Oracle enhances procurement suite

Enterprise software vendor Oracle Corp. has upgraded its suite of procurement tools to give supply chain customers greater visibility into business spending and address the expanding role of the procurement professional, the company said today.

Oracle released upgrades to its Oracle Fusion Cloud Procurement suite, a product that manages an organization’s complete source-to-settle cycle. The suite is designed to help customers minimize risk, reduce costs, enforce compliance spending, and simplify supplier management and contracting. The update includes 25 new capabilities that represent a “step forward in industry depth and additional value” in an area where companies tend to “bolt on” solutions, according to Tom Anthony, Oracle’s vice president of procurement strategy.

“With these additional capabilities in the procurement area, we are continuing our pace of fast innovation,” Anthony said in an interview, emphasizing the procurement professional’s widening area of responsibility and need for easy access to expanded tools and solutions.

“Now that procurement professionals are measured on their ability to control costs, manage supplier risk, and enforce environmental policies and [compliance] spending, they need to have full visibility into supplier performance and company spend,” Oracle said in a statement announcing the upgrades. “Too often, a lack of visibility into what the business is spending on and with whom quickly leads to inefficiencies and increased risk.”

Anthony highlighted three of the new capabilities, focused on managing complexity and spend:

• Complex Procurement helps organizations procure services and manage risk by helping ensure that contractors and subcontractors comply with negotiated payment terms. The new capability also provides transparency into services spend across payment milestones, allowing the department to track progress and completion of goals, Anthony explained.
• Spend and Procurement Analytics gives customers a holistic view of procurement and supplier performance across the entire organization, including the increasingly important environmental, social, and governance (ESG) areas. Spend and Procurement Analytics helps drive cost savings and efficiency by allowing users to view key spend metrics within a single dashboard–without complex data integration, according to the company.
• Spend Classification helps procurement professionals better understand their organization’s spending patterns and gain an accurate overview of buying activity. Spend Classification can remove manual effort and reduce human error by using machine learning to organize spend data into logical categories.