Streamline Your Oracle Financials Close Process

Manual processing bottlenecks within the Financial Period Close process can significantly reduce its efficiency and effectiveness in many organizations. A sub-optimal Close can cause a number of business issues to surface. Human intervention results in data entry and execution errors, and often in costly recovery efforts. An unreliable financial close delays information reaching executives, postponing key business decisions. Technical and functional employees spend a disproportionate amount of time getting existing processes to work, correcting errors and “baby sitting” processing. Applications function in silos, making it difficult to automate entire processes without doing extensive custom development. Manual processes, no matter how well documented, are difficult to “prove” during compliance audits. Bottlenecks in the Financial Period Close typically arise from a variety of sources, for example: manually submitted concurrent programs; completely manual tasks or forms; poor workload management of concurrent programs, and/or manual integration with other applications, sub-systems, legacy systems, vendors, etc. Eliminating Financial Period Close bottlenecks eliminates or improves all the business issues outlined above. There are a number of common but misguided workarounds organizations try to employ to improve the Financial Period Close process, but these seldom bring sufficient improvement. Three proven methodologies to optimize the Financial Period Close are automation, integration and acceleration. Automation targets all manual processes however and wherever they arise. Integration targets disparate processing points with the goal of a single point of control. Acceleration targets all processes with the goal of making them finish more quickly today and scale easily for tomorrow. Together these three approaches can significantly decrease the time required to close while significantly increasing the reliability of and confidence in the close.