Oracle Cloud Helps Organizations Discover Profit Winners

Oracle today announced a purpose-built solution for finance executives and organizational managers to understand specifically what drives profitability, continually assess how resources are being consumed, and take action. Although under constant pressure to improve performance, many organizations lack visibility into what drives cost and profit. Cost, revenue, and operational systems are often fragmented, unconnected, and dispersed, making it difficult to understand the true profitability and costs of the business.

Oracle Profitability and Cost Management Cloud (PCMCS) enables business users to understand the root causes behind costs and revenues. Users can quickly and easily determine the profitability of customers, products, geographies, and sales channels, and take action to improve profitability and lower costs.

“What you don’t know about where your business is making and losing money can really hurt you. In today’s high-paced and increasingly competitive global business climate, it’s essential that your organization focuses resources and cash on the right priorities,” said Hari Sankar, group vice president of enterprise performance management at Oracle. “PCMCS enables organizations to easily identify their profit winners and address inefficiencies, ultimately improving business agility and profitable revenue growth, while minimizing costs.”

Built for the Cloud, Oracle PCMCS delivers new capabilities and innovation in the Cloud, while also leveraging best practices from Oracle’s on-premises offering, Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management.  The solution allows organizations to keep their general ledgers “thin,” fast, and efficient by performing detailed calculations outside the general ledger. Business users can identify profit potential and areas of cost savings with simple one-click reports and dashboards, without reliance on IT. The Cloud solution delivers pre-built reports including profit curves, scatter plots, and traceability, and includes features for detailed financial modeling and ad hoc reporting. Oracle PCMCS handles large data sets, and easily integrates with multiple Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, as well as with Oracle Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Cloud and on-premises offerings.

No matter the industry, Oracle PCMCS helps determine where best to spend limited investments and scarce resources to get the biggest impact:

• Financial services: Banks can gain visibility into complex cost allocations and calculate costs down to product, consumer, and branch.
• Healthcare: Organizations can provide accurate charge coding in patient profitability.
• Higher education: Institutions can view the full cost of a course by calculating everything needed to deliver the course, including the cost of building the course.
• Telecommunications: Companies can apply network costs directly to a product that consumes actions on that network, such as minutes or data.
• Transportation: Organizations can calculate all costs of moving a plane from point to point, including capitalization on plane, crew, and station costs at each airport, which can be allocated based on factors like number of passengers carried or number of flights taken.
• Utilities and public services: Users can allocate all shared costs, such as facilities and support staff, into services required while providing transparency for government oversight.

“Businesses today can struggle with knowing exactly where their profit comes from, as traditional financial statements don’t tell the full story, and general ledgers can be inefficient and cluttered,” said Mike Willhelm, managing director at Huron. “Oracle PCMCS enables businesses to easily get insights into profits and costs and act on them quickly. In addition, it integrates well with ERP business processes.”

“The Oracle Profitability and Cost Management Cloud Service strikes the perfect balance between configurability and ease-of-use, and is a welcome addition to Oracle’s market-leading family of cloud-based Enterprise Performance Management applications. It’s the ideal solution for a wide range of allocation based business processes, including management reporting, product and customer profitability, shared service costing and chargebacks, and operational transfer pricing,” said Mike Killeen, senior vice president at Edgewater Ranzal.