First Look - Enterprise Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service

Last week I got the chance of attending the Oracle Partner Webcast of Enterprise Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service and I am sure surprised at some of the features that Oracle has introduced in this version. I would basically be going over the things that I found to be really cool in the application. Now since this is basically a presentation that I attended, I could not get through a lot of things with my hands-on (after all once you get your hands on something is only when you will actually understand things)

The first thing that I saw in the demo was that the entire look-and-feel of EPBCS is made to be mobile device friendly. There are tabs for most of the application like Revenue, Expense, Balance Sheet and Cash flow. Whenever you click on an application, it will immediately open a dashboard that shows the overall application status and then you can zoom in to the detailed level reports that you have.

Given the look-and-feel of the application, it looks like it has been designed for mobile applications and tablets and then for computers and desktops. EPBCS is built on top of HTML5 and it surely looks like it has been designed mostly for on-the-go kind of devices.

The other feature of EPBCS is that they plan to integrate the entire planning process for an organization under a single window. So it is possible that the organizational budgets, departmental budgets and the individual projects can all be viewed under a single window so as to help the organizations implement a single window for all their planning and budgeting needs.

The other thing that I was really impressed on in the demo is the strategic workflow module. This module is basically designed to integrate the long term HR planning with the corporate finance. Most of the big organizations will have the following streams who handle the HR planning:-

• ·         Human Resources.
• ·         Business Unit.
• ·         Line-of-Business.

Now the problem is that each of these act in their own silos and there is generally very less interaction among them. So you can have the HR which handles recruitment not in sync with the Business Unit that handles the daily grind of resources allocation and projects which in turn is not in sync with the LOB that has the visibility on the general trend in the business landscape.

Now the way Strategic Workforce Module was presented was such that, it will allow for this integration among these different groups of users to happen so that we have a single view of data in their specific format, which is impressive since this is a genuine problem that they are trying to solve.

Overall, EPBCS came up with some very interesting features and it would be something to look out to when it releases in a couple of months. I am still to type out most of the transcript so I think there will be more things to add later on, but for today I have jotted down the things that I found to be amazing in EPBCS.