WebCenter Team

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As one of our 2012 Oracle Excellence Award Winners in the Fusion Middleware Innovation category for Oracle WebCenter, News Limited Dominates Online News Publishing with Oracle. The spread of brands across the news landscape could not be managed effectively without the innovative use of Oracle WebCenter Sites.

Jason Brock of News Limited talks about how Oracle WebCenter Sites empowers hundreds of non-technical editorial staff to publish over 60% of Australia’s online news in record time. Improved online engagement fuels News Ltd sales and brand loyalty.

One of our other winners in 2012 in the Oracle WebCenter Category for Fusion Middleware Innovation was LADWP 12.00

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LADWP Transformed Customer Experience with Oracle WebCenter

Los Angeles Department of Water & Power, serving 1.6 million residential and commercial customers, mobile-enabled a customer service portal using Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Identity Management.

Upcoming Events and Deadlines:

New release of Oracle BPM Suite now available.
Register for the webinar to learn about the new features and see the demo.

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LAST CALL: Oracle OpenWorld 2013: Call for Proposals

Oracle OpenWorld 2013 call for proposals!

If you have something interesting to present to the world’s largest gathering of Oracle technologists and business leaders, submit your presentation proposal today. This call for presentation proposals closes on Friday, April 12. Submit your nominations today!

Oracle Excellence Defined

Striving for success is what drives Oracle and its customers and partners to continually discover innovative uses for Oracle technology and to deploy successful and groundbreaking solutions and best practices. The Oracle Excellence Awards for Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation recognizes customers and partners that have excelled in driving business value together with Oracle in eight award categories. Nominations for 2013 Awards are now open. Details and nomination forms can be found here.

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I've just returned from a roadtrip with my daughter to look at one of the colleges she's been accepted to attend next fall. Yes - with limited time to make a decision, we're attempting to hit as many of the admitted student open houses that we can to aid the decision process. As an admitted student, these trips take on a very different feel than our pre-application college roadtrips. Now, she needs to "try on" each school and see if the vibe of the campus fits her well. At this exciting time in her life, it was great to get out and spend some time with her on the open road on our 5hr+ drive to upstate NY. 

As we were driving, we were also conducting an experiment with our newly updated dashboard NAV/GPS in our Prius against our other older TomTom GPS. We programmed both for the exact same address and hit the GO - take us there button on each screen. Here's where the fun began. Our built in dashboard NAV (running off of a brand new latest version DVD) told us the drive would take 7+ hrs while our TomTom NAV reported closer to 5 hrs in a New Zealand accent. You can imagine, of course,  which one we were going to follow. Now - anyone familiar with the Boston area and NY knows that its pretty easy to just take the Mass Pike (90) to the NY ThruWay (90) and then hit all the windy country roads to reach any number of small liberal arts colleges nestled in beautiful little college towns. All along the route - our dashboard NAV would be directing us off of 90 to some other minor road or highway which we'd ignore - it became a guessing game as we'd skip the directed exit and watch the NAV recalculate the route and time to arrival. They still wouldn't match in ETA by very significant differences of hours.  We stopped and checked at one point to make sure that we really had entered the identical addresses into both devices. Same address - check.  We were amused and privately, I was formulating the complaint letter to Toyota in my head about the horrible product I had just upgraded (for a ridiculous price) from 2010 to the latest 2012 map data.

RECALCULATING

We stopped for a break with about 2 hrs left in our journey and stretched our legs. With the car now in PARK, we found another hidden setup menu of controls that was disabled as a safety feature while the car was in motion. Buried deep in a menu dungeon, we found our answer. As the default setting, a checkbox saying "AVOID TOLL ROADS" was checked. Everything made sense now for why the NAV was always trying to get us off of 90 (a toll-intensive highway) and onto alternative slower (but toll free) roads. As soon as we unchecked that box - VOILA! our ETA's for both NAVs were now aligned providing a discordant harmony between the New Zealand accent and the generic woman's voice - the only voice available on the dashboard NAV for every upcoming turn. The TomTom was turned off and put away. One small setting with huge ramifications for our journey. Our experience on the small backroads, while taking many hours more might also have been an interesting ride. The routes both ended up at the same place - each just took us on a different journey - a different experience with different points of reference along the way. Little did I know at the time, the powerful metaphor for the college experience was building around our journey and would also provide me a great intro for today's blog as well. 

The next morning, we were sitting in multiple sessions while the university admissions, faculty, students and special alumni guests spoke to us passionately about why our children should choose to matriculate at their school. Each spoke about the value of the journey our children were about to embark upon and how their programs would be the best fertile soil to aid the development of an already exceptional student into something even better. Creating the best environment to foster innovation across multiple disciplines was core to their pitch. They combined classes with Philosophy and Biology, History and Physics, Ancient Greece and Political Science, all the while causing students to step outside their comfort zones and approach topics from a completely different perspective. Taking risks, intellectually, was central to breaking age old patterns of traditional thinking. The administration would tend the soil, watch after the seedlings and produce a new crop of young adults with the ability to think critically, be nimble in new environments and experienced in approaching interdisciplinary challenges from new perspectives to find innovative solutions while working with others from a variety of backgrounds across the globe.

