Oracle Fusion Financials Online Training

Understanding Oracle Fusion Financials Cloud

Managing Enterprise Financials system in the Cloud

The purpose of this article is to describe the advantages of Oracle Financial Cloud through the process of implementing and deploying the solution set for financial systems of record and reporting. There are two key parts to the Oracle Fusion technology:

• Oracle Fusion Applications
• Oracle Fusion Middleware

The above user facing technologies are deployed on the technology stack described below:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Compute and Storage
• Platform as a Service (PaaS): Database, backup, Business Intelligence, Big data
• Software as a Service (SaaS): Applications

Business users can subscribe to the SaaS model or install the technology stack on their premises of choice. Some key differences between using a hosted service and hosting on premises is in the investment in software licenses, hardware and network infrastructure, and ongoing maintenance, including upgrades. A subscription model to the Oracle hosted service does not require investment in the technology stack and license is managed through subscription fee. The cloud technology stack can also be implemented on premises. This requires investment in license, maintenance fees, hardware technology stack, and the client taking on the responsibility for upgrades.

Advantages:

Many businesses consider financial information about their operations with utmost importance from an operational perspective and very confidential. This is especially true for small to mid-size businesses that are privately held and managed. The technology stack offered by Oracle offers advantages with machines designated for each subscribing customer thereby ensuring data security and strict confidentiality. As businesses grow and operations expand, many businesses expand globally with operations and reporting in multiple countries, and need to ensure compliance with governmental regulations and reporting to key stake holders, and eventually stock holders. The Oracle technology stack subscription service is designed to be elastic and grow with the scalability demanded by the subscribing customer.

Essentially, businesses with global operations require globally scalable financial applications that are, from the start, enabled for such operational capabilities. Oracle Fusion Financials is certainly an application that is ready, out of the “proverbial” box, for such scaling of capabilities. A big advantage, hence the phrase “proverbial” in quotes, is that the implementation of the solution is not invasive and does not require investment in software license or hardware and networking infrastructure. This offers flexibility of pay-as-you-use model.

Oracle Financials include the following key modules: Ledger & Analytics, Accounts Receivable, Collections, Accounts Payable, Cash Management, Fixed Assets, and Expenses.

Under the expert guidance of consultants from Inspirage, these Cloud Financial modules can be configured to suit a business’s specific requirements and deployed rapidly. The business subject matter experts will be able to state business requirements from operations and regulatory perspective across the globe with the implementation experts. Inspirage consultants and professionals can also assist their customers to maintain, expand, and implement a dynamic business process to enable growth and expansion of operations over a longer horizon of operations.

With a robust Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), a big advantage for any business is to operate in a hybrid environment (partially in the cloud with other on-premises applications) where:

• The financial system is hosted by a service provider like Oracle.
• The other applications (third party applications and services) can be easily integrated with the financial system – e.g., payroll, bank, exchange rates, etc.
• After rigorous review with stake holders, users can add custom extensions between the PaaS and SaaS layers, under expert guidance from Inspirage to ensure consistent product usage that will enable easy upgrade paths.

The configuration process takes into account business units that will be required and provides for all the subledgers (AR, AP, Fixed Assets, projects, etc.) to be tracked by business units, and legal entities. Inter-company transactions, if any, can be set up and configured to provide online tracking and balancing of intercompany transactions in multiple legal entities, business units and multiple currencies.

Use:

Another robust set of features enhanced in the Fusion Cloud is data security. Security is implemented through configurations at the business unit level, thus ensuring separation and security of transactional and some master data by specific business units across the global operations. This is implemented through the use of powerful and at the same time flexible Role Based Access Controls (RBAC) at the user level across the technology stack from database to applications and reporting. 

With all of the advantages and ease of use described above, there is the initial learning curve that will be required to deploy the applications in the cloud. The steepness of that curve can be greatly alleviated by using expertise from Inspirage professionals.