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Fatihah Ramzi, DigitalCFO Asia | 25 July 2022
ERP is a beneficial centralized platform that can manage all of the critical operations that keeps an organization running.
There are so many unexpected external obstacles that plague businesses nowadays. The ability of an organization to respond rapidly and economically to changes in real time determines whether it can successfully manage the opportunities and risks of today’s constantly shifting environment. An organization can be both proactive and nimble to internal and external changes with the help of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.
An ERP is a centralized platform that can manage all of the critical operations that keeps an organization running, including finance, accounting, supply chains, inventories, and even duties like scheduling. ERP software protects all of a company’s important data in one secure, arranged, and reachable location. The business only needs one program to keep track of all the operating elements if they have an ERP in place. With a spreadsheet, nothing will be overlooked. The ERP provides businesses with a thorough picture of their daily business operations.
Digitization Of Value Chains
The digital value chain links suppliers to promote smooth procurement, production, and delivery and combines sequential operations with prior and following steps. It also increases visibility by adding real-time data into processes. With their vast capabilities, today’s ERP systems can eliminate internal silos and enable the management of all company activities through a “single source of truth.” Every organization is different, so a “one size fits all” approach is ineffective. The ability to customize ERP systems gives users the tools to add to, create, deploy, and manage processes and data from a variety of business applications.
The ERP system may be able to import data from different sources thanks to its configurability and connection. Without logging in and contacting other systems, users can get machine data, transport data and more through screens within the ERP system. The system, however, can assist businesses in advancing their connectivity by enabling companies to take advantage of customer order history, forecasts, social data, as well as product sensor data. This will enable businesses to manage a demand-driven supply chain and proactive scheduling of maintenance or other follow-up actions.
Real-time Data Access And Analytics
Organizations currently produce enormous volumes of data, but very little of it is really analyzed, and when it is, it is frequently not in real-time but rather with a spreadsheet tool. Spreadsheets are still utilized to analyze and guide some operations even if they do not communicate and offer multiple perspectives on the truth. Data can be retrieved from various sources and systems used throughout the company and analyzed in real-time with the correct ERP system. The setting up of user and role-specific dashboards enables regular monitoring of performance and costs.
The big question in analytics should be “what’s the relevance?” due to its ability to acquire enormous amounts of data. Before creating reports and dashboards, consider the “what” and the “why.” Monitoring is also necessary for the “what” and “why,” as these questions may have been pertinent yesterday, but today’s development may have added a new dimension that may require the inclusion of new fields to some reports and dashboards (rather than creating additional reports).
The time formerly spent gathering data and compiling reports is reduced by the capacity to access data and give analytics in real-time, freeing up that time for planning and strategic decision-making.
Scalability And Flexibility
Scalability is the ability of an ERP system to handle a growing volume of work and support expansion. The system’s ability to adapt to changes in internal workflows, outside influences, and the capacity to access new capabilities when requirements shift is referred to as flexibility.
An ERP system that is adaptable and expandable may manage many languages, currencies, laws, multiple corporate sites, and accounting standards in one system, enabling future growth and legal compliance. Organizations should be able to install the essential features for today while still having access to more advanced features “tomorrow” without having to make disruptive or expensive upgrades. Last but not least, it should be used on a variety of platforms to give the organization and its workers mobility and flexibility.
Business productivity will undoubtedly improve when they have an ERP that ties in with their sales, operations, and accounting processes in one spot. The team can concentrate on client interactions, scalability, and growth when manual data tasks are eliminated. To be competitive and technologically advanced, businesses will eventually need to implement an ERP system.
DigitalCFO Newsroom | 1 April 2022
A leading multinational company in the Philippines and one of the world’s top container terminal operators chooses Rimini Street software support for SAP to optimize ERP investments and align its ERP roadmap to business priorities
Rimini Street, Inc. (NASDAQ: RMNI), a global provider of enterprise software products and services, the leading third-party support provider for Oracle and SAP software products, and a Salesforce partner, today announced that International Container Terminal Services, Inc. (ICTSI), has switched to Rimini Street’s award-winning software support services for SAP. Rimini Street will support business-critical functions such as financials, treasury, asset tracking, equipment maintenance and repair that powers the entire sea freight business for the Philippines and other ICTSI-operated terminals.
