More than 430,000 businesses use Oracle to support their critical business processes because it provides the performance, security, reliability, and scalability they need to be more flexible and agile.
However, relying solely on your existing legacy systems and business applications for your core processes might not allow you to operate at full capacity.
Successful organizations combine Oracle with robotic process automation (RPA), which removes the drudgery of repetitive tasks in critical business processes. Automation speeds up slow and inflexible processes, driving efficiencies, reducing operational costs, and improving the customer experience.
Curious about how to automate with RPA and Oracle? This guide shares common RPA use cases and benefits and how you can add automation to strengthen business operations in Oracle.
WHAT PROCESS CAN BE AUTOMATED IN ORACLE?
Before you jump in and start implementing RPA in Oracle, identify the potential opportunities for efficiency improvements and cost savings in your business processes.
Generally, RPA uses software robots to automate and execute tasks that are:
- Repetitive and rules-based
- Tedious, time-consuming, and mundane
- Stable and standardized
- High-volume and high-frequency
- Prone to errors and inaccuracies
- Involve large volumes of disparate, structured data
Bots can automate a breadth of activities in business operations, including sales, customer service, and accounts payable.
Here are some examples of tasks you can start automating in Oracle.
ORDER-TO-CASH (O2C)
Customers expect you to handle all aspects of a sale quickly and efficiently and deliver their orders in a timely fashion. Many companies still rely on manual order-to-cash (O2C) processes, so they don’t maximize their O2C cycle.
Oracle RPA automates O2C processes from sales order entry to product shipping to billing and payment collection to reporting so you can:
- Eliminate billing errors
- Improve efficiency
- Reduce payment delays and day sales outstanding
- Increase customer satisfaction
- Boost profitability
DATA ENTRY
Data entry is one of the most boring tasks and a huge time sink, taking up 1-3 hours of your employees’ time. This tedious manual process involves moving data from one platform or application to another and finding information or specific documents.
RPA bots handle these data-related tasks, freeing up your workers to focus on more strategic tasks that require the human touch and less time updating Oracle or searching for information.
INVOICING
Paper-intensive processes such as invoice processing are still largely manual in many companies. When the volume of invoices increases, manual procedures lack speed and efficiency, making invoicing a suitable candidate for automation.
RPA bots perform matching of invoices against purchase orders (POs), validation, general ledger coding, and approval steps resulting in:
- Fewer errors
- More visibility into corporate spending
- Simplified reconciliation
- Streamlined accruals
- More accurate financial statements
- Improved vendor relationships
PROCURE-TO-PAY
The procure-to-pay process is difficult and frustrating for many companies. Adding RPA to your Oracle establishes an automated flow of structured data between vendors, employees, and other third parties, enabling you to:
- Reduce costs
- Accelerate invoice processing
- Improve performance
- Reduce days payable outstanding
- Transform the supplier experience with faster onboarding
- Streamline communication between your employees and third-parties
CONTACT-TO-LEAD NURTURING
Software robots handle the heavy, automated lifting for the contact-to-lead nurturing process with little to no human intervention.
For instance, if you have an email nurturing campaign, RPA robots can create new customer contacts in your CRM while Oracle localizes and personalizes content for the new customer contact.
Bots can also search for new customer contact records using key, filtered criteria to fetch details for specific records or update key information.
Once the customer information is ready, Oracle moves the contact into marketing automation, allowing bots to start email messages for the new customer.
PROPOSAL-TO-CONTRACT PROCESSING
Automating Oracle with RPA can also execute tasks within your proposal-to-contract or source-to-contract processes.
For instance, software robots can assess contracts, identify deviations from company policy or best practices, and look for the best prices. This frees your team to do more with their time while drastically improving the return on operation costs.
RPA bots are equally effective in addressing vendor background checks, onboarding, and other standard aspects of supplier management.
ORACLE RPA USE CASES
RPA can transform most—if not all—areas of your business while helping your employees handle business tasks with a level of accuracy, timeliness, and thoroughness that they can’t achieve on their own.
