OracleApps Epicenter

Do you know , The Japanese Concept ‘Ikigai’ is a Formula for Happiness and Meaning

Ikigai ( pronounce ee-kee-guy ): passion | love | mission | vocation | profession

Everyone, according to Japanese culture, has an ikigai.

Finding it requires a deep and often lengthy search of self. It is your reason to get up in the morning; your reason to enjoy life."

It’s easiest to think about ikiagi as an intersection, the common ground between:

—What you are good at
—What you love
—What the world needs
—What you can get paid for

Photo source :( Internet)

Recently Oracle announced new AI-based Apps for Finance Leaders to empower CFOs w/ data-driven insights to adapt to change, develop new #markets & increase profitability!

With Oracle Adaptive Intelligent Applications for ERP, finance leaders can benefit from:

• Better insight: Making use of analytics and synthetic intelligence to finance can enhance efficiency and will increase agility throughout payables, receivables, procurement, and monetary interval shut processes. Clever purposes are additionally in a position to present instructed actions to assist mitigate vendor threat and fraud exercise by detecting exceptions in vendor choice standards.
• Greater efficiency: Robotic process automation and artificial intelligence capabilities enable touchless transaction processing, minimizing the chance of human error.
• Smarter business outcomes: Oracle delivers immediate impact by infusing machine learning across the entire suite of business applications; this is done by leveraging data from the Oracle Data Cloud and from partners to derive insights across multiple channels and platforms, including finance, HR, and project management to support strategic business decision-making.
• Increased influence: The wealthy insights obtainable to finance leaders through synthetic intelligence empower CFOs to anticipate what comes subsequent for the enterprise and to make clever selections, growing the affect of the CFO and finance staff within the group.

Since this data is unchallengeable and absolute, accountants and auditors can save valuable time, which can also decrease cost. He highlights that, from an audit prospective, using blockchain, artificial intelligence, and cognitive tools can increase audit volume to help get through massive volumes of data. The technology also extends itself in helping accounting firms prevent fraud and collusion both internally and externally.

Blockchain’s impact on accounting is imminent. Here is how the technology will allow accountants, auditors, and financial professionals the ability to trust the data blockchain provides.

A new study by Deloitte reveals that initial public offerings (IPOs) may suffer as a result of New Accounting Standard (ASC606)

Here are excerpts from an article by Terry Sheridan in accountingWEB.com

Here’s a snapshot of the survey’s findings:

• 60 percent of the respondents said they have not begun implementation of the standard or have only done an initial assessment.
• But 53 percent said IPO activity will increase modestly (46 percent) or substantially (7 percent) in the next year.
• 83 percent of respondents said it takes 12 months (40 percent) to 18 months (43 percent) prior to the IPO to put in place the structural and operations changes needed for a public offering.
• 49 percent of respondents said media, technology and telecommunications industries would attempt the most IPOs.

Read the full article in accountingWEB.com

Oracle ERP Cloud Transaction Tax Automation is consist of Comprehensive Tax Partner Offerings

• Robust infrastructure for tax partner solutions
  • Tax Content and Tax Reporting services providing fast ROI option for mid-market companies adopting Oracle ERP Cloud
  • Integrated Cloud-to-Cloud tax calculation services for enterprise grade companies
• Infrastructure has been optimized for ERP Cloud customers using end-to-end Vertex transaction tax offerings, lending value in fulfilling the compliance function

Let see some key features and automation Flow.

Tax Content Offering

The Vertex tax content service covers geographies, tax jurisdictions, and tax rates.

This service supports address validation for master location data, and provides tax jurisdictions and tax rates data for US locations all updated on a monthly basis to comply with
statute changes.

In addition, users may opt for taxability rules content, which adds product and service taxability taxability rates and customer-specific product and service tax rules also updated on a monthly basis.

Tax Calculation Offering

• "Cloud-to-Cloud" integration of ERP Cloud and Vertex O Series Cloud for transaction tax calculation
• No software integration components deployed on Cloud
• Seamless data flow between Oracle ERP Cloud and Vertex O Series

Tax Reporting Offering

• Vertex Indirect Tax Returns - Signature-ready returns for U.S. sales and use taxes are produced for filing
• Vertex Returns Outsourcing Service - Vertex can manage the entire tax compliance function from tax returns generation to payment remittances

  Here is how end-to-endTransaction Tax Solution usually Flow

Fig1 :Vertex End-to-End Tax Solution Automation

The Vertex solution architecture enables “cloud-to-cloud,” touchless integration of Oracle ERP Cloud and Vertex Cloud.

Enjoy efficient, user-friendly uptake and integration, with no need to host any software or integration components on premise.

There is no need to apply patches, service releases, or monthly data updates Vertex takes care of these for you.