After numerous sessions throughout the day, I was firmly convinced that I wanted to go back to college and attend this school, but someone has to keep working to pay for it, so we finally hit the road to head home. Along the way, through small towns full of old silos and sagging barns - I couldn't help but wonder how many of these people were able to survive. There was no obvious industry or employment. My daughter and I talked about how people really needed to be resourceful and play with the hand you've been dealt the best you can to survive. It was at this point that we passed the sign for the "Petrified Creatures" Museum and we understood that innovation comes in all shapes and sizes across the world, often driven by looking at what you have in front of you and who you can pull together as a team to work together. Summed up by the fortune (above) from the fortune cookie I got with our less than stellar chinese takeout along the route home (I know.. what were we expecting...? ).

So... what does this have to do with Oracle WebCenter? Many of the Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Winners in the Oracle WebCenter category last year have shown that same spirit of tackling a problem from a different perspective for positive results. One of my favorites is the LOUI project. They were featured in an article in Oracle's Profit magazine in Feb. 2013 and are shown here below in a video talking about their project that brought together healthcare workers and technology innovators to solve a public healthcare challenge in Kentucky.

At Oracle Openworld 2012 the University of Louisville won the prestigious Oracle Excellence Awards for Fusion Middleware Innovation in the Oracle WebCenter category for their implementation of the LOUI (Louisville Informatics Institute) Initiative, a Statewide Informatics Network, which will improve public healthcare and lower cost through the use of novel technology and next generation analytics, decision support and innovative outcomes-based payment systems.

Solution Summary
The University of Louisville (UofL)  is a state supported research university located in  Louisville, Kentucky, USA. When founded in 1798, it was the first city-owned public university in the United States.

UofL business objective was to develop tools that improve the acquisition, management, communication, processing, and sharing of healthcare information.

As part of the LOUI (Louisville Informatics Institute) Initiative, they implemented Oracle WebCenter Portal to provide a secure, personalized, and rich user experience and Oracle WebCenter Content  for the management of unstructured content and digital assets (such as streaming video) that  supports the on-going patient education, wellness, and treatment. Using the Oracle WebCenter products, the University of Louisville is now providing the infrastructure for their Facebook for medicine.

This project is anticipated to produce an annualized Return on Investment of 277% based on avoidance of hospitalizations, earlier intervention and improved patient compliance that is matched to an outcomes-based reimbursement model. 

Company OverviewThe University of Louisville (UofL) is a state supported research university located in  Louisville, Kentucky, USA. When founded in 1798, it was the first city-owned public university in the United States.

Business Challenges
Healthcare is in worldwide crisis, costs are rising, quality is inconsistent, and there is a need to integrate the expanding information upon which healthcare depends. Healthcare informatics is widely recognized as an opportunity to dramatically improve public health, service, and cost.  Since informatics spans the interfaces between medicine, science, and technology, it offers an opportunity to develop tools that improve the acquisition, management, communication, processing, and sharing of healthcare information. 

To address these challenges, UofL created the LOUI (Louisville Informatics Institute) Initiative, a Statewide Informatics Network, with the following objectives:

• Deploying understandable patient specific informatics to underserved patients in order to improve treatment compliance
• Empower Healthcare Knowledge Workers and Health Coaches with access to near time clinical data and engage the patient in their community 
• Evaluating the impact of correlated physiologic data to claims data on risk adjusted reimbursement models that improve healthcare delivery and cost
• Score illness severity in individual patients based on their changing blood chemistry values, and objectively measure treatment outcomes in patients with chronic diseases including kidney disease (CKD), diabetes, congestive heart disease, chronic infections, and hypertension

Solution Deployed

The University of Louisville has implemented Oracle WebCenter Portal to provide a secure, personalised, and rich experience specific for each person using it, regardless of role. To improve proactive management of patient healthcare, Oracle WebCenter Content is used for the management of unstructured content and digital assets (such as streaming video) that  supports the on-going patient education, wellness, and treatment.   This information can be tailored to the individual patient’s needs based on his or her particular treatment or condition.

Business Results
This project is anticipated to produce an annualized Return on Investment of 277% based on avoidance of hospitalizations, earlier intervention and improved patient compliance that is matched to an outcomes-based reimbursement model. 

This ROI is achieved by

1) Deploying understandable patient specific informatics to underserved patients in order to improve treatment compliance;

2) Expanding two new healthcare job roles:  Health Knowledge Managers and  “health coaches”

3) Evaluating the impact of correlated physiologic data to claims data on risk adjusted reimbursement models that improve healthcare delivery and cost.

