BizTech Blog

I usually focus on Key Performance Indicators and leading indicators for healthy business growth, but recently I have been working with clients that have experienced outages with their supposed 24x7x365 cloud solutions.  I wanted to share lessons learned with you, and help you ensure you are truly a bullet proof infrastructure in the cloud.

In Star Wars, a New Hope, (the original one, not the sequels, or, gasp, the prequels) Darth Vader meets Obi-Wan Kenobi for what will likely be the last time, a duel of two former best friends. “I’ve been waiting for you Obi-Wan,” he hisses, and proceeds to quickly defeat poor old Obi Wan Kenobi, sending him to meet the Force. So when the two clashed swords (well, technically, light sabers), Vader won and Obi lost.

In the real world (where my mind sometimes resides) I’m often confronted by clients telling me that Oracle EBS, while the number one ERP system in the world, can be a little cumbersome when trying to perform financial analysis. Say I want to review my all of AP invoices, then further sort by one specific vendor, on one specific date and even by one specific location. Essentially I want to know who quickly are we paying our vendors, who is lagging and what are the details? Also, I’d like to export in Excel or PDF and maybe do some more analysis there.

Tell me if this sounds familiar, just around the start of holiday preparation (say mid-November) while the rest of the world is thinking about filling their pantries with holiday goodies, gifting, and family, you feel the buildup of annual stress and pressure due to the financial year-end close looming overhead. In mid-December the fire drill begins and you are in the thick of your company’s annual financial close.

When it’s all said and done in February, you get an email from your CEO to discuss your manual reconciliation process. The conversation quickly turns into a debate about the financial close results and data that (of course) can’t be aggregated very easily. The CEO also expresses concerns about issues potentially lingering within the reconciliations. Ugh, what a nightmare!

As marketers aggressively learn new skills and adapt their marketing strategies to meet the needs of their customer’s evolving buying processes two common challenges typically arise.

Hello all, been quite a while since I have last posted. I generally try to keep my posts related to past presentations that I have done or things I am currently working on. I have two active engagements right now where the client is actively using (or trying to use) AGIS or Advanced Global Intercompany System in Oracle R12 and yet my clients rarely understand what AGIS is or how it should be used.

Effectively running a sales team requires decision making based both on fact and instinct. Sales pipeline and weighted sales pipeline value are often used to gauge the “Health” of a sales person’s pipeline and used as an indicator of how likely that sales person is to meet or exceed their sales goal.

The un-adjusted revenue and expected revenue by Practice Area by Sales Rep can easily be represented by the following pivot table:

This post covers the highlights for Oracle CRM on Demand Release 24.

Something I am really excited about is the new connection between social networks and CRM OD Service tickets. This feature keeps your customer experience reps in the loop as issues develop in the blogosphere and enables prompt action. And of course all the interactions are trackable and reportable within CRM Analytics.

If you’ve ever read any of my blogs before, you are aware that I am a music fanatic. While late 60’s and 70’s classic rock holds a particular appeal to me, I’m not ashamed to say that 70’s lite music also has its place in my heart. Hearing old softies like “Torn Between Two Lovers” by Mary MacGregor (yes, really), can often brighten an otherwise long day, one sadly spent not using an Oracle Hyperion EPM Tool.

In “Torn Between Two Lovers,” our singer is in quite a pickle, being in love with two different people at the same time, all the while knowing that sooner or later she must make a choice. Loving them both is breaking all the rules, she tells us. And so it is.

Oracle E-Business Suite R12 is a mission-critical application that could turn your Oracle investment into revenue during a very short period of time. But, with any complex application, considerable time and attention should be devoted to maintaining, improving, and optimizing core business applications to ensure your organization is realizing value.

Lately, there’s been a lot of buzz regarding Oracle’s newest database, Oracle Database 12c. If the hype has led you to question how 12c differs from past database creations, this post is for you. I’ve sourced the latest information to give you an insider view on Oracle’s market-leading database management system and its new, distinctive features.

What’s the difference between Oracle 12c and past Oracle databases?