By leveraging Rimini Street services, ICTSI will achieve 50% savings in annual support fees while enjoying an extraordinary client experience with improved service quality. The savings in both IT budget and resources will allow ICTSI to focus its resources and invest in transforming its SG&A processes, accelerating growth, and improving innovation, productivity and efficiency moving forward.
“Our existing ECC 6 platform has become a constraint, rather than an enabler for our business, with more and more initiatives that would drive efficiency and digital transformation either blocked, expensive, or requiring third-party add-on solutions. It is a legacy system, and, as such, it is vital that we minimize investment in it and divert that investment into preparing for a replacement that would again enable and transform our business,” said Brian Hibbert chief information officer, ICTSI. “Working with Rimini Street not only delivers that spend reduction, but with their exceptional support, we can turn our internal focus on preparing for that change and going to market for our future ERP needs.”
Established in 1987, ICTSI is a leader in the port operations sector, employing more than 7,000 people and managing 35 terminals in 20 countries. It is the Philippines’ largest multinational company and the eighth largest container terminal operator in the world, with established operations in both developed and emerging market economies. As the company explores digital transformation opportunities, ICTSI looks to the next evolution of its IT infrastructure.
“Process is always king. Preparing for a new ERP platform requires first reviewing our internal processes and data assets and ensuring that before we implement any new system, our processes and data requirements are driving that implementation,” added Hibbert. “Partnering with Rimini Street helps us ensure that our technology meets the needs and goals of our business today. Allowing us to focus on addressing emerging market requirements and being well-positioned to capitalize on future opportunities.”
Personalized and Responsive Support Services
To deliver the experience and efficiencies clients have come to expect, Rimini Street leverages patented AI technology and a primary support engineer to provide ultra-responsive, personalized, premium-level services from highly experienced senior engineers. The Company continues to expand its portfolio with services that help clients optimize, evolve and transform their IT infrastructure. Rimini Street’s expanded portfolio of services and client success has put the Company on a stated target of $1 Billion in annual revenue by 2026.
“With Rimini Street’s client-centric and expert-led support services, businesses like ICTSI are truly free to focus on aligning their IT roadmap, innovation plans, and investments with their strategic business objectives,” said Andrew Seow, regional general manager ASEAN and Greater China, Rimini Street. “Rimini Street’s enterprise software services are a game-changer for companies wanting to stabilize and maintain their IT operations and achieve cost efficiency while building resilience as they grow amid shifting business circumstances globally. As ICTSI continues its transformation journey, Rimini Street will continue to provide trusted, reliable services that deliver significant business value and offer peace of mind to ICTSI, allowing them to grow their business and optimize the value they deliver to their own stakeholders.”
DigitalCFO Newsroom | 18 November 2021
Nucleus calculates Oracle ERP users achieve payback in under a year, generate $2.58 for every dollar invested, and cut closing times up to 90% with leading accounting automation platform
A recent report from Nucleus Research says Oracle ERP (enterprise resource planning) users achieve payback in less than a year (on average) and generate $2.58 for every dollar invested in BlackLine, Inc.’s (Nasdaq: BL) cloud-based platform for finance controls and automation, with interviewed users reporting increased employee productivity, decreased accounting workload and improved organizational visibility. Nucleus went on to say that BlackLine’s Oracle ERP connector complements an organization’s existing tech stack by automating data formatting to consolidate and streamline financial close activities.
