Modern finance teams need to make data-driven decisions quickly but they are struggling to do so because the data they need for decision making is spread across multiple systems and databases. First, let’s look at the challenges they’re facing, and then consider how Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse can help you address them.
Top Challenges Reported by Finance Teams Today
- Data democratization and self-service have become critical since the pandemic began
- Providing business users with access to data and the ability to transform it
- Make timely, data-driven decisions without having to rely on IT
- Robust data governance that meets security and compliance requirements
While finance teams are looking to be agile and data driven, outdated data analytics processes are holding them back. The usual practice of relying on IT for reporting is needlessly complex and time consuming. Issues involving data security and accessibility only complicate this process further.
Also, finance teams typically rely on spreadsheets to manage data, often resulting in human errors, confusion, complex reconciliations and multiple sources of truth. According to IDC, 80% of the time is spent on searching for and preparing data, with only 20% spent on analysis.
As a result, analysis is mostly confined to simple reporting instead of advanced analytics powered by machine learning. An analytics tool is simply not adequate for the needs of modern finance, what’s really needed is effective data management.
Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse
Oracle offers a simple and easy-to-use data analytics solution to empower modern finance teams, powered by Autonomous Data Warehouse.
- An autonomous database eliminates almost all the complexities of operating a data warehouse, enabling finance teams to reduce their reliance on IT
- It includes a complete suite of prebuilt tools for data loading, transformation, business modeling, data insights, graph and spatial analytics, ML and app dev
- These tools are designed for self-service, empowering financial analysts and other business users
Benefits of Oracle ADW for Finance Teams
- Automated management ensures that you can set up a new finance data mart within minutes and build a self-driving data warehouse that can be operated by your finance team
- All your data across multiple sources and formats is combined to provide a single source of truth for your finance team, avoiding data silos and integration challenges
- Elastic, automatic scaling up and down ensures consistent high query performance to empower any number of concurrent financial analysts while paying only for the exact resources you use
- Comprehensive data protection with continuous encryption, audits, and patches to ensure protection of sensitive financial data
- Automatic discovery and masking of sensitive data by finance users themselves without having to go to IT for assistance
- Building applications on ADW doesn’t require any coding expertise as finance teams are empowered with a Low-Code Application Development methodology. Finance teams can rapidly build data-driven applications for their ad hoc needs and manage processes outside their core ERP application without any coding skills, so they can do it quickly on their own instead of waiting in a long queue of IT projects.
- For analytics and data visualization, you can use Oracle Analytics Cloud or any tool of your choice like Tableau or Power BI
- Analysts can immediately discover insights in Oracle ADW with built-in machine learning algorithms surfacing anomalies, outliers, and hidden patterns
- Data analysts can access the data in Oracle ADW to build, evaluate and deploy machine learning models in-database, without moving data across different systems