellow or red.

OAX is also offering users to drill-down automatically in a KPI to understand the metric, see who is the KPI Owner, put notes, understand the period trend.

OAX provides a way to drill-down to a deeper analysis of the KPI. This augmented view is also offering contextual menu option to run actions and take decisions.

Financial controllers, accountants, business analysts, payroll agents, payables and receivables analysts can click on each deck and drill-down into each metric to understand the variance against the pre-defined target. Oracle Analytics suggests decisions and actions based on the fraud detected, the revenue decreased, the payroll cost increased, or the turnover increased. This is an augmented analytics revolution.

This is an augmented analytics revolution

The metrics, KPIs, and data warehouse can be customized to include additional data sources.

Users and administrators can manage a set of predefined KPIs in a catalog with definitions.

Users can add new KPI and define the source, the target, the time levels for the KPI and other customizations.

Executives are now able to get best in class AI and augmented analytics with zero effort.

More information: Oracle Analytics for Applications