Oracle Corp. today updated its cloud-based enterprise resource planning, enterprise performance management and supply chain management software with features it says will be particularly useful to businesses seeking to manage more effectively during the uncertainty of a global pandemic.

With a focus is on digital assistants, machine learning and analytics, the enhancements are “not COVID-driven but a commitment to the road map we set out,” said Juergen Lindner (pictured), Oracle’s senior vice president of software as a service.

Still, Oracle is focusing its enterprise application development in particular on the pain points customers have raised since March, he said. Those include running businesses remotely, optimizing global supply chains and modeling various business scenarios in an unpredictable climate.

“Most of the features we’re introducing have more relevance in terms of the pandemic,” Lindner said. “For example, predictive planning and enterprise performance management have become hot topics very quickly.”

The machine learning and digital assistant features are part of Oracle’s ongoing push to integrate intelligent features into workflows across its applications. Gartner Inc. has forecast that such technologies will replace almost 69% of a typical manager’s workload by 2024.

Invisible intelligence

The company’s approach is that “you shouldn’t have to know you’re using machine learning,” Lindner said. “It’s part of the experience based on what we learned about you in the past.” Integrated intelligence “significantly differentiate us” from market leader SAP SE, he added.

Oracle’s Fusion Cloud EPM is getting new predictive planning capabilities to help organizations better identify patterns in financial and operational data. They includes the ability to predict and forecast variances, identify variance patterns and make plan revisions on the fly to improve the quality and timeliness of decisions.

Intelligent code defaulting improves the accuracy of processing payables transactions by leveraging machine learning to recommend account codes. The algorithm adapts its recommendations based on past actions. New intelligent document recognition features read data in PDF and other popular financial document formats to reduce manual invoice entry. It also learns and adapts over time.

Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP now has joint venture accounting to help reduce partner disputes, improve cash flow and gain real-time visibility into the financial state of joint ventures. A new project-driven supply chain feature integrates with Fusion Cloud SCM to support complex business processes at the project level in manufacturing and other asset-intensive industries. It enables businesses to capture, invoice and capitalize project-driven material, manufacturing and maintenance costs.

Other SCM enhancements include replenishment planning, which enables better prediction of consumption levels for replenishment planning. Backlog management help users set priorities for their entire backlog of open orders and fulfill the most important ones first. The feature is particularly useful during the pandemic, Lindner said. “You need to re-prioritize orders at times like these.”

Oracle Field Service is getting a new dedicated function for workflows in repair organizations to  enable faster repairs, reports and billing. For users with large channel operations, a new channel revenue management function automates processing and settlement in the cloud.

The new features are included in cloud subscription fees. Certain features “will be available selectively on-premises,” Lindner said, but Oracle is encouraging its large base of legacy on-premises customers to migrate. “We feel the cloud route is a better way of partnering with customers,” he said.

Photo: SiliconANGLE