Analyzing BlackLine ROI case studies it had conducted in the last five years, Nucleus Research identified synergistic advantages of using BlackLine’s flagship financial closing platform alongside Oracle ERP systems. Key benefits they discovered include:
- Improved User Productivity. Users can consolidate and format the necessary information for the monthly closing period in a fraction of the time of manual processes through a unified platform. Pre-built accounting templates and other task management solutions empower users to streamline workflows, such as transaction matching, creating journal entries and variance analysis checks. Nucleus observed that most BlackLine customers cut monthly closing times between 50% and 90%.
- Reduced Audit Costs. BlackLine enables customers to standardize compliance guidelines across the entire organization by adopting pre-built industry standard templates that can be incorporated in daily, monthly, quarterly and yearly closing processes. For example, accounting teams can leverage the SOX audit compliance templates and set the automated validation rules that fulfill SOX 302 and SOX 404 requirements. BlackLine’s automation and standardization solutions can reduce the risk of compliance breaches and shorten auditing time on average by 400 personnel hours.
- Enhanced Organizational Visibility. BlackLine can be customized to integrate with virtually any ERP solution and is well suited for companies with multiple ERP systems. Financial data is consolidated through integrations and out-of-the-box connectors to establish a single version of the truth, regardless of sales channels, billing methods and accounting structures. This enables management to track the status in real-time of each financial close and drill down into the underlying data points to evaluate trends and irregularities.
“BlackLine unifies customer data and processes, automates repetitive work and drives accountability through visibility. Using BlackLine and Oracle together can be a very powerful combination providing greater control and visibility throughout the entire financial close process and shifting finance and accounting team responsibilities away from mundane, manual tasks to purposeful functions that focus on the future,” says Martin Naydenov, analyst at Nucleus Research. “BlackLine’s augmentation of an organization’s existing ERP system introduces a cultural shift in the accounting department as users embrace modern accounting practices.”
BlackLine provides a best-of-breed, full-functionality suite of cloud-based accounting automation solutions along with leading practices attained from years of experience with thousands of customer implementations, enabling both large multi-national and mid-sized organizations to realize success faster. With built-in capabilities and off-the-shelf reporting templates that work across all leading ERP and source systems, BlackLine customers spend less time configuring, and more time driving results by delivering fast, accurate, trusted numbers to inform business decisions.
“As a cloud solution, BlackLine can be accessed, updated and configured from anywhere as companies’ ERP landscapes and business models change, allowing for long-term scalability and resilience from an accounting technology and process standpoint,” added Mr. Naydenov.
The Nucleus Research report comes on the heels of BlackLine announcing it recently surpassed 1,000 customers running on Oracle ERPs as they embark on their digital finance transformation and modern accounting journeys. Here’s what some are saying:
- “Using BlackLine alongside our Oracle ERP over the past 8+ years has given us much greater visibility and increased employee productivity by eliminating manual processes and providing real-time access to critical financial data. BlackLine assists in the monitoring of policy compliance and provides us with a full-functionality, one-stop shop. As a global business with nearly 30 currency ledgers in Oracle, BlackLine also allows us to perform multicurrency reconciliations instead of only reconciling in US dollars.” Justin Culp, head of financial and regulatory reporting, Western Union
- “Even though updating our Oracle ERP required a whole new chart of accounts, it was easy to get everything into BlackLine. The ability to have full functionality at our fingertips, all kinds of reports we can run at any time, saves us so much time. I haven’t worked with any software that is better for this purpose than BlackLine.” Travis Curl, general ledger analyst, Hyatt
- “Linking BlackLine with Oracle was pain-free – a smooth integration and seamless implementation with minimal support needed from IT. I can’t imagine not having BlackLine. I have a lot more confidence in the numbers now. And BlackLine is scalable, so we can keep up with our ever-increasing workload – and increasing complexity – as the company grows.” Milton Massery, director of accounting, GoodRx
- “We looked at several software solutions to complement our Oracle ERP, but BlackLine was the best fit. It was entirely in the cloud, which allowed us complete visibility. The ability to implement BlackLine in stages—yet still have full functionality for individual processes—was also a deciding factor. We knew we could grow with it. Plus, it’s so user friendly and easy to navigate.” Jeanette Nimmo, GL global process owner, Hyatt
Though more than 1,000 BlackLine customers are currently running on Oracle ERPs, BlackLine is ERP-agnostic, optimized for today’s modern enterprise with direct integration to more than 30 different leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) and source systems.