Listen to Priscilla Hancock, CIO and VP  and Russell Bessette, Associated VP for Health Affair University of Louisville on how they use Oracle WebCenter to securely build communities and how they provide their Facebook for medicine.

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Greetings from Collaborate 13 in snowy Denver, Colorado!  Day 1 of the show got underway yesterday with a powerful and moving presentation from Aron Ralston, the hiker whose ordeal was made famous in the movie 127 Hours.  A large crowd of over 5000 attendees is here for a wide variety of sessions, dozens of which are centered around the benefits possible when using WebCenter solutions as well as a large number of sessions on best practices and customization opportunities.

A spring snowstorm has hit the area but that clearly is not keeping the crowds away. If you are here in Denver, be sure to stop by the WebCenter demo area in the Oracle pavilion at the rear of the (very large) exhibit hall.  Solutions and live demos are available for WebCenter Portal, Imaging, Content, Sites and Social and you will have a chance to speak directly to the product managers responsible for these product areas.

We hope to see you in one of the many sessions this week or on the floor of the exhibit hall.  And for those of  you that could not make it this year, we hope to see you at the 2014 event - and it will be in Las Vegas (so much less chance of a snowstorm!). 

This week on your favorite WebCenter Blog, our theme will be “Innovate and Collaborate”. It’s a very timely topic since we have just kicked off the Oracle Excellence Awards for Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation and our ace reporter and WebCenter team member, Lance Shaw will be reporting LIVE from the Collaborate Conference in Denver, CO this week. We should be seeing some street level views of the activity in Denver and highlights of anything that Lance finds scintillating during his time there.

Oracle OpenWorld 2013: Call for ProposalsWe’re excited to announce the opening of the Oracle OpenWorld 2013 call for proposals! If you have something interesting to present to the world’s largest gathering of Oracle technologists and business leaders, submit your presentation proposal today. This call for presentation proposals closes on Friday, April 12. Submit your nominations today!



Calling all Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovators Submit your Nominations for the 2013 Oracle Excellence Awards: Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation        

Click here, to submit your nomination today
http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/awards/middleware/index.html

Call for Nominations: Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation 2013Is your organization using Oracle Fusion Middleware to deliver unique business value? If so, let the world know and submit a nomination today for the 2013 Oracle Excellence Awards for Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation. These highly coveted awards honor customers for their cutting-edge solutions using Oracle Fusion Middleware. Winners are selected based on the uniqueness of their business case, business benefits, level of impact relative to the size of the organization, complexity and magnitude of implementation, and the originality of architecture. Winners receive a free pass to Oracle OpenWorld 2013 in San Francisco (September 22-26) and will be honored during a special event at OpenWorld.

Categories include:

• Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud
• Oracle Cloud Application Foundation
• Oracle Service-Oriented Architecture and Business Process Management
• Oracle WebCenter
• Oracle Identity Management
• Oracle Data Integration
• Oracle Application Development Framework and Oracle Fusion Development
• Business Analytics (Oracle BI, Oracle EPM and Oracle Exalytics)

To be considered for this award, complete the Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation nomination form for your specific category and send to Innovation-Middleware_us@oracle.com

NOTE: The deadline to submit all nominations is 5pm Pacific on June 18, 2013

Here's a collection of 2011 Winners talking about the importance of the awards to their companies

Many companies and industries have been praising the real business benefits of Web 2.0, or more recently, social business, for several years, including:

• Improving customer engagement
• Increasing workforce productivity
• Speeding and improving product and service innovation

It seems that lately, however, social business adoption has moved from “nice to have” to a strategic imperative. There are three intertwined trends that seem to be supercharging social business adoption: social, mobile & cloud.

The growth of social networks for business. Social networking accounts for 22% of all time spent online. Real business is taking place today in public and private social networks. It has moved far beyond using LinkedIn for recruiting or Facebook for consumer marketing outreach. The benefits accrue quickly from being able to communicate and collaborate easily with extended networks of employees, partners, customers, across internal and external social networks.

The increase of mobile computing. By the end of 2011, more smartphones shipped than PCs.  And Apple sold more iOS devices in 2011 than they sold Macs in 28 years. “Bring your own device” (BYOD) to work is an undeniable trend in the workplace, bringing freedom and convenience for users, but headaches for IT. Users want to interact anytime, anywhere, with localized, contextual content. And they aren’t afraid to sidestep IT if they don’t get the access they want. IT can try to ban access, but more often than not, needs to rethink their approach to mobile and secure those mobile devices to minimize risks from loss, theft or misuse.

