By leveraging Oracle’s Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) platform for financial data management, Private Equity and other private capital firms will observe significant process improvement. Firms will have access to automated data consolidation, rapid reporting, and collaborative planning cycles that engage stakeholders at the portfolio, fund, and investor levels. In this article, we will detail the innovative functionality within Oracle Cloud EPM that Private Equity firms are capitalizing on.
Portfolio Data Consolidation
Portfolio investments operate independently on a unique ERP system, with a distinct data format in the chart of accounts. Traditionally, there are a series of handoffs between the portfolio CFO and the Private Equity team. Each party manually manipulates an ERP export in Excel to gain an understanding of portfolio performance. This legacy process is error-prone, time-intensive, and difficult to aggregate into a portfolio-wide reporting package.
Private Equity firms have the opportunity to create a centralized, standardized, and auditable database of portfolio data through Cloud EPM. Each portfolio ERP system is mapped through Financial Close and Consolidation to a single chart of accounts, with configured parent-child relationships that represent the legal and accounting structures of the partnership.
Additionally, the portfolio company will benefit from efficiency gains in remote Financial Close management and data transparency to the firm. The firm will benefit from continuous fund visibility and less time spent manipulating CSV exports from ERP systems.
Stakeholder Reporting
The Financial Close and Consolidation tool normalizes a Chart of Accounts format, reconciles intercompany transactions, converts currency, and calculates ownership equity on an automated and scheduled basis. At the same time, the application has out-of-box frameworks for financial statement reporting across all industries.
For Private Equity leadership, this means reporting packages are easier to edit, quicker to generate, and can be accessed from any device. Microsoft Office exports are integrated and the pre-built dashboards provide “at a glance” KPIs to evaluate fund performance against benchmark goals.
Access to investment data is provisioned at varying security levels, so analysts, investors, and portfolio employees can only access the reports relevant to their position and seniority level. While reporting is traditionally executed through Excel, the entire EPM Platform can be navigated through the Excel add-in Smartview, providing a familiar UX but with live data connections to the cloud application.
Planning and Profitability
During remote operations, disconnected planning and forecasting processes will hinder the efficiency of any operation. The Oracle Cloud EPM application suite enables Private Equity firms to collaborate with their portfolio investments on budget cycles, revenue goal setting, and analyzing product profitability. A common application instance can be shared across the fund and portfolio companies. EPM ensures alignment on building yearly plans, tracks variance over historical performance as well as utilizes predictive intelligence to glean insights from portfolio ERP data.
Master Data Management
Oracle Cloud EPM is uniquely equipped with an integrated Master Data Management tool for data hierarchy governance and management. Enterprise Data Management (EDM) is an included business process that enables self-service data management across multiple software systems (ERP, HRIS, EPM, etc.) to ensure integrity in your data hierarchies. Use cases range from Chart of Accounts maintenance to workforce hierarchy maintenance as companies scale through new product launches and M&A activity.
Conclusion
Private Equity firms have much to gain with integrating Oracle Cloud EPM into their daily operations. An accurate single source of data, remote collaboration, and modern data governance and management are just a few of the key benefits of Oracle Cloud EPM for Private Equity firms.
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