To succeed with RPA, you need strategies and roadmaps based on a practical understanding of the main automation use cases, which include:
- Finance
- Customer service
- Human resources (HR)
- Procurement
- Compliance and reporting
FINANCE
An Oracle report found that businesses are investing in automation for better performance, revenue growth, and more productive employees. 46% of tech-savvy finance leaders reported positive revenue growth and are more likely to deploy advanced technologies.
Rich Clayton, Vice President of Product Strategy at Oracle Analytics, says that automation helps companies generate and manage narrative reporting in the financial process—especially in large companies where a filing can require input from many people.
RPA streamlines critical stages in the record-to-report process, offering greater insight into the quality and sustainability of your company’s financial results. Plus, it speeds the monthly financial close in companies from days to hours as bots run reports 24/7—without errors.
Some accounting tasks bots can handle in Oracle include:
- Moving data between Excel, Finance, and Accounting systems in Oracle
- Verifying VAT for vendors
- Reporting VAT on tax authority portals
- Processing vendor invoices
- Credit card processing, clearing, and reconciliation
- Preparing audit evidences
- Syncing data across platforms outside Oracle
CUSTOMER SERVICE
Speed is crucial to keeping your customers happy.
RPA bots can automate your invoicing, customer reports, and other processes so your customers always have everything they need while your support team handles any exceptions that may arise.
Automating the customer service process tasks in Oracle helps you deliver better service—faster, engage your clients in real-time, and enhance their experience throughout the lifecycle of a purchase.
Bots also support the customer self-service management process by:
- Making product or service recommendations
- Offering alerts or updates
- Automating report delivery
- Providing customers with their transaction history
- Processing customer service requests
- Ensuring first-call resolution (FCR)
HUMAN RESOURCES
You want to find and add the best candidates to your organization in the most cost-effective, time-saving, and efficient way possible. Automation can help your HR team focus on personal interaction more than mundane computer work.
RPA bots automate repetitive, administrative tasks within Oracle applications, including:
- Screening candidates and streamlining the interview and vetting process
- Employee onboarding/offboarding
- Providing new hires
- Configuring access to company applications
- Resetting passwords and unlocking user accounts
- Executing recurring transactions and benefits administration
- Updating employee information
Your team can focus on high-value tasks that require human intelligence and critical thinking like talent development, key-hire recruitment, implementing training, and more.
In turn, you’ll lower risk and costs, drive higher efficiency, increase job satisfaction, and provide better customer engagement.
PROCUREMENT
When used with ERP systems, automation can impact how you manage your procurement processes, negotiate with vendors, and make business decisions.
Once you implement RPA with Oracle, you can cut risks, costs, and manual efforts across the procurement function.
RPA bots can create and populate procurement dashboards, provide requisition assistants, streamline vendor onboarding, and speed up reporting.
In manufacturing, for instance, Oracle ERP automation can improve procurement, inventory management, order processing, lower labor costs, and provide data to manage and optimize production.
COMPLIANCE AND RISK MANAGEMENT
The more digitized your company’s IT infrastructure is, the higher the risk to your business.
Oracle RPA helps you monitor what’s happening in your business to ensure contractual and legal compliance across different departments.
Automated workflows and compliance processes give you the confidence that you’re meeting all current requirements and won’t have to reinvent the wheel when auditing or filing reports.
THE BENEFITS OF USING RPA IN ORACLE
RPA with Oracle can fundamentally change how you address multiple areas of process execution in your business so you can:
- Achieve cost savings
- Accelerate digital transformation
- Speed ROI
- Improve customer experience and retention
- Increase efficiency
- Boost workforce productivity
- Deliver faster time-to-value
- Enhance standardization and compliance
- Scale with confidence
1. ACHIEVE COST SAVINGS
RPA streamlines, standardizes, and optimizes your business processes, making them move faster while reducing the workload on your employees.
Software robots don’t take breaks, grow tired, or have downtime. This brings cost savings for your business as fewer resources are needed compared to hiring more workers to do the same work manually.
2. ACCELERATE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
You can’t rely on legacy systems alone to manage your critical business functions. Automation enhances your Oracle ERP modernization, accelerating and powering your company’s digital transformation.