BlackLine will be showcasing its market-leading financial close, accounts receivable and intercompany accounting automation solutions this week in front of more than 17,000 registrants at BlackLine’s annual user conference BeyondTheBlack™, with sessions designed to show how BlackLine complements specific ERP systems such as Oracle, SAP, Oracle NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics, Workday and more. Join us to find out why Eventex recognized BeyondTheBlack 2020 as one of the most ‘innovative, creative and effective events in the world’. To view the agenda or register free of charge, go here.
DigitalCFO Newsroom | 13 September 2021
15 of the Fortune 25 using BlackLine to automate key finance and accounting processes, with many
operating in a multiple-ERP environment that includes Oracle ERPs
Accounting automation software leader BlackLine, Inc. (Nasdaq: BL) has surpassed 1,000 customers running on Oracle ERPs (enterprise resource planning systems). In addition, 15 of the Fortune 25 currently use BlackLine to automate financial close, accounts receivable and intercompany accounting processes, with many operating in a multi-ERP environment that includes Oracle ERPs.
“Many of the largest companies in the world use BlackLine alongside Oracle ERPs because they realize adding BlackLine gives them greater control and visibility throughout the entire financial close process,” said BlackLine CEO Marc Huffman. “Coupled with our superior customer experience, using BlackLine and Oracle together can be a very powerful combination, resulting in stronger ROI, better user adoption and greater overall satisfaction.”
BlackLine provides a best-of-breed, full-functionality suite of cloud-based accounting automation solutions along with leading practices attained from years of experience with thousands of customer implementations, enabling both large multi-national and mid-sized organizations to realize success faster. With built-in capabilities and off-the-shelf reporting templates that work across all leading ERP and source systems, BlackLine customers spend less time configuring, and more time driving results by delivering fast, accurate, trusted numbers to inform business decisions.
Many of the world’s leading companies have leveraged BlackLine alongside Oracle ERPs as they embark on their digital finance transformation and modern accounting journeys. Here’s what some are saying:
- “Using BlackLine alongside our Oracle ERP over the past 8+ years has given us much greater visibility and increased employee productivity by eliminating manual processes and providing real-time access to critical financial data. BlackLine assists in the monitoring of policy compliance and provides us with a full-functionality, one-stop shop. As a global business with nearly 30 currency ledgers in Oracle, BlackLine also allows us to perform multicurrency reconciliations instead of only reconciling in US dollars.” Justin Culp, head of financial and regulatory reporting, Western Union
- “Even though updating our Oracle ERP required a whole new chart of accounts, it was easy to get everything into BlackLine. The ability to have full functionality at our fingertips, all kinds of reports we can run at any time, saves us so much time. I haven’t worked with any software that is better for this purpose than BlackLine.” Travis Curl, general ledger analyst, Hyatt
- “Linking BlackLine with Oracle NetSuite was pain-free – a smooth integration and seamless implementation with minimal support needed from IT. I can’t imagine not having BlackLine. I have a lot more confidence in the numbers now. And BlackLine is scalable, so we can keep up with our ever-increasing workload – and increasing complexity – as the company grows.” Milton Massery, director of accounting, GoodRx
- “We looked at several software solutions to complement our Oracle ERP, but BlackLine was the best fit. It was entirely in the cloud, which allowed us complete visibility. The ability to implement BlackLine in stages—yet still have full functionality for individual processes—was also a deciding factor. We knew we could grow with it. Plus, it’s so user friendly and easy to navigate.” Jeanette Nimmo, GL global process owner, Hyatt
- “BlackLine has helped our organization effectively and efficiently reconcile accounts with data coming from multiple ERP systems [including Oracle].” Nathaniel Holycross, manager, financial analysis, consolidations and reporting, XPO Logistics
Though more than 1,000 BlackLine customers are currently running on Oracle ERPs, BlackLine is ERP-agnostic, optimized for today’s hybrid, changing and growing enterprise with direct integration to more than 30 different leading ERP and source systems.
