ORACLE’S Account Consolidation Cloud Service: An UNDISCOVERED GEM FOR CAOS AND CFOS

Is it SIMPLE for your team to create, review, and distribute key reporting products such as QBRs, Earnings Releases, MD&A, Budget Briefings, and operational reviews?  

Is your team aware of which pages, graphs, paragraphs, charts, and images need to be updated and when?  

Are you exchanging emails and chats to complete these documents? 

I discovered a tool that will make you and your Finance team’s daily lives easier– improving an old-fashioned process in 2-3 weeks and at a low cost! 

Oracle’s EPM Narrative Reporting, which is included in the Oracle EPM (Enterprise Performance Management) Cloud subscription, is a stand-alone service for managing the reporting process.

Narrative Reporting in Oracle EPM divides a multi-page report – in Adobe PDF, PowerPoint, Word, PDF, and so on – into individual, assignable pieces.

Once you’ve broken down a large report into its constituent parts, you can load each one into Oracle’s Narrative Reporting to manage its creation, review, and distribution.  

Oracle’s EPM Narrative Reporting offers a seamless solution to break down any document, add it to the tool, and assign owners and dates, saving you time and effort.

With this tool, your team can easily access and update the required information, along with deadlines and comments associated with it.

Furthermore, you can efficiently manage the entire process as the document owner, ensuring a streamlined workflow. Hence, Oracle’s EPM Narrative Reporting is highly recommended to optimize your team’s productivity and efficiency.

When you start the creation process, participants are notified that a section needs their attention. Then, each person can go through their section and make changes in their usual desktop tools – even if it’s just a single word or sentence.

They submit their section for review once they have completed their update. As the document comes together, you can perform a final review before publishing it. 

By linking specific words to variables, you can automatically update values and text throughout your document as your process matures.

Dates, periods, revenue headlines, and so on can be automatically refreshed by the system. You can, for example, upload a spreadsheet containing the most recent revenue, income, growth rates, and EPS values. You can dynamically refresh your broader documents by referencing specific cells in your source data. Never miss a required update!  

If you have data, tables, and graphs in your Oracle Cloud and on-premises tools, such as ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), HCM, or Planning.

Oracle Narrative Reporting can “run” a report and embed the results directly into your larger document. To be clear, you do not need to do this to benefit from Narrative Reporting’s report creation process. 

How much time does it take? 

Typical reports take about 2-3 weeks!  

It takes a few hours of training to understand how the tool works. However, Alithya can assist with education, training, and implementation, making the learning process more efficient.

Moreover, investing a few weeks in this tool will result in a simplified and streamlined process, which can significantly improve work-life balance and boost your team’s outputs. Additionally, this tool can also help in reducing the possibility of any embarrassing reporting errors, ensuring smooth operations.

Hence, it is highly recommended to invest time in this tool for better productivity and efficiency.

Step 1: Divide Your Report into Sections 

Each element in your document – a chart, graph, table, sentence, or word – Each one can be assigned to an author who will oversee contributing that component.  

Step 2: Set up the workflow, assign owners, and set due dates 

 Create a list of your authors, reviewers, and approvers. When the authoring process begins, your participants will be notified to begin working on their portion of the document. 

Step 3: Begin the Process 

Some documents are updated on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual basis! You specify the completion dates for your report… establishing deadlines for the first draft, internal review, and final approval. 

You keep track of the overall process, deadlines, and where the document is located within your team in the Report Center 

Step 4: Write Your Section of the Document  

Each person edits their respective sections while using their familiar desktop office tools. To make the process easier, users should install Oracle’s SmartView for Microsoft Office Add-In tool on their computers.

To make updates, participants can use the SmartView tool directly within their native office tools. check in their completed portion, and submit their changes to the next level of review. 

Step 5: Distribute Your Completed Document  

When your document has reached the finish line, the last step is to distribute it.  

There are three distribution possibilities: 

Manual – download and send or print the completed document in PDF, PowerPoint, or Word.  

Email – You can set the system to automatically distribute the document via email. Automated distribution saves time for your team, avoids leaving someone off the list, ensures document security, prevents documents from being sent to an unintended recipient, and allows for republishing if necessary.  

Self-service – Recipients can download the completed document as needed, avoiding clogging up email with infrequently needed information. 

Quick time-to-value and no technical knowledge required by using EPM Narrative Reporting

By using Oracle’s Narrative Reporting tool, you can save a lot of time, reduce errors, and significantly enhance your team’s deliverables.

Additionally, our clients have reported a 30-40% reduction in the effort required to generate, review, and distribute their reporting deliverables.

Therefore, it’s highly recommended to check out Oracle’s Narrative Reporting tool to optimize your team’s productivity and efficiency.

It takes a few weeks to configure a report. 

Again, this is a process project, not a technology project: you continue to use your traditional Microsoft Office tools, but with the added benefits of workflow and orchestration – all supported by a cloud tool!  

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