Doing more with less is the defining characteristic of finance and accounting departments in midsize enterprises, which ISG research defines as organizations with between 100 and 999 workers. One frustrating truth confronting executives in these organizations is that, once their company stops being a small business, it has many of the same challenges that large enterprises face but with fewer resources to deal with them. Over the past two decades, advances in information technology have had the...
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Topics:
Office of Finance,
Business Planning,
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
natural language processing,
digital finance,
Generative AI,
Procure-to-Pay,
Consolidate and Close Management
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.
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Topics:
Office of Finance,
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
natural language processing,
digital finance,
Sustainability Management,
AI & Machine Learning,
Continuous Supply Chain & ERP,
Generative AI
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.
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Topics:
Office of Finance,
Business Planning,
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
natural language processing,
digital finance,
Work Management,
Generative AI,
AI and Machine Learning,
Digital Applications,
Procure-to-Pay,
Order-to-Cash,
Consolidate and Close Management
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...
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Topics:
Operations & Supply Chain,
AI,
Continuous Supply Chain & ERP,
Generative AI,
AI and Machine Learning,
Digital Applications
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...
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Topics:
Office of Finance,
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
digital finance,
Generative AI,
Procure-to-Pay,
Order-to-Cash
At this stage of the development of Generative AI, there’s much we can see clearly (at least we think we can), but there’s even more likely to surprise us. As that great 20th-century philosopher and hall-of-fame catcher, Yogi Berra, famously said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” The breadth and speed of innovation today in all aspects of GenAI rivals that of the internet in the 1990s, and for the same reason.
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Topics:
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
digital finance,
Generative AI,
Model Building and Large Language Models,
Procure-to-Pay,
Order-to-Cash
Until recently, dedicated consolidation software had been a sleepy category. First introduced in the 1980s as a tool designed to run on personal computers (freeing the accounting department from reliance on its IT department), offerings basically achieved feature and function parity by the next decade. The last major technology innovation—moving the software to the cloud—began in the mid-2000s. Cloud-based software reduces the cost and complexity of ownership, making dedicated software a more...
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Topics:
Office of Finance,
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
digital finance,
Generative AI,
Consolidate and Close Management
Oracle held an industry analyst summit recently where the focus was on artificial intelligence (AI) and embedded AI. At the event, Oracle demonstrated progress in adding useful AI-enabled capabilities to its business applications, especially in finance and accounting, supply chain, HR and revenue management. To put this into context, across the software industry, AI is already at work in many finance-focused applications that are currently available, albeit often in limited release. We are in...
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Topics:
Office of Finance,
Analytics,
Business Planning,
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
AI,
digital finance,
Generative AI,
AI and Machine Learning,
Procure-to-Pay,
Order-to-Cash,
Consolidate and Close Management
Zoho recently held its annual analyst day to communicate its strategy, objectives and product roadmap. The privately held company, headquartered in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, has an unconventional approach to the software market. Its self-described corporate philosophy emphasizes making bold moves that challenge assumptions. Its design engineering approach stresses simplicity and cost while aiming to provide easy-to-use software with sufficient capabilities to improve personal and...
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Topics:
Office of Finance,
Voice of the Customer,
Digital Commerce,
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
digital finance,
Customer Experience Management,
Generative AI,
Procure-to-Pay,
Order-to-Cash
After a year of near-constant AI chatter, the broad strokes of how the technology will roll out in business over the next three to five years are coming into place. It’s almost trite but worth repeating that artificial intelligence will drive a substantial boost in productivity as it’s adopted. Rather than making large swathes of jobs obsolete, it will take the robotic work out of those job descriptions, enabling people to focus on tasks with a greater economic return.
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Topics:
Office of Finance,
Business Planning,
ERP and Continuous Accounting,
AI,
digital finance,
Generative AI,
Procure-to-Pay,
Order-to-Cash,
Consolidate and Close Management