The STX EPM Fall Event included an insightful agenda of cutting-edge sessions. The main focus was Artificial Intelligence and its emerging capabilities across the EPM platform. Additionally, the EPMI and Oracle teams collaborated on EPM product demonstrations and roadmaps for Allocations, Account Reconciliation, and Narrative Reporting. Please contact the EPMI team if you would like a copy of the event’s presentations.
Allocations Demo
Tulsi Sachde, EPMI’s Director of Solution Engineering led a demo journey that covered Profitability Analysis, Tracing, Rules, and Scenario Modeling. Tulsi demonstrated several use cases spanning Shared Services, Transfer Pricing, and Overhead/Expenses. Lastly, Tulsi provided guidance on where users should perform Allocations in the Cloud, across the General Ledger, Planning, and EPCM.
Account Reconciliation & Transaction Matching
The next demo was led by Katherine Price, a Houston-based Solution Engineer at Oracle. She dove into Account Reconciliation, gave a behind-the-scenes tour of the platform, and highlighted how Oracle utilizes its own tool to automate 94% of its reconciliations. She continued to her favorite product in the Oracle Cloud suite, Transaction Matching! The amount of use cases are expansive and includes matching credit cards, warranty, payroll, and treasury management. The tool is expansive and flexible to an organization’s needs significantly streamlining a manual process in seconds!
Narrative Reporting Introduction and Roadmap
Al Marciante, Senior Director of Product Management at Oracle shared exciting new features that were recently released and previewed what is to come to the Narrative Reporting tool. He emphasized that customers use the platform to tell the story behind the data for planning & budgeting, management reporting, and external reporting! A key benefit of the tool is that it centralizes reporting in one place supporting EPM, ERP, and Essbase.
Al concluded his presentation by providing a stunning conceptual Generative AI demo. He focused on four initial Machine Learning use cases for Narrative Reporting:
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- Describe the cell where a condition is satisfied. For example, a grid cell that satisfies the variance threshold defined by the report designer as a condition.
- If the grid has prior time periods in the columns, describe the cell value in comparison to the prior period.
- If the grid has more than 2 periods, describe the trend of the data across time periods.
- Examine one of the relevant cell dimensions where the condition was satisfied and describe the top 3 contributors to it.
Artificial Intelligence for Finance & EPM
Chris Wilke CPO of AKW Ventures started off the Artificial Intelligence segment by discussing impactful innovations such as the internet and iPhone, and claimed that “AI is the single most powerful platform in human history.” The power of AI especially Generative AI is that users can input multiple forms of content like text, audio, images, and videos and create never-seen-before content in seconds. He continued to demonstrate the possibilities of using AI and ChatGPT for tasks in finance with generating financial reports, advanced analytics, chart of accounts, and SQL queries. Chris’ FORCE prompt template is a major lift for people who want to get started with Generative Artificial Intelligence interfaces. The acronym stands for Focus, Objective, Rules, Context, and Examples.
The last session was an AI panel with Al, Chris, Nihar Parikh (CEO at EPMI), and Dave Whittaker (Director of EPM Solution Engineering at Oracle). The panel tackled questions like how AI models have evolved, the ethical implications of deploying AI, workforce skill set transformations, future projections, and more!
Watch our recent Artificial Intelligence podcast with Oracle’s SVP of Development, Matt Bradley to understand Oracle’s overarching plan to leverage AI across the entire Oracle Cloud EPM platform!
See you Next Time
We love these opportunities to chat with our customers outside the context of the workplace – thank you to all who attended and please follow us on Linkedin for our upcoming calendar of events. As always, please reach out to connect with EPMI on how to best leverage Oracle Cloud EPM.