About BlackLine
Companies come to BlackLine (Nasdaq: BL) because their traditional manual accounting processes are not sustainable. BlackLine’s cloud-based solutions and market-leading customer service help companies move to modern accounting by unifying their data and processes, automating repetitive work, and driving accountability through visibility. BlackLine provides solutions to manage and automate financial close, accounts receivable and intercompany accounting processes, helping large enterprises and midsize companies across all industries do accounting work better, faster and with more control.
Indonesia’s largest digital payments platform moves core financial systems to the cloud
Qinthara Fasya | 11 August 2021
PT Visionet Internasional (OVO) has selected Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) to support its mission to drive financial inclusion in Indonesia. With Oracle Cloud ERP, OVO can streamline integration of its core financial systems with its customer-facing application, providing OVO with visibility across finance, procurement and reconciliation processes.
As the world continues the fight against COVID-19 and the idea of a digital economy becomes a necessity with lockdowns and social distancing measures becoming the norm, OVO’s mission to drive financial inclusion in Indonesia through digital payments becomes even more important. The shift to Oracle Cloud ERP will provide us with a more holistic view of our financials, enabling us the scalability and flexibility to make data-driven decisions around growth and innovation.
Sharly Rungkat, Chief Financial Officer, OVO
OVO, Indonesia’s only fintech unicorn and the leading digital payments platform in Indonesia, is available on 115 million devices nationwide. Since OVO’s establishment in 2017, the company has developed a reputation for agile execution, underpinned by a robust framework of checks and balances. As OVO continues to add new businesses, expand and accelerate in transaction volumes, more robust reporting and forecasting have become increasingly important. To support its continued growth, OVO made the decision to move its financials to Oracle Cloud ERP.
“After looking at several tech partners to upgrade our financial systems, we chose Oracle Cloud ERP for its secure and scalable applications that align with international accounting standards. The shift to the Cloud will allow us to create a seamless, end-to-end process across our financial operations, and increase synergies between our back-office and customer-facing operations with real-time insights,” said OVO CFO Sharly Rungkat.
Oracle Cloud ERP is designed to help organizations increase productivity, lower costs, and improve controls. With Oracle Cloud ERP, OVO can gain a more complete view of its finances and operations, empowering the company to quickly respond to changes in the market, and serve its users better.
“As a digital native, OVO understands the importance of a unified business platform and staying ahead of the curve through constant innovation. With Oracle Cloud ERP, OVO can leverage the most advanced technology in the cloud, with a complete view of their financials to help drive business growth. Together, Oracle and OVO can enable the company’s mission to drive financial inclusion in Indonesia,” said Iman Muhammad, head of applications, Oracle Indonesia.
About OVO
OVO is the leading digital payment, rewards and financial services platform in Indonesia. OVO is present on 115 million devices and can be used to access payments, transfers, top up, and withdrawals, as well as asset and investment management. OVO is accepted in more than 426 cities in Indonesia and we are committed to building the largest financial payment and technology company in Indonesia.
About Oracle
Oracle offers suites of integrated applications plus secure, autonomous infrastructure in the Oracle Cloud. For more information about Oracle (NYSE: ORCL), please visit us at www.oracle.com.
Boomi’s Global ERP Report Reveals How 1,600+ Organizations Are Confronting Limitations of Legacy Applications
By: Qinthara Fasya, DigitalCFO Asia | 25 May 2021
Singapore – May 25, 2021 – Boomi™, a Dell Technologies™ business and leading provider of cloud-based integration platform as a service (iPaaS), today announced the findings from a new global survey that reveals nine out of 10 organizations worldwide – a staggering 94% – are embracing a Composable Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) strategy to overcome the limitations of legacy applications and modernize their businesses to gain a competitive market advantage.
