Get Down Your Application Implementation & Upgrade Cost With Oracle Fusion Applications

Are you looking for a means of reducing your application’s implementation and upgrade cost? If yes, then it is time for you to adopt the standards-based Oracle Fusion Middleware or applications. The all new Oracle Fusion Middleware benefit analysis and adoption planning service will enable you to analyze the benefits Oracle Fusion Middleware can offer to you highly prioritize use cases and design an adoption plan based on your existing application implementation.

Fusion is a generic name that is being used by the Oracle to define the all new packages of middleware, architecture and even ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) applications. But what this Oracle Fusion application is all about???

Whenever you are implementing any application, you may have gone through a certain level of customization and integration to meet individual organizational requirements. As the requirements of each and every enterprise or organization are unique, a few of the processes may continue to have whitespaces that could in reality benefit from visibility and automation. The kind of customization and integration may differ from basic to complex, and may require a wide range of approaches and technologies to carry it out appropriately.

Conventionally, such requirements have been treated by manipulating the applications, resulting in tightly coupled systems, which are quite difficult to manage. The Oracle Fusion applications will empower you how Oracle Fusion Middleware can address such issues within your organizational environment while helping you develop and run agile and intelligent business applications and maximize your IT efficiency by utilizing cutting-edge hardware and software architectures.

Oracle Fusion benefits are a totally configurable and flexible global product that empowers organizations to smoothly and effectively continue to evolve and adapt to the unique requirements of their employees and it is an integral part of any total compensation package. It delivers both the conventional one-size fits all plans to the most complicated plans that can selectively address different segments of the workforce with different benefit packages.

Apart from this, it brings a whole host of features to the organizations, which are shown below:

- Complete, standard-based foundation. It lowers the costs and reduces the risk in the implementation, integration and innovation of the applications. It also quickly creates the customized process that easily separates your business from the others. Moreover, it boosts up the time to market your new initiatives.

- Role-based experience, tested by the world’s leading organizations. It helps organizations increase productivity across the enterprise. Also, it includes best practices from the thousands of Oracle customers.

- Embedded business intelligence. With the help of embedded business intelligence, it supports quicker and more informed decision making. Moreover, it enhances the accuracy of decisions taken by the leaders within an enterprise.

- Module, flexible uptake options. Modularity helps you select the product, solution or product family, which make sense for your business. It is designed to work with and add business value to the current application investments.

It is going to be interesting to see how such a huge software, like Fusion applications helped organizations to benefit from the modularity to get rid of customization and integration issues faced by the enterprises at the time of implementation of the applications…!

Leverage From the Hidden Potential of Your Business with Enterprise Performance Management Solutions

By seeing the current enterprise performance management (EPM) market, it is very easy to identify that the fundamentals of EPM haven’t seen any huge shift in the last decade. For many of the enterprises or organizations, EPM is still a process of associating different business strategies with plans and execution, tracking and monitoring financial and operational results against the business objectives and goals and applying analytics to identify and understand the key trends while driving enterprise-wide performance through better decisions. 

So what has changed? The world in which we operate has changed. Even though the economic growth is quite slow, business cycles are speeding up which requires frequent and speedy planning and forecasting. You can find plenty of internally as well as externally generate data to analyze and leverage from planning and reporting. Also, the expectations of stakeholders are reaching sky high, which includes more quantitative and qualitative disclosures about the organization they are investing in. Also, the internal management stakeholders are asking for more frequent insights into the finance and operating results of the enterprise they are investing in.

However, even if the workforce has changed, technology is changing like anything with the evolving trend of cloud, mobile and social computing. Such technology enablers have created many opportunities that will help organizations drive more innovation while enhancing the efficiency. While today’s market imposes a huge number challenges to achieve the desired goals, you can find plenty of other ways to unlock the hidden capability and potential of your enterprise to gain more benefit and profit with noticeable growth. Such opportunities may include:

-          Eliminate the need of investing more in the products who are not performing well or under-performing.

-          Concentrating more on various under-served customer segments within an organization, which will help you improve the customer satisfaction.

-          More effectively and efficiently utilizing the existing resources like staff and capacity within an enterprise to drive desired results.

-          Helps investing more in the new markets, products and services.

-      Establishing more efficient and effective business processes while minimizing the IT complexities to reduce the costs.

Today, many enterprises have realized that an integrated enterprise performance management solutions or platforms can surely help them break down the barriers to achieve success, associating business goals to the results while identifying and unlocking the hidden capabilities of the business. With the help of highly performance-driven EPM systems or solutions, enterprises can easily deliver the required business outcomes to achieve success in today’s competitive market. Also, such platforms can easily identify the needs of finance, IT as well as line of business managers to make sure they achieve consistent and better decision making. 

