Oracle Manages More Business Processes

E-business software provider Oracle Corp. , today announced the addition of its new Sales Force Automation and Customer Support Management functionality for the Oracle Small Business Suite, the online service for managing business operations, powered by NetLedger.

“This is our most significant release ever,” says Evan Goldberg, president & CEO of NetLedger. “All of the key components – Accounting & Finance, Relationship Management, Web presence, and Employee Management – are fully functional and deeply integrated for managing a growing business,” he explains.

He argues that the addition of Sales Force Automation to the Oracle Small Business Suite, can give companies the ability to track leads, assign leads to territories, process sales orders and have anytime, anywhere access to complete customer transaction history.

Customer Support Management is another addition to Oracle Small Business Suite and is designed to allow service departments to manage all service operations, including case management, tracking and processing.

A further enhancement is Advanced Shipping and Receiving, for companies that have separate departments for handling shipping. The feature can enable a firm to process all shipments and receipts without maintaining separate shipping and receiving software.

Goldberg says the additions and enhancements are part of a new positioning for the service around what he calls, ‘Automate Business Completely’. Going forward, he says the emphasis is going to be on end-to-end business automation to allow companies to automate their business without letting technology get in the way.

“A big thing people ask us for is flow of process within their business,” he says, explaining that the emphasis is on standardizing the flow; “especially from order to payment to servicing, and providing these personalized interfaces for all people in the company so they can see their own view of what they’re doing,” he explains.

The Suite is also offering enhanced accounting capabilities that include: Accounting Period Management, which gives users the option of setting up accounting periods which can be closed at anytime and will block users from recording transactions into periods that have already been reviewed; Inventory Costing Options which allows users to utilize LIFO or FIFO inventory valuation methods, and Automatic Drop Shipmen helps user take orders for goods that they do not have actual possession of. It automatically creates and delivers purchase orders for those items for the Drop Ship Vendor, and creates customer invoicing and vendor payments.

Chris Corcoran, president and CEO of Market Share Inc., has been using the Oracle Small Business Suite to run his two businesses, a Limousine service and the operation of six Cingular wireless stores in Connecticut.

Corcoran was a beta customer for the new version and says he can now set up multi-company consolidation with Oracle Small Business Suite: “It allows me to roll up all our sales and expenses from two different businesses at different locations into one balance sheet and income statement. We can e-mail receipts and invoices to our customers and give them access to their accounts so they can view their transaction history,” he explains.

In conjunction with the new and improved feature of Oracle Small Business Suite, the software giant also announced today the results of its study that found its Small Business Suite has generated an average savings of over $17,000 per year, per customer. This translates to a return on investment (ROI) of over 1,700 percent for an average payback period of less than one month.

The study, which included in-depth interviews with CEOs, owners, and business managers of 71 businesses including technology companies, non-profit organizations and service companies, focused on the quantitative and measurable benefits that these businesses gained and also found that using the Oracle Small Business Suite saves businesses a significant amount of time in managing their business processes.

Examples of companies using the Oracle Small Business Suite to improve profitability include:

• E & R Enterprise Inc., a company that sells and installs home building materials located in Murrieta, California, has an annual savings of $29,100 yielding an ROI of 308 percent.
  

• ODEN International, an offshore oil and gas consultancy based in Houston, Texas, has an annual savings of $7,780 yielding an ROI of 1,072 percent.
  

• Restaurants To You, a company that delivers food from restaurants located in Arroyo Grande, California, has an annual savings of $6,200 yielding an ROI of 3,487 percent.
  

• Mountain Buggy USA, an importer of baby strollers located in Torrance, California, has an annual savings of $36,000 yielding an ROI of 2,930 percent.
  

• Firedog Technology Solutions, a computer and technology consultancy based in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, has an annual savings of $29,800 yielding an ROI of 3,381 percent.
  

• The National Society of Collegiate Scholars, a non-profit organization in Washington, D.C., has an annual savings of $35,000 yielding an ROI of 2,845 percent.

Goldberg says: “These results demonstrate that we are having immediate and dramatic impact on our customers’ bottom line.”

ASPnews consulting editor Phil Wainewright contributed to this article.