Profit Magazine - February 2008

APPLICATIONS UNLIMITED

tives, the financial impact on facilities is instantly apparent— especially for larger organizations that maintain facilities in-house or outsource the storage of paper documents. Simply put, the cost associated with storing an image on a hard disk is infinitely smaller than the cost to store and ensure the security and integrity of paper-based documents.

STEP ⁴: Beyond the Quick Wins—Finance as a Case Study for

Cost Reduction

Financial processes are the sweet spot for imaging and process management technologies. Customers using the combined Oracle Financials and Oracle Imaging and Process

Management solution have seen benefits ranging from reductions of invoice processing from US$33 to $2.75, invoice-to-pay reductions from 80 days to 24 hours, and ROI savings in the US$100,000 range during the first year. One of the customers seeing such gains in financials process improvements is New Plan Excel

Realty Trust, which is using Oracle’s comprehensive content management solution to manage essentially all of its enterprise content. According to Robert Lieberman, senior vice president and chief information officer for New Plan Excel Realty

Trust, “With invoices coming directly to a central office for management within the system, we can automatically reduce the time it takes to process an invoice by

10 to 20 percent. The ease of routing invoices for approval and payment, combined with the system’s integration with our JD Edwards applications, further accelerates the process—enabling us to pay invoices within approximately 7 to 10 days, instead of our previous 30-day average.”

But finance isn’t the only area that can benefit. The adoption of imaging within finance can be a catalyst to cost savings within horizontal line-of-business processes like human resources for employee onboarding or benefits documentation and vertical processes including

Claims processing: streamlined data gathering and parallel processing

Loan/mortgage processing: centralized portfolio management Lease/contract management: formalized contract review cycles Account opening: process acceleration and error reduction Higher education: transcript and application management

Finally, imaging and process management provides organizations with peace of mind in a worst-case scenario: disaster recovery. Says Sancho Pinto, principal product manager for Oracle Fusion Middleware’s content management imaging solution:

“There are many reasons to consider Oracle for imaging, including the native integrations with Oracle’s business applications and ability to scale up and meet all of an organization’s imaging requirements. One particular customer sticks in my mind. The CIO was pushing the lines of business to scan docu-

ments and image-enable their applications, but reasons not to do it kept coming up. Then a tornado hit one of their main buildings. No one was hurt, but they were picking up documents for days, some of them confidential, all of them critical. When the dust settled—literally—they were lined up at the CIO’s door asking when they could start their imaging projects.”

What’s SOA Worth to You?
Calculate the value of agility

Oracle Applications customers don’t need to wait to discover the enormous value that service-oriented architecture (SOA) brings to the world of IT—they can implement SOA today. With an SOA approach, your IT organization can deliver modular business services that can be easily integrated and reused—creating a flexible, adaptable IT infrastructure that supports business agility. But any move to a new technology requires investment.

What happens when the value question moves out of the realm of IT and into the realm of bottom-line finance? How do you calculate the value of business agility?

Oracle studied hundreds of SOA early
adopters, eliciting information that brings
the value patterns of SOA to life. As you
work to put the buzz about SOA into
perspective for your organization or seek
to identify the best project for beginning
your exploration of SOA, you’ll want to know how to avoid
potential pitfalls and maximize the value of this new technology.

Oracle has created a library of information and tools that will give you the metrics you need for measuring the business impact you can achieve with SOA. Based on bottom-line cost savings and a total-cost-of-ownership approach, the Oracle SOA ROI calculator can help you quantify SOA adoption for your organization. See the “For More Information” box for details.

Opening Up the Field
An excerpt from Lenley Hensarling’s executive blog

Lenley Hensarling is vice president and general manager of Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne product line. The JD Edwards EnterpriseOne team focuses on ensuring that the customer base continues to gain value within the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne product line and has a clear path forward to the new Oracle Fusion Applications as they emerge over the coming years. Hensarling’s blog can be found at blogs.oracle.com/lenleyhensarling.

Business practice has changed due to globalization and an increased understanding of efficiencies in manufacturing and distribution. Here Lean techniques come to mind. The practices require a leap not in technology but in understanding. As manufacturers adopt Lean techniques, they require new types of applications, not new types of technological underpinnings. An example is providing “work-order-less” manufacturing so that