So it is obvious that EPM solutions bring a whole host of features and benefits for your organization. However, you may have to take proper care while implementing such EPM solutions within your enterprise. To gain more insights of how Oracle Hyperion EPM can help you unlock the hidden potential of your business, keep reading our blog posts.

Web Content Management Solutions – Everything You Need To Know About It

In this fiercely competitive internet market, keeping the website up-to-date with all the latest happening in the web world is extremely important for the survival. In its initial days, websites were developed with the help of Dreamweaver, FrontPage or any other tools like notepad to write the code. Such editors have helped developers to create brochure kind of websites seamlessly.

But with the advancement in technology, websites have started becoming more complex and dynamic, which requires developers to look for other alternatives that can help them simplify the development of complicated and dynamic sites, and that’s where Web Content Management Solutions and Systems (CMSs) come into the picture.

While there are millions websites are created with the help of the content management systems, still there many people over the internet who don’t have a clear idea about what the CMS is, which one is best suitable and how to choose the best one. With this thought in mind, we’re going to have a brief discussion on what the CMS is actually, which one is the best CMS and how to choose the best one for your online store.

What is a Content Management System???
A content management system is nothing but a software application, which is extensively used by the developers to create, customize and manage information over the web. Most of the CMSs can be used as a stand-alone application or in consort with the other existing applications. Moreover, any kind of CMS can be easily set up directly on a network, the internet or to run on a local server.

The main principle behind a CMS is very simple and easy to understand. It’s a database with basic functionality, like website editing, adding modules and so on. It can easily manage content and eCommerce in user-friendly and search-friendly way. CMS can be divided into two main categories: Proprietary CMS & Open Source CMS.

Proprietary means someone owns the rights to that CMS application and you have to pay license fees to use it. On the other hand open source CMS is free and you don’t have take permission to use it or to modify it as per your needs & deeds.

Which one is the best CMS?
Unless you have millions of dollars to spend on, start by considering world’s one of the best open source applications: Joomla, Wordpress & Drupal. Well, different people have different opinions about their favorite CMS. But these three are anyhow will be the best CMS for all time. If you wish to set up your own blog, personal website or even a small business site, then Wordpress will be the most suitable platform for your needs.

If you wish to get fame like Olympus, Porsche, Sprint or Vodafone, then you can go for Joomla. It is one of the oldest and popular web development platform. It is extensively used for creating complicated sites. Drupal is similarly used for creating dynamic and database-driven site.

Apart from all the three, you can also go for a variety of eCommerce platforms like Magento, OsCommerce, Zen Cart and so on if you wish to develop an eCommerce site for your business.

How to choose the best CMS among all of the available ones?
Evaluating CMS could be a daunting task because there are tons of open source available today to choose from. However, you should consider following things in order to choose the best one for your web development venture:
• Flexibility
• Intuitiveness
• Extensibility Offered By The Extensions And Modules
• Ease Of Learning, Optimized For The Performance
• Ample Security Measures
• Documentation And Community Support.

With the rapidly evolving web industry, CMS can have a massive impact on how well your organization can utilize the hidden potential of the web. So if you are going to the CMS, then make sure you go through the details discussed in this post.

How To Choose The Best Enterprise Performance Management System?

Choosing the right kind of software application has always been a difficult task for the organization as there are lots of things depended on it, and the difficulty level increased when it comes to choosing a right kind of enterprise performance management application or system. The main reason behind this is its requirements are quite unique based on the business itself.

While there are tons of resources available over the internet about the best practices and methodologies to choose a right kind of software, there are very rare resources that can elaborate the way of choosing a right kind of Oracle Hyperionenterprise performance management system or solution.

Well, choosing the best enterprise performance management system for your enterprise requires you to understand that fact that it will not be the scenario that what works for others will also work for you. Being an enterprise owner, you should be aware about the fact that there is no blueprint for the success in the business domain. There is a huge amount of time spent on the differentiating strategy. And that is the reason why the things that work for others may not work for you. If the strategy is different, then how could you believe that the method that is being used to execute and measure the progress would be same? Of course, it would be different.

Therefore, it is very important to concentrate on your requirements while evaluating or choosing the application or system for the performance management and strategy execution for your organization.