The continued rise of Cloud computing. With Forrester alone estimating enterprise cloud computing to grow to over $240 billion by 2020, it’s hard to find ANY current IT project today not considering cloud-based deployments. The conversation is no longer one of outright rejection due to security and quality-of-service concerns. Instead, the discussion is about the right mix of capabilities for the business. What should be delivered by cloud vs. on premises? How do I ensure new services are integrated with the solutions I already have in place? What’s the right policy and governance model I should be looking for from my cloud services providers? What level of customization do I really need, and how much standardization can I get away with? Despite cloud’s increasing sophistication and security in applications, information stores, transaction processing, or even analytics, critical questions still remain.

What is your experience? What critical capabilities are you looking for? How are you combining these three trends?  What’s standing in your way?  We’d love to hear your thoughts!

By John Brunswick

This year's Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit highlights opportunities for organizations to harness the nexus of social, mobile, information and cloud capabilities.  According to Gartner, "The forces combine to empower individuals as they interact with each other and their information through well-designed ubiquitous technology."

How does this nexus impact an organization's ability to support their business goals?  It is fair to say that these forces have been present in various formats for some time now? So what has changed?
Distilling the essence of the forces, we find that speed, agility and availability emerge as consistent threads.  Specifically, we see the speed of solution delivery, communication agility within and across channels, and the availability of analytical insight are all present.
Placing the above through the lens of organization's driving toward their business goals, it enables them to more rapidly attempt to address them.  Attempt being the operative word, as with the speed, agility and insight, the alignment of business strategy to technology strategy becomes even more important in enabling those goals to be met, while supplying a foundation of capabilities for a business to capitalize on their future objectives.
In many markets where products and services between vendors are comparable, key business differentiators will be tied to comprehensive engagement throughout the lifecycle of a relationship with a prospect or customer.  Without an investment in the consistent alignment of technical choices with the vision for the business strategy, discrete technical solutions can end up ultimately posing roadblocks.
Why is mobile computing considered disruptive?  It potentially shines light onto an organization's ability to expose their back office systems outwardly in a secure, contextually relevant way.  It implicitly shows the level of investment that organizations supply to align their information technology with their business vision.
Gartner highlights the forces within the nexus as "well-designed ubiquitous technology".  Considering well-designed in a holistic manner, outside of a discrete solution, capabilities that IT potentially needs to supply to the business to support initiatives like customer self-service require the knowledge of user profiles, single views of a customer and connectivity with various systems to support self-service activity.  Within the first phase of a particular mobile or self-service project, these aspects may not pose an issue, but to meet a future state, business vision may call for functionality to be included that prior decisions may render costly and complicated to deliver.
The nexus of social, mobile, information and cloud capabilities offer unprecedented opportunity to expedite and optimize delivery.  Organizations that will extract the most value from the nexus will do so by leveraging enterprise architecture practices to achieve long-term agility, making technology choices in line with principles that ensure the delivery of value beyond discrete technical solutions.  This allows organizations to then focus on business innovation, engaging with their customers and prospects, and outmaneuvering their competition, through the use of a technical foundation carefully aligned to support business innovation.
Will you be attending the Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit in San Diego, CA, April 29-May 1? Oracle is proud to be a Silver sponsor, with a 30 minute breakfast session given by Christian Finn, Senior Director of Oracle WebCenter, and a booth on the show flow. We hope you’ll come find us to discuss the nexus of social, mobile, information and cloud capabilities!

Embracing a mobile, social, context-driven world.

Social. Mobility. Context awareness. Nontraditional content. User experience. Consumerization. This confluence of trends is creating unprecedented opportunities but also unprecendented exposure and risk.

How do you capitalize on these trends? How do you ensure you exploit these trends now, so you don't fall behind better positioned competitors and acquire the the tools and insight needed to build a complete foundation for the changes ahead?

Not that long ago, people's most sophisticated computing experience was at work, and computing was limited at home. Now, in most cases, the opposite is true. The consumerization of IT is a result of the availability of excellent devices, interfaces and applications with minimal learning curves. As a result of using these well-designed devices, people have become more sophisticated users of technology, and the individual has been empowered. People expect access to similar functionality across all their roles and make fewer distinctions between work and non-work activities.

Social is one of the most compelling examples of how consumerization drives enterprise IT practices. It includes personal activities of sharing comments, links and recommendations with friends. Consumer vendors have been quick to see the influence of friends sharing recommendations on what to buy.

Mobile computing is forcing the biggest change to the way people live since the automobile. Mass adoption forces new infrastructure, it spawns new businesses, and it threatens the status quo.

Cloud computing represents the glue for all the forces of the Nexus. It is the model for delivery of whatever computing resources are needed and for activities that grow out of such delivery. Without cloud computing, social interactions would have no place to happen at scale, mobile access would fail to be able to connect to a wide variety of data and functions, and information still would be stuck inside internal systems.

