Oracle also receives cloud customers’ instant reactions to particular products, enabling its team to make responsive changes and speeding up development. This order of operations ensures that Oracle creates products and services that will fit its customers’ needs.
Publicly available data related to recent acquisitions, earnings reports, credit histories and even insights gathered from public-facing websites work to improve security.
“I think we are going to see a much more integrated financing side,” Haimes explained. “I think we’ll see [tighter integrations] so that banks can offer innovative financing solutions without having to take [operations] offline into a separate system.”
Making Change a Community Effort
AP automation solutions integrated with ERP software can provide myriad benefits, but businesses and professionals may be hesitant to adopt them simply because they cannot picture a non-legacy AP system.
“The biggest problem [these businesses run into when implementing these systems] is change management in the organization,” Haimes noted.
Successful integration requires not only structural change, but also mindset shifts among employees.
“If you’re going to implement this, you’ve got to have executive sponsorship, and there needs to be a clear desire in the organization to take advantage of the system to its full [potential],” Haimes said.
This means businesses must be diligent about managing their employees’ fears of organizational change. AP professionals may worry that automated solutions could cost them their jobs, for example, so businesses must be open, honest and clear about how these systems could impact their daily lives, Haimes explained.
Education plays a key role in this broader strategy, as employees may not understand that automating AP operations will make their jobs easier and more fulfilling. Such tools take care of tedious, repetitive tasks and open workers’ schedules so they can focus on other projects.
“You need to make sure that everybody gets brought on board with that process and that everybody buys into it — that they see why they are doing it and don’t feel threatened,” Haimes said.
Broader AP integration strategies must include education, which may be the critical piece that allows the entire automated operation to succeed.
