Do You Want to Streamline Your Applications?

Oracle has acquired a lot of technology recently - some of the biggest acquisitions have been within the Applications space. In addition to the Oracle eBusiness Suite, we own PeopleSoft, Siebel and JD Edwards and our acquisition of the Stellent technology in November 2006 puts us into a great position to underpin these applications with real-value content solutions.

Let's take a financials package for example, Oracle eBusiness Suite (EBS). Many organisations have successfully deployed this application to streamline their business processes but have neglected to solve an issue that causes headaches within the business teams. The handling of paper-based information within a financials process occurs on a daily basis and at certain periods (end of month, end of year predominately) the volume of paper being handled rises dramatically. Handling paper through a review and approvals process generates risk for an organisation. Believe it or not, the risk of spilling a cup of coffee on the paper is pretty high in most organisations as is simply mis-placing or losing the paper itself. Internal envelopes are notorious for getting lost for months-on-end - I've heard so many horror stories around this in my past. In addition to the risk of damaging or losing the paper, the process itself becomes long and cumbersome. Manual review and approval of paper - including the necessary cross-checks required can take anything from a week to a month to complete which in today's electronic age should be unacceptable to most organisations - particularly those that supply you with their goods!

There are solutions that help streamline the process through image-capture and electronic workflow processing. These solutions are easy to implement, highly-configurable as required and on the grand-scheme of things - relatively cheap to procure and own.

Now, of course, Oracle doesn't only look after it's own applications. SAP is out there being used by many organisations to run their businesses - we know a fair bit about this as most of the large deployments run Oracle's database at the back-end. SAP has a relatively good content management solution within its environment - but it is not considered by many to be enterprise-class as it doesn't really support the majority of ECM capabilities outside of its own ecosystem. Within SAP we provide an important and crucial solution that helps streamline the application itself ensuring ongoing performance without the need to consistently invest in new hardware. This solution is called SAP Archiving and is based upon the principal that only a relatively small percentage of data within SAP is actually being used. Once a financial transaction is complete, for example, the details (including any unstructured information) can be shipped out of the live environment into an archive - as long as it remains accessible if required. The Oracle Universal Online Archive solution fits this requirement nicely.

We are running a series of informative events in Sydney and Melbourne in the next few months to educate our customers and partners around these solutions. If you would like to be a part of these events, please let use know otherwise watch this space for registration details.

Paul