RPA optimizes processes within Oracle driving real benefits, such as reducing manual effort or intervention, improving data accuracy, increasing efficiency, productivity, and employee satisfaction—all of which speed up digital transformation.
3. SPEED ROI
Done correctly, RPA delivers high ROI, which—according to McKinsey—ranges between 30% and 200% in the first year. However, some industry reports suggest that the average ROI from RPA implementation ranges from 250% or more for high-performing companies and is typically paid back within six to nine months after deployment.
The more you identify and streamline your business processes before automating them, the faster the pace of automation and higher ROI you can achieve.
4. IMPROVE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE AND RETENTION
Automation frees your staff to focus on important, customer-centric activities while removing human error or bias from repetitive tasks.
RPA improves and guarantees a consistent customer experience because your team can access critical customer information in real-time and spend more time interfacing with customers—not manually searching for information or documents.
5. INCREASE EFFICIENCY
An annual Leadership Perspective Survey of 2,800 C-suite executives found that increasing operational efficiencies and productivity is their second most critical priority for 2022.
RPA streamlines workflows within Oracle by automating data practices like migration, reporting, and validation. This removes human involvement and errors, drives accelerated execution of tasks and increases overall efficiency in business processes.
6. BOOST WORKFORCE PRODUCTIVITY
Monotonous tasks amplify employees’ uncertainty and unhappiness, which lead many workers to quit their jobs, as seen during the Great Resignation.
UiPath’s 2022 Office Worker Survey reports that 70% of employees are interested or could be swayed into finding new jobs in the next six months, while 44% are currently applying for other positions.
Automating business processes in Oracle transitions workers from dull, manual, value-less, and time-intensive work so they can focus on more strategic, innovative, and value-adding activities. This improves engagement, boosts productivity, and increases employee retention rates.
7. DELIVER FASTER TIME-TO-VALUE
Empowering end-to-end process automation in Oracle applications allows customers to experience faster time-to-value and reduces development times with low-code, out-of-the-box integration capabilities for your business.
Extending the reach of RPA in your business processes also increases productivity while accelerating digital transformation across the organization.
8. ENHANCE STANDARDIZATION AND COMPLIANCE
Many business processes may not be as standardized as you would hope.
RPA standardizes your processes by mimicking human-like tasks in a repeatable, predictable, and stable manner that’s consistent every time. This ensures you reduce risks in your business, speed up time-to-value for your customers, and comply with policy requirements across different industries.
For example, during the pandemic, clinical laboratories experienced an influx of personnel changes, triggering spikes in dependent verification checks to ensure benefit coverage. Automating such checks within Oracle helps manage any verification backlogs, saving costs and time for medical personnel.
ADDING AN RPA SOLUTION TO ORACLE
On its own, Oracle doesn’t offer RPA tools.
You can handle the installation on your own, but you’ll have to source the RPA solution and hire an in-house team of developers to plan, design, implement, and support automation in your Oracle infrastructure. These requirements may be costly and time-consuming—especially if you’re setting it up for the first time.
Alternatively, you can hire a vendor to help with the entire process. In this case, you’ll find an expert RPA vendor—like Leaniar—who will handle everything on your behalf.
Our team of RPA experts and developers will evaluate and determine automatable processes in your Oracle system, develop, test, and deploy the RPA solution, and provide support post-installation.
We apply an automated one-click deployment solution that ensures you can scale your robot deployments as your business needs change. This hassle-free option provides faster time-to-value and reduces development times, helping you become faster and more agile in a rapidly changing environment.
CHOOSING AN EXPERT TO BUILD RPA SOLUTIONS IN ORACLE FOR YOU
Choosing an RPA expert to build a tailor-made solution for your Oracle infrastructure involves finding the right vendor that understands your systems, has the RPA expertise and industry experience, and has positive reviews or references.
Plus, they must have the right tools, maintenance, or support programs, comply with regulatory requirements, and adhere to good documentation practices.
Leaniar’s qualified RPA experts carefully study your company’s unique needs and advise you on the best RPA solution based on your industry. By bringing automation together with Oracle, we can help you power your Oracle ERP modernization and drive value through digital transformation.
Contact us today to find out how we can help you start your Oracle transformation journey.
