Robert Kugel's Analyst Perspectives

I recently attended Infor’s Velocity Summit, designed to showcase the latest versions of its CloudSuite ERP software. Also center stage were Infor’s advances in artificial intelligence and process mining as well as its environmental, social and governance application and supply chain optimization enhancements.

Artificial Intelligence and generative AI are beginning to change how enterprises do many things, especially planning and budgeting. This technology has the potential to significantly redefine the mission of the financial planning and analysis group. It will do so by substantially reducing the time spent on the purely mechanical aspects of day-to-day tasks. AI is also making it easier for executives and managers to rapidly forecast, plan and analyze to promote deeper situational awareness and...

Agents are all the rage—and for a good reason. They are a way to automate work almost effortlessly so that repetitive and boring tasks get done with the least amount of effort on the part of the operator. In business, agents can be a boon for customer satisfaction and a way to improve worker productivity. They are alluring, with an almost unlimited number of potential use cases.

Oracle announced significant updates to its Fusion Cloud Supply Chain & Manufacturing (SCM) software at the recently held Oracle Cloud World. The application suite includes procurement, inventory management, warehouse management, order management and transportation management. SCM tasks are mostly small-scale and repetitive, yet the processes they support are far from simple. They involve the intricate choreography of often complex activities that require the accurate communication and...

Artificial intelligence-enabled business applications have advanced considerably over the past year as software providers have added a steady stream of capabilities. This includes customer facing, financial, supply chain and workforce software. ISG Research asserts that by 2027, almost all providers of business applications will use some form of generative AI to enhance capabilities and functionality to remain competitive.

Prophix launched its Prophix One platform earlier this year. CFOs of midsize enterprises should take a look at it because it supports a more effective approach to finance and accounting operations in growing companies. It facilitates the transition of organizations that can no longer make do with work-arounds of existing systems to those with formal, controlled core processes that can be completed faster with reduced risk. The platform performs financial consolidation, account reconciliation...

Sage recently held an analyst summit to take a deeper dive into its product and technology roadmap, complementing sessions it held at its 2024 user group conference that I commented on earlier this year. ERP systems have been central to the operational and financial management of enterprises since they first appeared in the 1990s. They are so familiar that they have become part of the background and only noticeable when something fails. We are now in a major transition to a new era of...

ERP systems have been the central nervous system of enterprises for more than three decades, handling business-critical process management and recordkeeping. While their basic outlines are unchanged, today’s systems are far more capable in their functional depth, adaptability, usability and manageability. Especially for cloud-based systems, they are far easier to maintain. Decades of refinement and focused development to support specific industries, and even specialized categories within these...

OneStream offers a platform designed to serve the needs of accounting and financial planning and analysis (FP&A) organizations. The software handles financial close and consolidation, planning and budgeting, analysis and reporting. OneStream recently held its annual user conference, Splash, in Las Vegas. In attending this meeting, my focus was on progress the company has made in the areas of predictive artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI (GenAI) over the past year, since the...

Improving data management is at the forefront of my Office of Finance research practice because, when not managed well, it can have a profoundly negative impact on departmental efficiency, individual performance, organizational agility and sustainability. Conversely, straight-through processing (STP), a business process design and data management methodology, reduces process friction throughout an organization and, by minimizing errors, builds trust in the accuracy and reliability of all data,...