Information is not stored anywhere in particular. Rather, it is stored everywhere. For years, technologists have discussed the ubiquity of information without realizing how to take full advantage of it. That time is here now. Social, mobile and cloud make information accessible, shareable and consumable by anyone, anywhere, at any time. Knowing how to capture the power of the ubiquity of information and utilize the smaller subsets applicable to a company, a product and customers, at a specific point in time, will be critical to new opportunities and for avoiding risks.

Looking to learn more? We invite you to view Gartner's research note on this topic "The Nexus of Forces: Social, Mobile, Cloud and Information." Additionally, Oracle is proud to be a silver sponsor of the Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit, which delivers the tools and insights needed to tap into unprecedented portals, content and collaboration opportunities. Disruptive trends are yielding an array of business-critical imperatives: Deliver secure access across a widening range of devices. Mine and leverage nontraditional content. Use social software to drive efficiency and innovation. Exploit context-aware computing.

This summit represents the single most important event in the portals, content and collaboration space, where IT and business leaders gather to learn from the latest Gartner research and interact with 24+ Gartner analysts, peers and solution leaders. Experience new research and innovative thinking in a variety of session formats that drill down to your most critical topics. Are you planning to attend? We hope to see you there April 29-May 1, 2013!

Figure 1, Gartner, The Nexus of Forces: Social, Mobile, Cloud and Information, June 2012. 

We know many of our blog readers will be attending the annual Oracle user group conference, Collaborate13 in Denver, Colorado beginning on Sunday, April 7th.  This year, there will be over 50 sessions focused on Oracle WebCenter!   These sessions will range in scope from updated product roadmap sessions to in-depth technical sessions to help you get the most out of your current implementation.

In addition to the substantial list of sessions dedicated to Oracle WebCenter technology and solutions, there will be an expansive new Oracle pavilion within the Demo Grounds of the show with multiple WebCenter demo pods featuring WebCenter Content, Imaging, Portal and Sites. Additionally, there will be demo pods featuring Oracle Fusion Middleware, Database and many other technologies.  Be sure to stop by and talk with members of our Product Management and Development teams about the latest WebCenter products.

We hope to talk with you there.  If you need more information, or still need to register, please visit http://www.oracle.com/webapps/events/ns/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=160784&src=7663010&src=7663010&Act=4

See you in Denver! 

It's hard to believe, but preparations are already well underway for Oracle OpenWorld 2013!  So while we prepare to take over downtown San Francisco, it's time for you to think about what you would like to present at the show.  Your stories and lessons learned are invaluable to the other attendees that want to learn as much as possible about all things WebCenter.

With that in mind, we’re excited to announce the opening of the Oracle OpenWorld 2013 Call for Papers! If you have something interesting to present to the world’s largest gathering of Oracle technologists and business leaders, submit your WebCenter presentation proposal today. 

This call for presentation proposals closes on Friday, April 12,  so don’t delay. Submit your nominations today and we look forward to seeing you there in September!

Last Friday evening, I boarded a connecting flight as I made my way home across the country.  Tired yet relieved to be going home after working at an Oracle-sponsored industry event, I got on board and watched as every last bit of seating and storage space was consumed by fellow travelers.  We were then notified that the plane had a maintenance issue that was being investigated and within seconds, many of us on the plane were automatically notified of the new estimated departure time on our smartphones.  In terms of customer communication, so far so good!  The airline (who will remain unnamed) was informing customers promptly about an unforeseen issue and the customers responded by settling in with whatever reading material they had.
Within a half hour, we were notified that the problem was resolved.  But then, those dreaded words came across the PA system from the Captain. "We are ready to go, but we are waiting on the paper work."
Now the crowd emitted an audible groan.  Why is that?  In my case, when someone tells me that they are "waiting on the paper work", I immediately have an image of a slow, tedious, bureaucratic process requiring a manual approval.  Sure enough, we waited for quite a while as our now perfectly operational aircraft was held on the ground...  by paper.
What struck me as I loitered on the plane with my fellow passengers that night is that there are still, surprisingly, many business processes that rely on physical paper and manual signatures.  It's easy to think in this day and age that everything is now automated.  We live in a world of notifications and alerts, automatic updates, text messages, social collaboration and news feeds.  Yet at the same time, there are a myriad of areas in our personal and professional lives that rely on paper and pen.
In the case of airplane maintenance, procedures must be followed and documented.  There are industry and government mandated regulations that outline exactly how maintenance repairs are performed and formal records must be kept of every repair done on each plane for safety and legal reasons.  And yet with automated imaging, scanning and forms recognition solutions such as those available with Oracle WebCenter, these approved forms could be routed much faster. Management of the records and associated documents would also be more efficient and less prone to human error and possible loss or damage to the paper documents.

If there is room for improvement in business processes that directly impact customers at one of the world's largest airlines, what about your business?  Are you still relying on paper forms and documents in critical or regulated business processes?  How does this effect the customer experience you provide?

