In the Part -1 of the blog, there was a brief discussion about some of the important Industry trends. This part throws light on how Oracle Fusion Financials Application can cater to the recent Industry needs.

Oracle Hyperion Essbase provides the best of multidimensional database capabilities in terms of performance and features. The Essbase lovers and existing users may believe that Essbase is sufficient enough for their planning, budgeting and forecasting requirements. Hence most planning applications still exist on Hyperion Essbase instead of Hyperion Planning - the centralized MS Excel and Web-based planning, budgeting, and forecasting solution from Oracle's Hyperion Suite of Products.

Most of us have been part of implementations where CRP (Conference Room Pilot) is undertaken by the client. In most cases CRP is used by the client when they are not familiar with the product and want to see if the ERP package would fulfill most of their needs before they finalize which package to be implemented. In one of the recent projects I got a chance to work on CRP exercise in Oracle Apps for a client where Oracle was already running for more than a decade. Here is a glimpse of the situation which the client faced:

1. Multiple Geographies with different business model. E.g. One Geography was following distributor model. In one of Geography ATO operations formed major portion of their sales.
2. Different Geographies had different Oracle version being used: One Geography had 11.5.9 version of Oracle and others had 11.5.10 version.
3. Local IT teams at each Geographies led to various different customizations across Geographies: The customizations built were also of different nature based on business needs in each geography.

Client engaged Infosys to do a business process re-engineering (standardize Business processes across Geographies) exercise in the first phase and then undertake CRP (showcase the fitment in oracle) in the second phase.

In the Part-1 of the blog, we provided an overview of recent CRM Industry trends and in this part we will provide our Point of View regarding how Oracle Fusion CRM and its capabilities cater to the recent CRM trends.

In the first part of my blog I talked about economics of using Cloud platform for performing business analytics and its obvious benefits. Through this part I want to bring forth ideas which can help a cloud BI customer as well as service provider maximize the overall benefits out of a cloud setup and reap advantages beyond the obvious ones.

The blog attempts to addresses following questions:

• How organizations can maximize value derived from a Cloud setup?
• How the Concerns around Data Security can be addressed?

During the last three to five years, Oracle CRM and best of breed niche solutions have emerged and expanded to offer broad CRM or CRM related functionality, including Loyalty Management, Campaign Management, Self Services, a 360 Degree of Customer View and others. As many companies continue to expand their CRM functionality to include these trends, we are witnessing significant number of relatively new trends shaping the future of CRM as a key tool with the capability not only to increase sales revenue and significantly influence customer satisfaction, retention and loyalty, but with the potential to change the paradigm under which companies have traditionally interacted and done business with their customers.

In this part of blog, I provide an overview of recent CRM Industry Trends and in the second part, we will provide our Point of View regarding how Oracle Fusion CRM and its capabilities cater to the recent CRM trends.

Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management 11g Release 1 includes Sales, Marketing, and Customer Data Management modules. Service, Order Capture, Call Center Modules and Vertical Flavors are expected to be part of the next release.

Any Implementation in Oracle ERP world involves a constant effort in re-doing the setups from scratch whenever a new instance is required. Getting a new instance and bringing it to speed with the current setups just can't be avoided or wished away. It has to be done and redone with almost no scope of errors. But anything that is done manually is prone to error and if these errors slip in when we are doing the setups, these will cause a lot of grief and the project team may have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out where there has been slip between the cup and the lip.

It may sound ironic that we live in a world where on one hand the household gadgets are able to not only communicate to each other wirelessly but are also able to work with external entities (read grocery stores, hospitals, service personnel et al) to drive efficiency within the home, but at the same time the corporate systems seem to remain largely ensconced in the physical infrastructure available within the four walls of the workplace. While corporate calendar and email have been able to breach that barrier a long time back, the actual productivity improvements borne out of making the workforce truly mobile are being realized only now that serious effort is being spent to unshackle the biggest behemoth of them all - the corporate ERP.

Continuous pressure on businesses to perform has forced enterprises to evaluate, evolve and empower their finance functions, as a result of which there is a strategic shift seen in the finance department from being a score keeper to a valued business partner. The finance function on its path to evolve has come to be integrally dependent on effective information systems and technologies.

In this part of blog, I provide an overview of the current industry trends and in the next part, I will elaborate how Oracle Fusion Financials Application aides organizations in keeping up with these changing trends.

Definition of success parameters at the outset of any enterprise is the first step to determine the steps that need to follow. The ability to follow through with the detailed planning basis the success parameters is at the heart of project and program planning. The effective management of any enterprise depends upon the identification and administration of these parameters. Hence the relevance and effectiveness of any KPI is how closely it is linked to the business outcome and its understandability.

In the previous part of the blog, we discussed about some of the important Human Capital Management trends in the industry. This part throws light on how Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management Application can cater to the needs of these fast changing Human Resource trends in the industry.