Leverage the benefits of powerful tax automation as below:

• Real-time transactions and batch processes for tax functionality
• Tax-sensitized receivables and payables invoices
• A streamlined process with accurate tax outcomes
• Secure, cloud-hosted journal retention for tax return compliance

Do you know ,Chatbots are the latest and hottest topic and the newest way to engage your customers , employee or partner through messaging apps.

This is one of the most interesting sessions that I attended on the first day of Oracle OpenWorld 2017 and there this post will help to share more insights on Chat bot and thus Oracle’s intelligent Bots.

As per Wikipedia ,A chatbot (also chatterbot, chatterbox) is a computer program which attempts to maintain a conversation with a person
A Chatbot or Bot is a computer program designed to simulate a conversation with human users, especially over the Internet. End users can easily discover and connect to Chatbots through many of the popular messaging apps, without the need to individually download and install them from an App store.

This gives Bots a distinct advantage over device-resident Mobile Apps in many circumstances. With a Bot, your service can be instantly available through a messaging app the user already has installed on their mobile device.

An Intelligent Bot, powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) dramatically improves the conversational experience, allowing a far more natural conversation between the Bot and the end user. However it is expressed and respond accordingly. Intelligent Bots will ensure your users keep engaging and coming back to your service.

Oracle Intelligent Bots: Key Components

With Oracle Intelligent Bots, an integrated feature of Oracle Mobile Cloud, Enterprise, you can develop Intelligent Bots that can create a more natural conversational user interface, through text or speech, to your enterprise systems.

• Pre-Integrated Delivery Across Channels - This is for APIs for integration with Instant Apps and channels, dialog builder, human-handoff framework
• Enterprise Ready - Pre-built back end integration framework, connectors, security, scale, continuous bot analytics
• Embedded AI for Conversational Dialog - Unified contextual state engine and AI platform, Speech & image recognition, intent detection, multilingual NLP

By using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) powered by Neural Networks and Machine Learning, Oracle Intelligent Bots can more easily detect what the user is trying to achieve (their intent) and respond appropriately with information or results of transactions from API connections to any of your back-end enterprise applications and information sources.

The platform makes it simple and easy to build and train Intelligent Bots without the need for specialist AI skills.

Your bots can then be exposed through many Chat and Voice channels, a custom mobile app or even your web site.

Oracle Intelligent Bots has the following 4 components

Oracle Intelligent Bots has everything that customers need to build a chatbot with channel integration, dialog flow, AI engine, integration and an easy to use Bot builder UI that brings this all together. Oracle Intelligent Bots provides you with a solution that is predictable in terms of cost, ease of use, level of effort and with a rapid time to market.

Looking at the architecture, the Oracle Intelligent Bot supports a clear separation between Interacting with the channels (Facebook, etc.), the actual Intelligence, dealing with providing an answers, and the Integration with backend systems.

Fig 1: Chatbot architecture layering

But above all, it provides you with a solution that can enable you to deliver the next generation of customer engagement

1. Channel configurator that abstracts the communication and UI/UX aspects of the end channel.
   • Here end users have a choice of messaging channels they prefer to use. Certain geographies have specific channels as their preferred messaging channel while other geographies
     prefer other messaging channels. There are different categories of channels as well.
     Broadly, these can be categorized as follows:
     • OTT Channels: Over the top (OTT) messaging channels such as Facebook Messenger, Facebook WhatsApp, WeChat, Line, Kik, Telegram, Talk, Skype, Slack,SMS.
     • VPA: Virtual Private Assistants such as Amazon (Dot, Echo, Show), Google Home,Apple HomePod.
     • Mobile & Web app extensions: Extending native or hybrid/responsive mobile apps or web applications with chat capabilities.
     • Voice Based Input : Custom devices or apps with interfaces that use Siri, Cortana, Google Voice or other speech input for interaction.
2. Dialog flow execution – the heart of the Intelligent Bots is a state machine that executes context driven workflow with scoped variables. One of the differentiators with Oracle’s Intelligent Bots is that the AI components of NLP and Machine learning are part of this state flow engine as opposed to a separate black box which makes it very simple and easy for the Bot developer to model a conversation without having to worry about the state engine and the AI algorithms
3. AI Engine – Here active machine learning that identifies the intent of the conversations from the end user and extract entities from unstructured data to create a structure ‘query’ to get data from the enterprise and respond back.
4. Components. This is final building block of the Bot builder are the components. These are typically enterprise backend systems that own customer’s banking information, or employee information in a HCM system, or sales information in a Sales CRM system.
   • There are system components that handle things like message channel visualization and custom components that provide integration to mobile cloud service to reuse APIs that have been created for the mobile channel.

Fig 1 :Oracle Intelligent Bots : Key Components

Therefore Oracle’s intelligent Bots sounds to be integrated & One multichannel Integrated solutions.

Next post , will be more on Oracle Chatbot Platform

Milestone is a type of billing that occurs only as certain milestones have been attained.

