Oracle delivers greater business insight to customers with new Oracle Corporate Performance Management release

The introduction of Oracle Profitability Manager and the new release of Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting (EPB) will enable faster, strategic decision-making, increased agility in the planning process, and greater ability for companies across the region to manage profitable growth.

"As the business landscape across the region matures and the economy becomes more diverse, there is a pressing need for enterprise solutions which enhance an organization's ability to react to regulatory changes and to respond to the onset of increased competition," commented Ayman Abouseif, managing director, Oracle, Gulf States. "Oracle Profitability Manager and Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting simply increase a management team's business intelligence, enabling companies to gain a competitive edge over their rivals."

Integrated Functionality for Profitability Analysis and Management

The new Oracle Profitability Manager integrates the functionality of Oracle Performance Analyzer and Oracle Activity-Based Management applications into one solution to calculate, analyze and report profitability.

Beyond traditional cost allocation, the integrated solution delivers the ability to analyze profitability by a number of different business dimensions, such as profitability by customer, product, or sales channel. Oracle Profitability Manager extends the scalability and flexibility of its predecessor products and reconciles inputs back to the source system of record, providing auditability and traceability on how results are derived.

Companies often need to model various scenarios to determine how changes in business processes can affect costs over time. Oracle Profitability Manager has a flexible architecture that includes "what if?" analysis and produces different costing scenarios across many industries. With integration to Oracle's other CPM applications, these scenario results can be input directly to the planning and control cycle.

Simplifying the Planning and Budgeting Process

Most companies' current planning and budgeting initiatives result in the proliferation of disconnected spreadsheets, a piece-meal approach that presents several challenges, including the inability to monitor processes in real-time, the lack of a process model in spreadsheets, an inconsistency of business models across departments, poor security and time-consuming, costly administration.

However, spreadsheets are a ubiquitous user-interface for planning, budgeting and forecasting. The new release of Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting is designed to leverage the user's familiarity with spreadsheets while mitigating drawbacks. The new release also incorporates important features that enhance ease of use and streamline administration. These include the ability for users to work offline on spreadsheets and easily import the data to the system, produce professional quality reports and export an EPB report directly out to XML Publisher format, to create or apply templates and output a report in PDF format.

Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting also streamlines administration, making it easier to reforecast on a more frequent basis. Integration with Oracle General Ledger allows users to seed budgets with historical figures and provides the ability to frequently update forecasts with actual data for more accurate forecasts. New SQL access provides the ability for both Oracle and non-Oracle applications to report off the data.

Single, Unified Architecture

Oracle's CPM applications leverage a single, unified architecture for reporting, planning and budgeting, profitability analysis, financial and other operational transactions, delivering a single source of truth for confident reporting.

"Corporate performance management is top of mind for many executives today, and they are increasingly looking for an integrated approach with a lower cost of ownership," said Vice President of Applications Strategy at Oracle, Chris Leone. "As one of the key tenets of our Greater Business Insight strategy, CPM continues to be a major area of investment for Oracle applications."

Commenting on Oracle's new CPM enhancements, Nigel Rayner, Vice President of Gartner, the world's leading provider of research and analysis about the global information technology industry, said: "The increasing need for organizational agility, and a better grasp on performance from a compliance and governance point of view, mandates that organizations change their budget routines. Organizations need to build planning models based on an enterprise-wide network of business drivers in order to model financial outcomes based on changes in their business driver assumptions."