Oracle WebCenter provides a plethora of solutions for businesses looking to improve the customer experience. From Self-Service Portals to targeted Web Experience Management to Enterprise Content Management and yes, even Automated Imaging solutions that help you eliminate paper from your processes.  As a reader of this blog, we hope we have already helped you solve some of your business challenges and we look forward to helping you address more in the future as you strive to continuously improve.  Thank you for joining us!

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Note: In case you missed yesterday's Webcast featuring Jeanne Bliss in our Oracle WebCenter Social Business Thought Leaders Series, Jeanne has provided us a wonderful summary to use for your Annual Planning process. You can also watch the full webcast On-Demand.

Annual Planning Checklist: 10 Actions of Beloved and Financially Prosperous

Guest post by Jeanne Bliss, President, CustomerBliss

With annual planning just around the corner, here are 10 actions that business leaders and their organizations should invest in to exponentially increase customer loyalty and drive profitable business growth in the upcoming fiscal year. Execute on them to move toward "beloved" status in the eyes of your customers. Good news is; many don’t cost a thing but your commitment and leadership alignment on messaging and execution.

1. Believe in the integrity of your customers. The majority of business policies and rules are created to protect business from the minority of customers. Be bold, like Connecticut Griffin Hospital, which began sharing hospital records with patients and saw claims against the hospital drop by more than 43 percent. Take a leap of faith and believe that trust is reciprocated by customers when they feel that you trust them. Find one rule or policy to relax and watch what happens.

2. Invest in employee trust. Show your employees that you believe in them. Beloved company Wegmans invests in its employees by training them in the skills that remove rules, regulations, policies, and procedures that pen employees in. This enables Wegmans to throw away the rule book and live by this one edict: "No customer goes away unhappy." As a result, its margins are higher and profitability more steady because the grocer's turnover is only 7 percent of employees versus the average in its industry of 19 percent employee turnover.

3. Practice democratic decision making. Make sure your company's best ideas have a way to see the light of day. Give good ideas a chance to prosper no matter where they come from in terms of your organizational chart. Innovation and marketplace differentiation come when employees are respected as part of achieving a mission greater than their set of tasks, and when their voice counts. W.L. Gore has become a $2.7 billion dollar company, was named by Fast Company as "pound for pound, the most innovative company in America," and earned a place on Fortune magazine's best companies to work for list since its inception because of how the company unleashes its employees' spirit and ideas.

4. Grow and invest in customers as a primary asset of your business. Talk about customers lost and gained in real numbers, not percentages, to illustrate the vast number of lives your business impacts. Understand what drives customers out your door, as well as their long-term potential. Zane's Cycles in Connecticut has experienced more than 20 percent growth every year for 29 years, with 45 percent margins because the retailer never loses sight of the fact that its customers' average lifetime value is $12,500. And employees manage relationships bearing that in mind. Valuing customers makes it easy to make decisions about how to treat them.

5. Know your power source for bonding with customers. Regularly connect with customers, not only through surveys and other feedback mechanisms, but also as they experience your products and services. Take a page from Trader Joe's, which uses employee taste buds at its testing kitchens to determine what items should make it to the grocer's shelves, but uses customer "tasting stations" inside its stores combined with sales to determine what items stay. This closeness contributes to Trader Joe's ability to generate $1,300 in sales per square foot--twice the supermarket industry average.

6. Have clarity about how you uniquely serve customers' lives. Unite your operation to ensure that decisions connect to deliver an experience customers want to repeat and tell others about. This ties cross-silo decision making together and releases the organization from excess bureaucracy. IKEA, for example, designs the price tag first because employees at all levels know that the store serves customers who have less money than sweat equity, so are willing put together their items themselves at home. Across IKEA, the understanding that the price drives design, innovation, and what the retailer will and will not do drives its growth...sales that increased even in 2009 by 7.7 percent.

7. Deliberately walk in your customers' shoes. You need to know your customers' life to serve their life. Yet as people rise through the ranks or even join organizations, orientation is often more about process and policy than learning about the customer at the heart of the business. Be deliberate in establishing a process for new hires, such as insurer USAA, which require new "recruits" to wear the flak jacket and helmet that many of their enlisted customers wear and to read their letters. All this is done so that when calls come in employees first connect with the customer, and then conduct the process of the business. Ninety eight percent of its customers stay with them year after year.

8. Make employee selection one of your most important decisions. Select your employees as you would customers: for lifelong value. At Chick-fil-A, operators and employees are selected based on their values, ability to build grow and sustain partnerships in all areas of their lives, and then their technical skills. As a result, Chick-fil-A has operator turnover of just 5 percent, and the fast-food chain just achieved 43 years of consecutive sales growth. Hire people who you want to become a part of the story of your business, and then watch how your social media story improves.

