Orchestrating the Symphony of Business Resilience in the Cloud
- By Adrian Johnston, Oracle
- May 02, 2021
Amid the global pandemic, businesses of all sizes, industries, and geographies have learned so much about staying resilient, scaling as needed, and, most importantly, responding to their stakeholders’ changing needs as they start on the road to recovery.
The World Economic Forum reports that Asia’s diverse economies saw an overall 2.2% decline in 2020, with an estimated 2.7% decline in IT spending. In the face of that challenging landscape, business leaders in the region still understand the need for relentless, sustainable digital innovation to get growth back on track.
More specifically, they’re turning to a range of cloud applications, many of them embedded with AI, blockchain, IoT, and other emerging technologies. They inject innovation into every process, across finance, human resources, manufacturing, sales, marketing, and other business functions, to drive substantial new business value.
The instrumental role of standards-based architecture
Carving out a competitive edge requires organizations to operate as a single organism, with fully integrated suites of applications whose data flows seamlessly across each business function. The unfortunate reality is that most companies’ legacy on-premises applications were purchased or internally developed at different times and were customized along the way as business needs evolved, making it difficult for them to exchange information.
Cloud-native application suites, built on an open, standards-based architecture, are both “extensible” (adapted to individual business needs) and seamlessly integrated with one another. What’s more, they are updated automatically (often every quarter), ensuring that customers benefit from the latest innovations. And they are secure by design.
Transforming the performance of healthcare
Consider how a variety of healthcare providers in the Asia Pacific region are using standards-based, cloud-native applications.
One prime example is Pharminiaga Berhad, the largest integrated pharmaceutical group in Malaysia. It implemented Oracle Fusion Cloud Supply Chain Management (SCM) and Oracle Internet of Things (IoT) applications to efficiently and safely deliver COVID-19 vaccines to health facilities nationwide. The integrated applications allowed for the automation of logistics planning and execution, with the IoT service ensuring optimal delivery routes and cargo temperature in the complex cold chain for the vaccine.
Aspen Medical, an Australia-based provider of a variety of health products and services, particularly in remote and under-resourced areas, adopted Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Oracle Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM) to consolidate its global finance, procurement, and HR processes onto a single platform. Aspen Medical’s deployment of the integrated back-office cloud applications enables it to support the modernization of two Fiji hospital infrastructures, providing easy remote access to data via mobile applications.
Conducting an impact in finance and human resources
Cloud applications have been the front-facing, go-to interface for people when they deal with the element of finance, which is one of the earliest pioneer adopters of digital technology.
Inland Revenue Authority of New Zealand adopted the Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) application suite to consolidate its dispersed spreadsheets into one single source of truth. It eliminated the need to manually move data across diverse sources while providing deeper analytics-based insights.
Common language unlocks innovation
Cloud applications built on open, standards-based architectures are how companies can modernize their processes, share and analyze data across those processes, and ultimately unlock their ability to innovate. They’re the foundation of true digital transformation in the Asia Pacific region and across the globe.
Adrian Johnston, senior vice president of cloud applications (SaaS) for Japan and the Asia Pacific at Oracle, wrote this article.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CDOTrends. Image credit: iStockphoto/feedough