Commissioned with Coleman Parks, the independent survey of 1,675 CTOs and enterprise architects, which included 300 from Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and the Philippines, shows companies are keenly aware that their legacy ERP systems, the backbone of every organization, are struggling to keep pace with business today. This explains the trend toward the modern strategy of composable ERP, which gives companies a flexible platform to bridge the gap between legacy and modern applications to meet business demands in today’s fast, competitive market.
Yet despite the flexibility Composable ERP provides, integrating all of those applications to work collaboratively and share data is still a challenge. As traditional integration solutions require expensive, time-consuming custom development coding, optimization and automation is a high priority to IT teams today. This is evidenced by 76% of survey respondents investing in standardization and consolidation of applications, and 72% modernizing applications and migrating to the cloud.
“Perhaps the biggest challenge every business faces today is unifying their increasingly fragmented digital ecosystem so they can create the seamlessly integrated experiences that customers, employees, and partners now expect,” said Chris McNabb, CEO of Boomi. “The organizations that are removing that friction through fast, intelligent integration and workflow automation are the ones best positioned to thrive as we move beyond the pandemic.”
Leading analyst firm Gartner suggests a focus on integration is critical. “ERP vendors will have to provide or partner with integration platforms in order to meet customers’ demands for increased integration capabilities,” Gartner wrote1. “This is because ERP customers will empower business users to bring together applications and data to build business capabilities for their enterprise. Customers will engage multiple vendors, clouds and services to compose capabilities.”
Boomi’s recent findings suggest businesses see the vast potential of Composable ERP but are struggling to implement an integration strategy. In the survey, 51% of respondents said providing the best user experience possible was the motivation behind adopting integration technology. Yet 47% indicated their current integration solutions struggle to meet their challenges. Forty-two percent say there is a high cost to maintaining these solutions, with 38% finding that they can’t cope with their complex hybrid technology environment.
Other key survey findings from Asia Pacific and Japan include:
- 95% say they are adopting a Hybrid Integration Platform (HIP) strategy to gain the flexibility to integrate applications and data wherever needed.
- IT modernization projects are top priority for businesses with 76% of respondents currently migrating infrastructure to the cloud, while 79% are focused on application modernization.
- Benefits of modernization by moving their ERP suites to the cloud are improving business efficiency (38%), increasing IT agility (35%), and driving business growth (32%).
- Focus on integration and orchestration strategy by providing the best customer experience possible (55%) and innovating internal processes to be more agile (51%).
- Currently 31% say their organizations are predominantly on-premise with some cloud, but 61% plan to shift to 100% cloud in the next 12 months.
- Applications for ecommerce (38%), business intelligence (36%) and supply chain management (33%) have broken into the cloud, and they predict a move to the cloud over the next 12 months.
- Organizations are now committed to migrating ERP suites to the cloud, and 61% predict that their ERP system will no longer be fully on-premises by 2022.
- Some obstacles hindering modernization are budget constraints (42%), complex hybrid IT environments (31%), and process roadblocks related to legacy technology (35%).
“The business disruption that has carried into this year has compelled organizations in Southeast Asia to boost their digital capabilities, but while many have accelerated modernization projects to manage change and continuity, many struggle with concerns around budget, fragmented IT environments, and legacy technology infrastructure without realizing that IPaaS can solve most of their problems here and fast,” said Ajit Melarkode, Vice-President Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ) at Boomi.
“This data highlights that as organizations increasingly lean on digital technologies for operational resilience, many are finding themselves needing hybrid integration capabilities to ‘stitch together’ their new technology investments, and subsequently enable data intelligence for departments, teams and customers.”
“After a year of coping with incredible change, businesses are seeing that modernization is critical to survival,” McNabb added. “We’ve seen heroic efforts by IT teams just keeping their businesses operating during the pandemic. But now is the moment to double down on innovation. Across the world, we see organizations ramping up modernization efforts with Composable ERP. Integration technology, like iPaaS, can power that innovation.”