HITS

The cloud is freeing business leaders up to focus on what’s most important in running their companies, Oracle said July 6 while announcing the findings of a new study it conducted with MIT Technology Review Custom.

Migrating finance and human resources (HR) systems to the cloud improves collaboration and saves more money than companies tend to expect, according to the findings of the study, “Finance and HR: The Cloud’s New Power Partnership.”

The study explored the motivations, benefits and rewards that result from deploying finance and HR systems to the cloud, and highlighted the importance of collaboration between finance and HR teams with a unified cloud, Oracle said. The study also outlined how a “holistic view into finance and HR information, delivered via cloud technology, empowers organizations to better manage continuous change,” it said.

“As finance and HR increasingly lead strategic organizational transformation,” return on investment “comes not only with financial savings for the organization, but also from the new insights and visibility into the business HR and finance gain with the cloud,” Steve Cox, group VP of enterprise resource planning (ERP) enterprise project management (EPM) product marketing at Oracle, said in a news release.

He added: “People are at the heart of any company’s success and this is why we are seeing finance and HR executives lead cloud transformation initiatives. In addition, improved collaboration between departments enables organizations to manage the changes ahead and sets the blueprint for the rest of the organization’s cloud shift.”

Seven hundred C-level executives and finance, HR and IT managers in North America, Asia and the Europe Middle East Africa (EMEA) region in all were surveyed for the study. Among the specific findings: 35% of respondents said they planned to create a shared finance and HR function within a year; 42% said they were motivated by improvements in productivity and performance; nearly 90% said cloud migration costs were either lower than or in line with expectations; 41% said the cloud enabled them to reapportion their time to focus on revenue generation; and 46% of respondents from finance and HR said their collaboration with each other had significantly improved.

Among the benefits of integrating ERP and human capital management (HCM) systems are easier tracking and forecasting of employee costs for budgeting purposes, respondents said.