If you are a ‘problem solver’ like me then you may have come across a game called Geoguessr. The principle is very simple, which its that you get given a random google maps location- anywhere in the world – and you need to identify where it is. The clock is ticking and the close you are, the more points you get. A great guess is within a few hundred kilometres….a perfect guess is within a few tens of metres.
If you are lucky, you might get a street sign or something that gives you a big clue. This is an example of what you get:
Based on a quick look around I was thinking southern Europe only to guess Spain when it was in fact Greece:
You’ll notice that 5000 is the maximum number of points, so I only achieved 26% of the maximum points available. This is not considered a good result.
There is even a world championship for Geo guessing and people who do this full time often share videos of their techniques to solve the puzzle. In these videos they explain that they look at different types of pylons, road markings, shadows from different types of Google cars, foliage, location of the sun. They build up an encyclopaedic knowledge of the differences country-by-country. It’s impressive to watch them at work.
So, to this end, I want to use this blog to explain something similar to you which is how I go about using Oracle AI Success Navigator or “CSN” as we are still calling it to use it as a detective tool rather than just sharing the actual results.
I working with a client and we need a comprehensive list of business requirements to help determine which product in the market place best meets the needs of the organisation.
To this end, I’m looking to build on a previous article I previously authored. In that article I used CSN to determine a complete set of business requirements for employee expenses. In that article I used CSN to discover 20 business requirements for employee expenses. What I want to do now, is use the same approach to discover business requirements for every other area of a finance system (of which employee expenses is just one part).
Defining the problem
I’ve learned over the years and through my interaction with 6-Sigma techniques, that ‘defining the problem’ requires careful thought and, most importantly, “rigour”. With Geoguessr the problem statement is easy, ‘Where am I?’. However, it is a little bit more subtle than that because there is a time limit and accuracy of location needs be balanced with how long is being spent on looking around. So a Geoguessr’s first question is “which country am I in?” Followed by “which part of the country am I in?”.
To this end the problem I am trying to solve is not only to create a list of requirements for a finance system but to be confident that I haven’t any areas that are not covered. So, it’s ok to ask CSN:
create a comprehensive list of business requirements for a new ERP finance system
And with some trepidation this is where I start.
The results, on the surface certainly look promising. CSN starts off with letting me know the overall business objectives and outcomes:
| Provide a single source of truth for financial data |
| Standardize finance processes across business units, entities, and geographies |
| Improve financial visibility and reporting accuracy |
| Reduce manual effort, spreadsheets, and duplicate data entry |
| Strengthen internal controls, auditability, and compliance |
| Accelerate period-end close and financial consolidation |
| Support business growth, acquisitions, and organizational change |
| Enable better forecasting, planning, and decision-making |
| Improve cash flow management and working capital visibility |
| Support automation and scalable finance operations |
CSN then provides a series of categorises and a list of requirements against each. For the functional areas this looks like:
| Row Labels | Count of requirement |
| 2.1 General Ledger | 11 |
| 2.2 Accounts Payable | 12 |
| 2.3 Accounts Receivable | 10 |
| 2.4 Cash and Treasury | 9 |
| 2.5 Fixed Assets | 8 |
| 2.6 Expense Management | 7 |
| 2.7 Tax Management | 6 |
| Grand Total | 63 |
In addition, there are a further 136 requirements by the following areas:
| Row Labels | Count of requirement |
| 10. Compliance, Risk, and Audit Requirements | 9 |
| 11. Workflow and Approval Requirements | 6 |
| 12. Master Data Management Requirements | 6 |
| 13. Integration Requirements | 9 |
| 14. Data Migration Requirements | 8 |
| 15. Security Requirements | 7 |
| 16. Usability and User Experience Requirements | 7 |
| 17. Performance and Scalability Requirements | 5 |
| 18. Configuration and Administration Requirements | 5 |
| 19. Controls and Exception Management Requirements | 6 |
| 20. Document Management Requirements | 5 |
| 21. Implementation and Transition Requirements | 8 |
| 22. Non-Functional Requirements | 6 |
| 3. Financial Close and Consolidation Requirements | 9 |
| 4. Budgeting, Planning, and Forecasting Requirements | 8 |
| 5. Procurement-to-Pay Integration Requirements | 6 |
| 6. Order-to-Cash Integration Requirements | 5 |
| 7. Project and Grant Accounting Requirements | 6 |
| 8. Multi-Entity, Multi-Currency, and Global Requirements | 7 |
| 9. Reporting and Analytics Requirements | 8 |
| Grand Total | 136 |
This is a total of 199 requirements.
But how do I know if it’s comprehensive or not?
Well, there is already enough information above in this article that says that it isn’t comprehensive. As mentioned above, I discovered 20 requirements for expenses alone when I specifically asked for ‘employee expenses’ and the table above for section 2.6 is only seven. So we are somewhat short. A question at this point is, “how short are we?.
What we can say is that we’ve uncovered in this latest search “nine twentieth’s of the expenses requirements” which is exactly 45%. So this implies that the above list of 199 requirements should equate to somewhere closer to 440 if it were to be ‘comprehensive’. This gives us a ball park that we need to be in…or, for Geo guessing, an indication of being “in the right country”.
So where next?
I know that if I follow the instructions of my previous article I can discover 20 requirements for employee expenses….and I could use the above 27 headings to interrogate CSN for 27 longer lists. For example, I could ask a specific question about tax management; then about Fixed assets and then collate all the results. That would require 27 separate questions and a collation exercise. Let’s estimate that at half-a-days work.
We can test this hypothesis against one of the areas, say, tax management. The original results of CSN returned six tax management requirements (section 2.7 above) which were:
| Support indirect tax calculation |
| Support tax rules by jurisdiction |
| Handle recoverable and non-recoverable tax |
| Support tax reporting and audit requirements |
| Manage withholding tax where applicable |
| Support cross-border and multi-country tax scenarios |
o I now use a specific question within CSN as per my article for employee expenses requirements:
provide me a comprehensive table of MoSCoW use cases for the Tax Management module in ERP
So I tried that query …and it returned exactly 100 use cases. This is a 16.7 fold increase in the number we had in the original table! If this multiplier were to be applied to the 199 requirements we are now in the “ball park country” of 3300 requirements for a new finance system. This is a somewhat different answer from our estimate of 440 above!
So let’s recap on the positive progress we’ve made…what have we discovered…what are the new ‘data points’ that we now have that we didn’t have before:
- When I ask CSN for a comprehensive list of requirements it volunteers ‘employee expenses’
- CSN thinks that there are 27 categories of requirements/use cases to cover a whole finance system
- For employee expenses, we get a summary number of 7 against a comprehensive answer of 20…but for taxation, the summary number of six becomes 100
At this stage, I’m only interested in collecting data…note that I’m not trying to provide an analysis or draw any conclusions from the data I’ve collected. What is important is that I stay “on mission” and keep focused on answering the question in the problem statement
It’s also worth capturing what new questions we have at this stage that we will need to resolve. At the moment, my key question is:
- How do I know that the 27 categories that CSN has identified is the correct number and list of categories.
However, I also have another ‘nagging doubt question’ which is:
- Why did CSN return exactly 100 use cases for taxation?
For me, “exactly 100” is a “spooky result that could have been a criteria of the search engine within CSN which was to have a maximum limit of 100. At the moment, this is a secondary question, the key question I need to resolve next is:
What is the comprehensive list of categories for use cases for a finance ERP system? Is it 27 or is it something else…..
