On September 10, 2024 during the SuiteWorld 2024, Oracle NetSuite EPM revealed exciting new AI updates to its Enterprise Performance Management platform, which really took the benchmark on how finance teams would streamline their processes to make more data-driven decisions to a whole new level. These will not be mere iterative enhancements but a quantum leap in how financial reporting and forecasting is to be done. Built on the powerful foundation of Oracle Fusion Cloud EPM, fully integrated into NetSuite, these AI-driven features strive to make financial management efficient, insightful, and agile.
The finance teams of today must often deal with an overload of information arising from rapid business environments. It should, therefore, be organized, analyzed, and presented to ensure sound decision-making. However, manual efforts involved in reporting, justifying decisions, and forecasting can be very time-consuming and distract efforts from more strategic activities. With the new enhancements, NetSuite EPM is well-positioned to unlock time and resources for finance professionals to focus on value-added activities that will drive growth.
Evan Goldberg is the founder and executive vice president of Oracle NetSuite. “Finance teams often spend a significant amount of time gathering data and creating narratives to explain financial results, justify important decisions, and forecast future growth. This can be a labor-intensive process that often diverts time away from more strategic analysis and slows down decision-making.”
This statement resonates with finance teams worldwide that are burdened with the mechanics of financial management rather than its strategic elements. New enhancements to NetSuite EPM include a host of features powered by AI that drive productivity, accuracy, and deeper insight into performance.
What's New in NetSuite EPM?
The latest enhancements include a number of AI-powered features to help finance teams automate and simplify their work, all while gleaning real-time, actionable insights to inform their decisions.
Generative AI for Narrative Reporting
One of the biggest game-changing updates surely is the integrative aspect of generative AI into narrative reporting. This feature empowers finance teams to create AI-powered narratives, explanations, and visualizations from financial and transactional data faster and more efficiently than ever before. Conventionally, preparing an extensive financial report involved data gathering, manual interpretation of such data, and explaining it to key stakeholders. Automating this process comes with generative AI. But with AI, the ability to analyze data, identify trends, and build rich narratives to explain financial outcomes at a far more substantial level for stakeholders can be accomplished. This automates the entire reporting process and leaves finance teams with more time for analysis at a higher level and strategy.
AI-Powered Narratives in Planning and Budgeting
With an extension of generative AI capabilities, the new update comprises AI-powered narratives designed for use in planning and budgeting. IPM Insights is the Intelligent Performance Management capability that lets finance teams rapidly generate reports complete with AI-generated commentary about patterns, trends, and anomalies in the data. This, in turn, allows organizations to capitalize on the insights derived from real-time understanding of data for better capitalization of business growth opportunities.
Instead of studying spreadsheets to identify trends or any cause for alarm, finance teams could now receive detailed commentary straight from the system to speed up decision-making and make teams quicker to react to changes in the market or internal developments.
Predictive Forecast Explanations
Along with enhanced narrative capabilities, predictive forecast explanations also form part of the updates. They are bound to aid finance teams in paving their way to increased forecast accuracy and confidence. After all, finance teams need to understand why an AI-generated forecast is making a certain prediction to drive action from those insights.
Predictive forecast explanations show that instead of just providing a forecast, the AI system shares key factors driving its predictions. This enhances business understanding and allows finance teams to take quick, informed actions based on the AI’s insights.
AI-Driven Digital Assistant
Another exciting feature introduced with these updates is the AI-driven digital assistant. The role of the digital assistant is to enhance user experience and allows the finance teams to interact with NetSuite EPM by having natural language conversations-easily asking an AI assistant to run reports or build forecasts from within an intuitive user interface rather than through complex menus and workflows. This digital assistant has further developed ease and usability in financial management. Equipped with natural language processing capabilities, simple tasks are easier to do within the system. This further enhances productivity and enables finance professionals to pay attention to higher strategic work.
AI's Influence on Financial Management
The introduction of this AI-powered machinery in financial management does not mean automation of redundant and mundane tasks; rather, it reflects adding a change into the role and positioning of the finance teams inside an organization. By lessening the time spent on data gathering, report generation, and manual forecasting, these new features will enable finance professionals to devote more time to strategic activities that help drive business growth.
Above all, AI-powered insights can provide a level of depth and accuracy that might otherwise be difficult to achieve with more manual processes. Finance teams are now able to pinpoint trends, anomalies, and opportunities for growth in a matter of minutes, rather than it taking several days or even weeks. The speed and accuracy are invaluable in today’s fast-moving business environment.
Drive Growth with the Newly Enhanced NetSuite EPM
Integration of AI into NetSuite EPM is a testament to how Oracle NetSuite is committed to innovation and efficiency. These updates aim at enabling organizations to do more than just enhance the efficiency of financial processes; it’s also about gaining deep insights that inform proper decisions and, in turn, drive business growth. Hence, AI enables finance teams beyond traditional ways of financial management to more agile data-driven efforts. AI-powered capabilities in NetSuite EPM enable organizations to stay ahead with faster and better-informed decisions for growth and success.”
