AI Continues to Fuel ERP Vendors’ Arms Race – Don’t Disregard This When Considering Your Next ERP Project
Artificial intelligence continues to fuel the arms race among ERP vendors. Last week Oracle announced that it has extended the AI (machine learning, to be more precise) capabilities within its ERP Cloud and Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Cloud products.
Using this announcement as an example, these capabilities should no longer sound too remote for any enterprise, big or small:
- Expense Reporting Assistant: Uses machine learning to improve the automatic classification of expense items, monitor policy violations, and reduce audit risks, thus streamlining and automating expense report processing.
- Project Management Digital Assistant: Learns from past time entries, project planning data, and the overall context to tailor interactions and smartly capture critical project information.
- Advanced Financial Controls: Continuously analyzes transactions, setups, and configurations to automate audits and help prevent financial leakage by using self-learning algorithms and routing incidents to analysts for investigation.
- Advanced Access Controls: Uses graph-based analysis to assess violations hidden inside complex, recursive, and dynamic security configurations, and automates user security analysis by using AI to protect business data from insider threats and fraud.
- Intelligent Supplier Management: Enriches supplier profiles with AI-sourced and validated company data to power scoring and categorization. It also uses AI to extract dynamic supplier risk signals from news and press releases to manage supplier risk.
Our Take
AI capabilities are becoming a distinguishing factor among the biggest established and new ERP players. Considering that any given ERP implementation is expected to last up to 15 years, even if the immediate practical application of AI seems not so feasible, the foresight baked into engagements with a vendor that invests into AI will likely pay off huge dividends within the lifespan of that ERP.