Oracle Announces Updates to ERP Cloud Industry Solutions

Oracle's announcements at OpenWorld 2019 reveal the company aims to ease challenges in the health care, higher education, and oil & gas industries, as well as the public sector, via upcoming updates to Oracle ERP Cloud. These newly announced or updated industry-oriented features will help customers improve business processes and achieve faster time to value.

Let’s talk about what’s new.

Vocado student financial planning for higher education

Vocado was acquired by Oracle in April 2018 to add a cloud-based financial aid solution for higher education institutions to Oracle Student Cloud. In a session earlier this week, I heard Oracle’s VP of product management for Student Cloud, Sam Witt (formerly Vocado’s COO), talk about the innovations the company is making with Student Cloud to make the product more student-centric.

The full integration of Vocado into Student Cloud will help students better access their financial aid and will support higher education institutions with processing and compliance.

In a separate session at OpenWorld, the ERP Cloud team placed the same renewed emphasis on the product, highlighting how it can enable informed academic and financial decisions, reduce time-to-aid eligibility and first disbursement for students, and improve the efficiency of financial aid processing to help higher education organizations meet compliance requirements.

It was highlighted that the product supports automated financial aid packaging, with real-time synchronization with federal data sources to reduce institution overhead and time to aid processing.

Labor distribution for higher education, health care, and public sector

The labor distribution features in Oracle ERP Cloud for health care, higher ed, and public sector industries will allow businesses to better track and control their labor and human-based resources. 

With labor distribution, users will be able to reduce labor errors and better distribute payroll costs. If an organization is audited or is held to mandated reporting, these features will allow them to easily report on their workforce. Organizations taking advantage of these features can expect more visibility into their budgeting and labor costs, which in turn can lead to better decisions about how to utilize resources and budget. 

Joint venture accounting for oil & gas

Joint ventures are common in the energy sector, but managing them can be challenging in terms of visibility and collaboration. A small handful of third-party apps have been developed to better support joint ventures for the oil & gas industry within Oracle ERP Cloud, but now the vendor has taken matters into their own hands to provide better joint venture features directly within the tool, no third-party apps needed.

Newly announced joint venture accounting for the oil & gas industry increases transparency between joint venture partners and allows them to better collaborate around finances. The feature gives operators and partners (depending on assignable role-based access) real-time visibility into the financial health of their joint venture. The tool’s focus on transparency should reduce partner disputes and improve joint ventures’ cash flow.

These newly announced industry features for Oracle ERP Cloud are only a small fraction of the ways Oracle is continuing to evolve to better serve industry professionals’ unique needs.