Milestones are events or conditions that trigger the billing.

For example, you can bill customers based on the number of days since the activity began, a specific date, a manual milestone you specify, or an activity percentage of completion.

You define the milestones to be used and the amounts to be billed for each milestone.

In EBS R12.2.7 , Oracle Order Management extends support for flexible ordering of products, services, subscriptions and warranties with a new milestone billing option.

This option lets customers with long lead times for custom-designed equipment define the amount or percentage to be billed at each interim milestone.

This help to Support for manual item substitution after order booking avoids the overhead of cancelling and recreating order lines.

Indeep a great feature , after a long time.

Here is the Ultimate Fin Tech Glossary got a fwd email (source internet).

Blockchain technology has created waves around the World, bringing transparency and massively reducing costs in sectors like Banking, Finance, Logistics and Manufacturing, among others. And this is only the beginning...

What is blockchain? And what are the potential implications for finance?

Great primer

• What is blockchain? A primer for finance professionals

Apart from India GST new in recent past , In another milestone towards the implementation of VAT across the Gulf Cooperation Council, the Unified Agreement for VAT was published in the official gazette of one of the member states, Saudi Arabia.

The Unified Agreement provides the framework for the operation of VAT across the GCC.

Each GCC member state will implement the framework through legislation and other instruments. This milestone is another reason for companies operating in the Middle East to put in place or further their VAT implementation plans.. Companies in these region already started for Implemnating GCC .

Let's have a quick look :

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) was formed in 1981 to create unity and economic stability amongst the member nations.

The International Monetary Fund recommended the introduction of an indirect tax system to increase revenue for the member countries.

All member states signed the VAT Framework Agreement, which establishes the main principles for the application of the VAT regime in the member countries.

Here are Key Highlights for KEY Unified VAT Framework

Currently , GCC Member Nations

• Bahrain
• Kuwait
• Oman
• Qatar
• Saudi Arabia
• United Arab Emirates (UAE)

Each member will issue VAT legislation.

Majority of Tax system provide Tax Engine and Integration:

• Logic to natively support Goods and multiple Services type transactions in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates
• Domestic, Intra-GCC, and International (Import and Export) transactions are all supported

Why GCC is getting some much attention

Reason , a deadline is given for these countries

• United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia in Q4 2017
• Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait in 2018 (dependent on legislation)

Though , It’s official: 2018 will see the start of implementation of a value-added tax (VAT) across the Gulf states

Business Functional Area where get impacted [TRANSITION-RELATED CHALLENGES]

Businesses will face the impact of VAT in two ways: by the additional investments needed for compliance,as well as the higher input cost of the new VAT, itself .

However, companies may refrain from passing on the entire input VAT to consumers owing to the fear of losing business.

Some key Challenges can be best understood as :

In Procurement : Major Trabsition Releated challenges might be

• Formulate new procurement strategies
• Vendor management
• Revisit contracts and arrangements

Accounting & IT System

• Update financial and point of sale systems
• VAT coding for payables and receivables
• Electronic documentation/process automation [ if any]

Sales & Pricing

• Assess impact of VAT on demand/current contracts
• Pricing strategy and terms of payment
• Customer management

Knowing Where to Start

So, where do you start to determine which approach is best for you? Deploy a new ERP in the cloud? Keep your core ERP and connect cloud VAT services? Should go with Tax vendor ?

There are a number of factors to consider:

• What is the age of your existing ERP system? Are you running the latest version of the software, or are you on an old vesrion?
• In how many countries do you do business?
  • The more geographies, currencies,and languages you operate in, the more rules, regulations, and compliance issues you will need to consider.
  • It might be worth a full-scale migration to cloud in order to keep on top of all the permutations.
• How many transactions does your ERP process in a day?
  • The higher the transaction volume, the more important it is that your core system be scalable enough to meet demand.
• Are you looking at a full ERP replacement in the near future?
  • If so, it might make sense to take a phased, “outside-in” approach—starting with tax applications in the cloud to meet the immediate VAT deadline, and then moving core ERP to the cloud at a later date.

No matter which approach you decide on, VAT is coming. Every GCC business will need to comply. I recommend that you form a project team as soon as possible to understand how VAT will impact your business and operating model.

Assess the capability of your existing systems to comply with the new regulations.And then, choose an implementation partner and a software vendor with the real experience and capabilities to meet your needs.

More Reading

You can get more reading

• https://www.pwc.com/m1/en/services/tax/me-tax-legal-news/2017/unified-agreement-vat-across-gcc-region-published-official

Closing Thoughts

As per The UAE Ministry of Finance

The system for VAT registration and payment is being developed to meet the very best global standards using leading-edge technology. All services will be online and accessible 24/7, responding to the requirements of business. This reflects the UAE’s aim to be a leader in innovation and technology across all aspects.