The CFO guide to transforming finance with Oracle Cloud

Tomorrow’s digital finance capabilities today

Regular readers of Deloitte’s Crunch time series may recall our 2018 predictions³ on Finance in the year 2025. Among other things, we envisioned core finance processes conducted with limited human intervention. Real-time information available on demand to anyone who needs it. And finance professionals focused primarily on discovering new insights, not gathering and scrubbing data. While we’re not there yet, this future is coming into view, and cloud technology can bring it closer to reality.

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Standardization and simplification with Oracle Cloud transformation

In large part, Oracle Cloud’s secret sauce is its “vanilla mandate”—which means the underlying components of Oracle’s standard software as a service (SaaS) applications can’t be modified. This is a big change from past practice. Historically, when you bought a database or application from Oracle, you could do what you wanted with it. Your IT team could customize it to meet business requests. Database administrators would monitor system performance and make changes to keep things running smoothly.

Now, Oracle manages the technology for you. This takes responsibility off IT’s plate, so fewer in-house resources are needed to maintain your finance platform. But it also means the CFO, without significant consideration, can’t knock on the CIO’s door and ask her to build a unique capability. For that to happen, the CIO will need to work with Oracle to create it or leverage Oracle’s cloud-based platform as a service (PaaS) capability to develop the new internal application.

That’s the constraint. The upside is that it forces standardization and simplification, making it easier to update software, enhance capabilities, and drive innovation quickly—without turning a desired change into a massive project.

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Thinking about your business case

When considering a digital finance transformation, the first question many CFOs ask is: Will I gain efficiencies and reduce cost? New technology can let you complement humans with machines, creating cost efficiencies. The “however” is, these gains can take some time to materialize. In fact, your costs may even increase slightly at first, as new roles and expertise are needed to run and optimize new processes. So if cost reduction is your main objective, you might be disappointed initially.

But let’s take a step back. The primary value Finance provides is generating the right information at the right time so business leaders can make good decisions. As you build your business case, consider how digital technology can help increase Finance’s value contribution. Here’s an example. A large retailer asked its finance team to project what would happen if the price of television sets were reduced in specific geographies. How would it affect sales and profit margins after accounting for supply chain impacts, merchandise buying decisions, product placement, and other issues?

Before it modernized its finance organization, the retailer would have simply marked down the TVs and then asked Finance to reactively report the results. Now, with smarter scenario planning, Finance was able to provide a range of expected outcomes that could mean a difference of tens of millions of dollars.

Deloitte has supported over 300 finance transformations using Oracle Cloud. Download this PDF to read about a few ways finance teams have used digital technology to support their businesses.

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Ready for prime time with Oracle Cloud strategy?

Digitizing and transforming your finance organization can be an agonizing decision, with a lot at stake. But hundreds of companies have made the move already, and you can benefit from their experience. So, let’s look at some issues and risks you’ll want to consider.

Looking ahead

Moving to Oracle Cloud is transformational, but it’s not a transaction. The journey to optimize your processes and acquire new digital capabilities doesn’t end upon deployment.

Educate yourself on digitalization and what’s possible. Keep investing in ways to work efficiently and be a better business partner. Determine how Finance can learn more, produce more, and influence more.

Your competitors  ̶w̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶b̶e̶  are doing the same.

Download the full report

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Explore other Crunch time reports and case studies

Explore other reports and guides in our Finance in a Digital World^TM Crunch time series, and read case studies about digital transformation in the finance function. 

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