One of the benefits of being an Oracle ACE is that you get to work on problems that dont just impact a single client but can have a positive impact on a whole community. This week I was speaking to two Oracle executives in my network about unrelated challenges. The first one is why it takes clients so long to develop business requirements when we know what the product is already capable of. The second executive was looking for quantitative benefits of Oracle Cloud Success Navigator (“CSN”). So, to this end, I set myself the challenge of solving both of these problems at the same time.

What is CSN?

What if you could access the experience of over 10,000 Oracle cloud implementations to help you move your ERP system to the cloud? What if you had access to implementation guidance, milestone tracking and tools to help you with your Oracle project? Step forward CSN which you can read more about here. This article is not an in depth review of CSN but does explain how to utilise the AI assist to solve a real world project problem and to quantitatively assess the benefits that CSN brings.

Define the problem

One of the most length activities of building a business case is to derive the business requirements. An ERP implementation could have many hundreds of such requirements often specified using the MoSCoW technique. It is a myth that we don’t need requirements when moving systems to the cloud and I’ve written about this previously. I’m also going to assume that you are familiar with the terminology of MoSCoW r which requires that each statement is either a MUST, SHOULD, COULD or WONT.

In order to run a quantitative benchmark then we need define a clearly stated test. In my experience, the Accounts Payable (“AP”) process is standard across almost every implementation I’ve seen. Within AP there lies something that is even more standard which is the Expenses module. Of course, organisations will have differing expense policies but I find that the underlying requirements vary very little from organisation to organisation.

A benchmark level of effort to derive a set of MoSCoW requirements for expenses would typically be four client side people from various parts of the organisation facilitated by a business analyst in a workshop from, say, 10am to 4pm. Lets say 5 hours of 5 people (25 hours) plus 2 hours preparation. This gives us a baseline of 27 hours in total. Let’s see what CSN can do…

CSN produces a requirement specification

The Right Hand Side of CSN looks like this:

We then click on the Red and White icon which is the AI assist and get started:

I then dive in with the following query:

Not a great start. However, AI assistants are only as good as the query you use so I come at the problem from a slightly different angle:

This time CSN hits the target and I get the following:

1. Employee Expense Submission: Employees can create and submit expense reports for business-related costs such as travel, meals, and lodging.
2. Manager Approval Workflow: Managers review, approve, or reject submitted expense reports, ensuring compliance with company policies.
3. Policy Compliance and Audit: The system automatically checks expenses against company policies and flags non-compliant or duplicate expenses for audit.
4. Receipt Capture and Attachment: Employees can attach digital receipts and supporting documents to their expense reports for verification.
5. Corporate Card Integration: Corporate credit card transactions are automatically imported and matched to expense reports for streamlined reconciliation.
6. Mileage and Per Diem Calculation: The module calculates mileage reimbursements and per diem allowances based on company rules and travel details.
7. Multi-Currency and Tax Handling: Supports expenses in multiple currencies and calculates applicable taxes for global operations.
8. Reimbursement Processing: Approved expenses are processed for payment through integration with Accounts Payable.
9. Analytics and Reporting: Provides dashboards and reports for spend analysis, policy violations, and reimbursement trends.
10. Mobile Expense Management: Employees can submit, approve, and track expenses using mobile devices for greater flexibility.

The wording certainly hits the mark of the output I could expect from the workshop I’ve described above. However, I then think how many requirements should I expect to see for expenses. To this end, I looked back at a requirements catalogue from a previous implementation which had nine for expenses. So this is OK. However, I then notice that the AI assistant has prefaced the above list with the following words:

“Here are some key use cases for the Oracle ERP Expenses module:”

The use of the word “some” implies “not all”….so I ask the AI assistant a more targeted question to provide “a comprehensive list of requirements”. I get the following:

1. Employee Expense Submission: Employees submit expense reports for travel, meals, lodging, and other business-related costs.
2. Mobile Expense Capture: Employees capture and submit expenses using mobile devices, including photo capture of receipts.
3. Receipt Management: Attach, scan, and manage digital receipts for expense verification and audit.
4. Corporate Card Integration: Import and match corporate credit card transactions to expense reports.
5. Automated Policy Enforcement: System checks expenses against company policies for compliance (e.g., spending limits, allowed categories).
6. Approval Workflow: Multi-level approval process for submitted expense reports, including manager and finance review.
7. Per Diem and Mileage Calculation: Automatic calculation of per diem allowances and mileage reimbursements based on company rules.
8. Multi-Currency and Tax Handling: Support for expenses in multiple currencies and calculation of applicable taxes (VAT, GST, etc.).
9. Project and Cost Center Allocation: Allocate expenses to specific projects, departments, or cost centers for accurate financial tracking.
10. Audit and Fraud Detection: Automated and manual audit processes to flag suspicious or non-compliant expenses.
11. Integration with Accounts Payable: Approved expenses are processed for reimbursement through the Accounts Payable module.
12. Cash Advance Requests and Settlement: Employees request cash advances and settle them against incurred expenses.
13. Delegate Expense Entry: Allow assistants or delegates to enter expenses on behalf of other employees.
14. Expense Report Resubmission and Correction: Employees can resubmit corrected expense reports after rejection or audit queries.
15. Expense Analytics and Reporting: Dashboards and reports for spend analysis, policy violations, reimbursement trends, and audit outcomes.
16. Automated Duplicate Detection: System flags potential duplicate expenses or receipts for review.
17. Integration with Travel Booking Systems: Sync travel bookings with expense reports for seamless reconciliation.
18. Expense Category Management: Define and manage custom expense categories and subcategories.
19. Notification and Alerts: Automated notifications for pending approvals, policy violations, or missing receipts.
20. Role-Based Access and Security: Control access to expense data and actions based on user roles (employee, manager, auditor, finance).

This is now the most comprehensive set of requirements I’ve seen associated with an ERP project- 120% more than I had seen on an average real life ERP project.

The timings are then “off the charts” by comparison. This took me 10 minutes to create a list that could have taken 27 hours of effort which, on the face of it, is 162 times more productive (27 divided by 0.16666). To validate this number, I need to check that I’m being as honest as I can be with the comparison. Yes, it would take five people five hours to get the same result, However, one of the benefits of the face-to-face workshop would be that everybody would have been involved in the synthesis of the requirements and will have verified them within the session. So, in order to verify the CSN produced requirements, I’m thinking we need 1 hour of the four people’s time back to buy into the above list of 20 items. This gives me a ‘true’ ROI of (27 divided by 4.16666). From which I conclude that CSN is a factor of 6.5 times more efficient at deriving business requirements which is certainly a quantifiable benefit of using CSN (the second of the two problems we set out to solve).

In addition, we have also solved the first problem by stating the requirements of a Enterprise Class ERP system for Expenses Management- and we’ve done it 6.5 times more efficiently. The next steps here is to undertake a piece of work to document the other areas of AP as well as Accounts Receivable, Fixed Assets, General Ledger, Project Management etc so that we have a comprehensive catalogue of a full set of client needs.

Follow on work for CSN

CSN also indicated it would be able to help me with Expenses Management for process mapping, test management and other aspects of the project lifecycle which I will explore in future articles.

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