Another thing that you should keep in mind that choosing a software or application for the performance management of your enterprise doesn’t mean you choose an application having tons of innovative technical functionality. Most of the time business often believes that technical functionality is the key aspect of a good EPM application or system. But in reality,

Of course, there is nothing wrong in expecting a technically sound application. But one should think beyond the technical features and search for the application that offer immense flexibility and ease of use that will bring functionality in the hands of the business users while making change management quite easier. Moreover, one should look for the EPM application offering a predictable implementation timeframe, which runs for a short period of time rather than taking months. Also, look for the optimal total cost of ownership (TCO) and other factors that can make sure that the application is easy to sustain for a long period of time.

Don’t go to the application having generic demos and nice presentations as it doesn’t guarantee for the best application. Try to analyze the application in order to see how well a specific application serve your critical business needs or deeds.

Apart from all these, you should look for a few basic things like the level of customization and workarounds offered by the application, does the chosen application fit into your enterprise needs and deeds or not and so on.

Considering the above discussed things will definitely help you choose the right kind of an EPM solution for your organization. Did I leave any point? Do you have more suggestions on choosing a right kind of EPM solutions? Share your views with us by commenting below…!

How Big Data Analytics Will Manipulate The Enterprise Performance Management In The Future?

In this fast-paced world of technology, the success of the companies, whether its small or any giant organization, will heavily depend on their capability of capturing, analyzing and gaining deep insights from the data. And when it comes to the capture, analyze and reporting of data to the support management decision making, then Oracle enterprise performance management has always been at the forefront of it. But with the emergence of Big data analytics, the face of Enterprise performance management is going to take a huge shift in the near future.

But what this Big Data Analytics is all about and how it will change the way EPM is performing now? Generally, most of the organizations are gathering the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and business metrics, analyze them thoroughly and report the results of analysis to educate management decision making in their usually EPM efforts.

However, most of them are struggling to determine the key strategic indicators and sometimes end up reporting an incidental set of metrics that doesn’t help them leverage from the real insights and doesn’t support them in taking the right decision. On the other hand, other companies have chosen a next-level approach with data warehouse, which not only store their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) but also a huge amount of transactional and operational data that they can utilize to fetch more insights from. Earlier, only an organization with a huge budget and the best skills was capable to leverage from the sophisticated business analytics.

With the rapid emergence of computer technology in consort with the exceptional growth of the social media are the two main driving forces behind the rise of the Big Data Analytics. You can consider the term “Big Data” as more complex and messy type of data that we can’t smoothly put in rows or columns. A huge and ever changing amount of data created by the social networking sites where the internet users chat with each other, share files, search for something as well as the data generated by the sensors and chips within the Smartphone devices.

Analyzing big data would help enterprises to understand their employees and customer’s behavior in a much better way through their own transactional data and web logs and associating all these with video tracking, social media posting and search engine data to get far better insights. But what are the key involvements of Big Data Analytics for Enterprise performance management as of now? 

Well, now organizations will have more data to play with. While the conventional KPIs will be the most important business navigation tool, they will be provided with the analysis of a huge and unstructured data sets. Now it has become imperative for the organizations think about the conventional KPIs they wish to inform decision making and how each of these could be enriched with the help of big data.

In the earlier days, when organizations were supposed to have a huge IT & analytics budget to gather, store and analyze the data, today you can find tons of tools that can be used to start analyzing the data.

With the technologies like cloud computing, Software as a Service (SaaS), Hadoop etc., companies can easily store data, access it anytime and manipulate the data in a much faster way. 

So, with the introduction of Big Data Analytics, the organizations are going to see a huge shift in the way they carry out Oracle enterprise performance management. However, it is crucial to think about a few points discussed in this post. Do you have any suggestions? What’s your experience with EPM? Share your views with us…!

Digging The Basics Of The Enterprise Performance Management

 

In this technology era, we are surrounded by some of the world class technology innovations and therefore, it is very common to assume that everyone around us is familiar with the various terms like – ERP, CRM and EPM. The BI (Business Intelligence) is the next thing. So, do you know about all these terms?

Sometimes it is quite good to take a back step and ask ourselves that how well we know each of the terms discussed above and how we will categorize our field of niche accordingly. Today, many of you might not be aware about the basics of the acronym EPM (Enterprise Performance Management). So, what this enterprise performance management is?

Let’s begin by first differentiating the Enterprise performance management from the BI (Business Intelligence). Today, many of the software application vendors, who have initially developed business intelligence solutions, are now trying hard to expand their work portfolio by extending their capabilities with Oracle enterprise performance management system and solutions. Now you might be thinking what this BI (Business Intelligence) is? Well, it just comprises of the various tools for analysis and reporting that help organizations in decision making.

