One of the most common ways in which organisations exploit the feature set of Cloudbridge is to automate the process of loading financial data and metadata from the general ledger to their budgeting application. A normal part of month-end for finance teams is to extract last month’s actuals from the general ledger and load it into the financial plan so that it can be compared with the forecast.
This process normally also requires the updating of metadata such as the chart of accounts or product lists, in case items have been added or changed. Our customers have used Cloudbridge to automate these tasks - scheduling data and metadata extracts from ERP products including EBS, Cloud ERP, Netsuite and SAP to load into Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service, Financial Consolidation Cloud Service and Account Reconciliation Cloud Service. Some customers also need to copy the data from the financial plan into an analytical tool such as Essbase. Where this is required, customers use Cloudbridge to automate this extract and load as part of their month-end process.
As well as extracting data from ERP applications, Cloudbridge is being used to insert and update data in ERP modules. One such use case involves a customer who receives international orders from EPOS systems in various formats. These orders need to be added or amended in their ERP system in real-time. Using Cloudbridge, the customer has deployed a process that automatically picks up all new and amended orders as soon as they are posted by the EPOS systems, and then delivers these to the ERP system for fulfilment and invoicing.
Another scenario in which ERP applications must be updated from third-party products concerns timesheets and expenses claims. These might be captured outside the ERP application. Our customers can use Cloudbridge to extract the timesheets and expenses claims and add them to the ERP data.
As well as automating data integration processes, Cloudbridge provides enterprise data management features. Metadata such as the chart of accounts is usually shared by multiple applications, with the process of propagating changes being a manual one carried out via spreadsheets. Using Cloudbridge, customers have been able to replace manually updated spreadsheets with automated processes that extract and merge changes into a single golden source of metadata. Customers then review the updates in Cloudbridge and make any changes required before the metadata is propagated across the applications. For some organisations, maintaining metadata also involves mapping codes when different applications use different codes to identify the same metadata items. Customers use Cloudbridge to maintain the mapping rules and then automatically apply them to the metadata as it flows from one application to another.
Cloudbridge can transform the efficiency and reliability of critical data-centric business processes across multiple applications and platforms. While we have highlighted several Oracle related applications and systems, Cloudbridge can also connect with platforms including SAP, Microsoft and NetSuite.