9. Proactively solve mistakes when they occur. When mistakes happen (and they will) get out in front of customers and admit the flaw; then make peace with your customers. Repair the emotional connection, reduce the concern, and solve the problem. Southwest Airlines reviews every flight every day to know when delays interrupted their customers' lives, whether it was the airline's fault or not. The company contacts customers to explain what happened and, when warranted, sends out LUV bucks for a future flight. Being proactive earned Southwest a net revenue increase from those bucks of $1.9 million in 2010. What can you be proactive on?

10. Accept the order and the accountability. In a world where customers are use social channels as a megaphone to broadcast the experience you're delivering, invest in reliability. Don't make the customer wonder where the order is, how long until it gets there, or what happens when it backorders. If a customer can't tell another customer what they get from you, how they get it, or how it feels when they receive it, they you don't have a story to tell (at least one you want heard). Investing in reliability earns you the right to grow.

Companies that have grown in this economic downturn did so because their customers became an army of advocates who grew their business for them. They earned the right to their customers' raves, and the growth that ensued, because they deliberately made decisions that moved their operations in the direction of their customers and employees. And many times because of how we budget, that commitment must be baked into annually planning. Don’t lose another year of opportunity by letting annual planning pass by without considering these important commitments.

 Watch Jeanne Bliss On-Demand along with our other Social Business Thought Leaders.

Join us today (03/21/2013 10am PST / 1pm EST) for an interesting presentation by Jeanne Bliss on 12.00

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So - people often ask us about our Social Business Thought Leaders Series and why we do it.

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We believe very strongly in the positive change that is happening today in both how we work and how we live because of the transformation of social business technologies and people's behavior. Things are being driven by cloud technologies, mobile, real-time, video, and big data trends. We think, certainly as a technology vendor, that it isn't all about the technology - that you don't just buy our products - you buy into our strategies for the future and you won't buy into our strategies unless we share the same world view. So we've brought together this webcast series featuring opinion makers and thought leaders from the world of business, marketing, academia and IT to share with you what their research shows about what really is going on in the world and what the implications might be. We'll share some of their analysis about it and then show you, as a senior decision maker in your organization, how you can take advantage of some of those changes and avoid some of the pitfalls.

Of course, to help you avoid some of these pitfalls, we’ve brought together all these core technologies at Oracle under the WebCenter brand to form and build a user engagement platform for social business. We know that you are having to adapt to the trends and changing user expectations, and our goal is to provide you with the ideal solution to meet those demands. 

What is Oracle’s solution? Oracle WebCenter.

This is why we’ve brought together all these core technologies at Oracle under the WebCenter brand to form and build the user engagement platform for social business – connecting people and information. We’ve brought together in a single solution, a combination of enterprise content management, imaging, social networking and collaboration, web experience management, and composite applications and mash-ups, that can be implemented individually or as a platform to address all the needs of engaging your users.

Each of these core capabilities play a significant role in helping you:

• Increase sales and loyalty with online engagement optimization – whether it be via the web, mobile or social
• Innovate and engage users by creating composite applications as well as by offering new services online to your customers, partners and employees
• It also helps you enhance productivity with purposeful collaboration that’s exposed to you when and where you need it
• And finally WebCenter helps you optimize access to information with an enterprise content management foundation that ensures users can seamlessly view and change content wherever they work.

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Hundreds of companies have customers, who admire them, but only an elite few have true advocates – passionate, vocal, loyal fans – who tell the stories of their experiences and about how much they “love” them. As a teaser for our upcoming Social Business Thought Leader Webcast,  we have a short podcast on our WebCenter Cafe where you'll hear from customer experience expert and author, Jeanne Bliss. Click on the jumping little guy below. You’ll learn a little bit about Jeanne and the evolution of her specialty focus in helping companies shape company culture and uncommon decision making to significantly impact their customers, employees, growth and prosperity. Don't forget to register and join us for the webcast.

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Guest Post: Jeanne Bliss, President, CustomerBliss

1. Starting with a mantra, not an action plan.

a. Often companies decide that they want to get some early traction by telling everyone to “focus on customer experience” What happens next is that people realize this is a big corporate priority and begin taking actions, making plans and creating new scoreboards and taking action.

b. This proliferates the silo based approach to actions that is contrary to the discipline of experience development and management. A lot of action occurs, executives get a “false positive” that action is occurring and traction is happening, but it eventually stalls out because the actions don’t aggregate up to improve complete end to end customer experiences.

2. Not first defining the customer experience and gaining alignment on the path of actions.

a. This is similar to first point, but I am stressing it separately because defining the experience consistently and gaining alignment has major downstream implications if it is not done correctly and if the time is not done to get alignment.

b. The organization needs to agree on the stages of the experience and the definitions of success.

c. The importance of this is because we want to give leaders a new language set for which to ask and drive the business, and we want to establish the key cross-functional metrics for the development of key KPIs for priority touchpoints. This is critical also to database management, as the stages of the experience interrelate to one another.

d. Without creating this framework first, the risk is to experience the same failure as what happened when (most) corporations around the world rolled out CRM.

e. They automated current processes without rethinking the business.

f. The business of customer experience is about redefining the operation of the business to be driven from the customers’ point of view on how they experience the company .

g. This new attitude and approach to talking about and managing the business is key to achieving the cultural transformation. It’s only when we drive the experience from this vantage point, and hard-wire this approach into language, leadership and operations that it will become sustainable.