Today, you can find a number tools in the market that serve the various requirements, starting from the most common multi-dimensional analysis via data mining to the sophisticated predictive analysis. Giant enterprises have created a huge data warehouse, which aggregate the information from the transactional systems and serve as the data source for the various Business Intelligence tools. However, such organizations with a rock solid BI framework often faltering when it comes to take the right decision. Here comes the EPM (Enterprise Performance Management)…!

EPM systems have built upon BI by getting benefits from the information provided by it. Even if we assume that we are having good data and can make great decisions, we are still lagging with the gap between the reports. So, what comes in between this empty gap? Well, it might be process & actions, which leads us to the first definition of the Oracle Enterprise Performance Management system.

EPM is built upon BI (Business Intelligence). Once a BI framework is implemented, enterprises move towards automating the processes that can easily leverage the information provided by the business intelligence solutions. One of the most popular cases would be scorecarding solutions offered by many software application vendors. However, a few of the people realize scorecarding a whole that can be carried out by the BI tools. Well, this would be perfectly fine if your goal is only to report the status of the key performance indicators.

A real performance management applications should offer a lot more than this. Most importantly, they should be able to manage the portfolio of strategic or other performance improvement initiatives and projects.
Another way that you can think about EPM is in terms of the processes, such as financial planning, budgeting practices, forecasting and so on. Dealing with the financial performance of an organization is one of the most basic functions of Enterprise Performance management applications. But EPM could be applied to a broaden set of business verticals.

So, from the above discussion, we can say that EPM applications is an extension of the BI solutions. The BI and EPM solutions, both are used for the enhanced decision making & performance. Hope the above discussion will help you clear the fundamentals of EPM solutions. If you have any question or query, then you can comment below…!

Executing Enterprise Performance Management System? – Make Sure You Avoid Making These Mistakes!

An effective and efficient Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management system for workers or employees brings tons of benefits for the organizations through far better workforce productivity while retaining skilled workers for enhancing the overall operational efficiencies and  reducing the HR costs. In the reality, in these dire economic days, organizations are extensively opt for on-demand software solutions in order to help step up its workforce optimization efforts.

However, implementing enterprise performance management in an appropriate way is not everyone’s cup of tea. Sometimes it could turn out to be one of the most difficult tasks for the enterprises due to lack of appropriate approach for implementing it.

Many organizations often make a few mistakes when they thought to put enterprise performance management system into place. Are you planning to implement EPM in your enterprise? Make sure you don’t make the following mistakes while implementing it.

Mistake # 1 – Keeping the managers in the dark by not clarifying a few important aspects
Many organizations often struggle with the seamless user adoption, and the main reason behind it is that they have not clearly interacted with managers, which are the key users of the EPM system, regarding the crucial decisions that required in choosing the performance management system. Moreover, they fail to educate the managers about the benefits they are going to gain with the help of the EPM system.

How to overcome this issue? Well, you should ensure that you get in touch with the managers and discuss each and every aspect associated with the EPM. Moreover, you should ensure that you communicate and provide appropriate training to the managers if needed as it is a base for the success.

Mistake # 2 – Making frequent changes
Making the performance management process fulfill almost each and every aspect of your business may require years. Making frequent changes increases the risk of overwhelming managers and workforce.

Instead, try to concentrate on a few important outcomes and try to achieve success in those areas only. EPM systems can be configured with tons of options and features that at the end are useless as there is not meaning of using such features.

Mistake # 3 – Building Complicated performance review forms
Performance management systems are designed by keeping in mind the ease of use. However, many times a few of the HRs are so excited with tons of options available and thus, they try to configure review forms with tons complicated options, which at the end create confusion for the end users.

Well, you should always stick to simplicity. Just because it offers tons of options and features in the review form, it doesn’t mean you should use all of them. You should keep in mind the usability and user-friendliness while configuring the review forms.

Mistake # 4 Overlooking the importance of change management
Modifying or configuring the application is just a part of simplifying the work performed by the organization in conjunction with the incorporation of the new system. However, most of the organizations often overlook the importance of change management without realizing the benefits of changing the behavior of both, employees and managers.

Never underestimate the power of change management. Try to establish an unparalleled communication and training sessions for the senior management , HR, managers and employees.

Well, failing to identify and fix the mistakes discussed above can ruin your entire Oracle Hyperion performance management investment. Do you have more points to highlight? Comment below to share it with us…!