Welcome to Cloud Chronicles: Real-World Global Transformations. In today’s podcast, Megan Testani, VP of Marketing and Business Development at Project Partners, discusses with three organizations how Generative AI is impacting the present and future during their transition from Oracle JD Edwards and Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) to Oracle Cloud Applications or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and what the future holds.
Megan Testani, Project Partners: First, let’s speak with Laurence Cauchy, the Enterprise Performance Management Center of Excellence Director for AtkinsRéalis. Laurence, your team is presently running AI in Oracle Cloud EPM. What capabilities are you utilizing?
Laurence Cauchy, AtkinsRéalis: So this is really exciting. AI. That’s all we hear about currently. So what we’re doing currently? We’re in the testing phase, so it’s not live in production, but we expect it to be live in prod before the end of the year. We are using the IPM functionalities in EPBCS to improve the forecasting and budgeting activities.
The objectives are to reduce the time used for the forecast and budget and improve its quality by having some insights into our forecast and budget processes. So we don’t want to remove the activities that people are doing currently, which is a more manual activity of really looking at what your employees are, what your projects are, and what we are forecasting for the future based on workforce and projects. We want to supplement it with a comparative predictive forecasting and budgeting version.
Megan Testani, Project Partners: Thank you, Lawrence. Now, let’s look to the future. What’s next for your organizations regarding cloud adoption and digital transformation? How do you see your strategy evolving? Let’s begin with Jochen Rahm, the CTO for PROMATIS (an ITG Company) and the program manager for PRODINGER. Johan, what’s next for PRODINGER?
Jochen Rahm, PROMATIS: As I mentioned, we are in the middle of a digitalization program. In the following steps, what we want to achieve is that we will also now have a next phase forward for Supply Planning. So, we want to establish the Demand and Supply Planning Cloud to improve our business functionality in this area.
Additionally, we have also the HCM Cloud in place. Now, we also want to extend that with a Talent Management Cloud. That means we are looking at new functionalities and business features step by step—what will allow the business to grow? That is a good opportunity with Oracle because Oracle has such a big application and functional pool. I use this and combine that, and with all the integration technology, what Oracle provides is a very good target to achieve that.
Megan Testani, Project Partners: Thank you, Johan. Next, let’s speak with Wino Verschoor, the Director of Applications for Vanderlande Industries. Wino, what is Vanderlande focused on for the future?
Wino Verschoor, Vanderlande: Now, in the short term, we are confident with the OSHA platform. So, in the short term, we are also moving our IBM Maximo tool into OCI. We will also investigate the Autonomous Database with Oracle for our efforts migrating into OCI. There are currently no plans to change our ERP. But I see AI and Cloud, and that inspires me. Also, to engage input for future vision and former process to see where they have a lot of directions for them on how this is going.
Megan Testani, Project Partners: Thank you. Vino. Now let’s hear from Randy Martin, Director of Financial Applications, Strategy and Innovation for AtkinsRéalis. Randy, what does the future look like for your team?
Randy Martin, AtkinsRéalis: Yeah, for us, we were we were running many different ERP systems globally. So, our first priority after moving into OCI has been consolidating those ERPs into one. So, we get all of our operations globally under one ERP. In this case, EBS and OCI. I think the heavy lifting is aligning processes globally because if you have multiple ERPs, you have multiple global processes. No one looks at things the same way.
So it’s quite a heavy lift, simply aligning the organization to one way of working. We feel like that will better position us later to move to Cloud ERP; having done that alignment and that hard work, the migration should be a bit easier.
Megan Testani, Project Partners: Thank you. Randy. Now, let’s wrap it up by circling back to Laurence. Laurence, your team is already dabbling in AI. What comes next?
Laurence Cauchy, AtkinsRéalis: So, EPM offers a wide range of tool functionalities. We’re not currently using all of them. Our goal in the future is to use the most we can of those applications. So, in the short term, we are turning on some functionality on FCCS, which is supplemental data, which will help us with the quarterly reporting. So, people across the finance function can give detailed information on the movement in the accounts through supplemental data directly in the tool. And we’re turning this live for September 2024 reporting—like, right now.
We’re also developing narrative reporting to produce the financial statement notes. From there, we will also produce management reporting. And we’re really excited about the generative AI coming to narrative reporting. I think it will significantly help with the management reporting comments in financial notes. We want to automate reporting as much as we can. There is still some manual reporting that is done, even after our goal of EPM migration, that we want to get rid of for legal management and audit.
We also want to use more AI on EPBCS, FCCS, and generative AI for script explanation and correction. I think that’s a really important piece of that. In the near future, we also want to turn on EDM CS to manage our metadata centrally in one single place instead of having multiple sources to manage the metadata.
Megan Testani, Project Partners: Thank you, Lawrence. This concludes episode five of Cloud Chronicles Real World Global Transformations.
Join us for episode six, where we will discuss lessons learned during the migration process and managed services’ role in ensuring seamless cloud operations post-migration.
Did you miss episode 4? Click here to listen in.
