News & Views

December 4, 2009 from AMR Research and written by Bruce Richardson – The answer to one of Bruce’s questions about what’s different in Fusion (Oracle’s soon to be released new ERP system) was – “In designing Fusion Applications, we wanted every part of the application to be business intelligence (BI) driven—every part—from the navigation, to the workflow, to the most basic transaction. We looked at every business task and from a role-based perspective, asked, “What do I need to know and what do I need to do? Here’s an example: A typical payables manager who uses our systems every day is presented with a menu that has a list of items: invoices, payments, suppliers, and bank accounts. The manager then needs to issue queries to process transactions. In a BI-driven system like Fusion Applications, we proactively alert the manager to what he or she needs to do: “You have five payments whose early discounts are about to expire,” “You have three suppliers on hold,” and “You have seven invoices awaiting your approval.”

Then once they start to process, we tell them what they need to know: the number of times that this supplier has delivered late, the quality of their service, and who gives the best discounts for early payments. Business intelligence becomes more than just metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) after the fact. [It] should help you do business…”

180 View – We like what we hear, and hope that Bruce will continue his good work under new management as Gartner just purchased AMR Research.