3. Not breaking the work into actionable pieces and not understanding what “success” is.

a. Initially the work on the customer experience journey should be considered successful when “enabling infrastructure” actions occur, such as

i. Aligning the databases to be able to manage customer data to know the value of the customer asset

ii. Engaging leaders in personally becoming connected to customers’ lives by calling customers, visiting employees

iii. Teaching the organization the competency of working together across the silos to solve and improve one (or two) customer experiences end to end

iv. Changing the communication from leaders to drive customer experience accountability

b. What often happens is that instead of building in (and celebrating) these new competencies so critical to the long termed sustainability – is that people want to attach a score.

i. “we will be successful when our satisfaction rates are x” or “we will be successful when our net promoter score is y”

4. Attaching early metrics to outcome metrics rather than operational metrics people can impact

a. It’s very enticing to jump to the outcome metrics such as survey scores.

b. The challenge with this is that the outcome of a survey score is impacted by numerous factors, not all of which can be impacted by areas of the organization who are given the outcome metrics as their performance score.

c. It’s more powerful to, for example, identify the operational kpis that people can impact

d. If the outcome metrics are added to early, before the underlying processes and culture change and coaching and development are put into place – people WILL want to achieve great scores – but they will rely on involving the customer in helping them to achieve a better score (follow up – any reason you can’t give me a ten?, etc.)

e. They will also focus on actions so minute that it might move the needle a little on the score, but the overall approach to sustaining that skill or even building that skill is compromised. It’s very hard to sustain this type of “go get a good score” approach.

5. Not having executives engaged in the effort.

a. Often executives will say that they want to focus on the customer experience – but they hand off the work to a department or area to work on.

b. This work is not like a typical project. Setting up a great project plan and executing on tactics and actions will get the infrastructure built (such as VOC systems) but it won’t drive the change in culture and the development of cross-silo competencies.

c. Leaders must commit to being personally involved – beyond a perfunctory monthly “check in” meeting. They need to engage in the process of the work. Without executive involvement driving the new prioritization, driving out the actions that are in the way and giving people permission to work together – it is hard to sustain this work.

6. Not having clear communication to the organization that walks people constantly through the roadmap, and actions, and behaviors to model

a. It’s not enough to do the work behind the scenes. The organization needs to be constantly kept up to speed on what is happening and what it means to them.

b. As new decisions are made that focus on customer experiences – people must be kept apprised of these decisions – and given permission to model this type of decision making.

c. Leaders must emerge as constant communicators of why we are taking the actions we are.

d. The organization must be kept up to speed on actions and successes.

e. Without this constant communication and “permission setting” and “decision guidance” the organization will view the cx work as another in a long string of exercises or programs that will go the way of the others – away.

7. Taking actions based on what they think, not based on understanding what customers need.

a. Many companies, especially those long entrenched in their business, believe they know what customers need.

b. Even when they do research, they make the research about “validating” their plans rather than beginning open minded and asking the customer about their lives and what they need.

c. This approach will compromise the outcome of the new experiences that are built – and in some cases will completely backfire.

d. The recent Walmart case is a great one to bring up. Walmart did “research” and got from it that customers said that they wanted less cluttered stores. So they set upon a plan (led by a past Target executive) to declutter the aisles, etc. Then they asked customers if this what they wanted. It backfired. They have lost millions on this. Look up this example --- it’s a good one!

e. Customer experience differentiation comes when the experiences are based by truly understanding customers’ needs – rather than beginning with current processes and asking customers what they like or don’t like. Many companies fall into this trap – from experience building to customer satisfaction scores that indicate that “they are doing ok”. Customers are forced to react the box of the experience you are currently giving – they aren’t given the change to really talk about what they need.

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Jeanne Bliss Blog:       www.ccocoach.com subscribe to my blog

Books:   Chief Customer Officer & I Love You More Than My Dog

Twitter: @jeannebliss

 

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How many of us have had the experience with an organization either in person, on the phone or online that just leaves us seething with feelings that we’ll never do business with that company again? I’d bet that most of us have had that experience. But is the experience due to an interaction with one single employee, a department of employees, or everyone we ever dealt with at an organization or enterprise?

We all seem to forget some days that developing customer loyalty or destroying it often begins with a single human interaction. These interactions don’t necessarily happen in a vacuum – there is a driving force that sets policies, controls customer interactions and ultimately creates happy or unhappy employees – which in turn creates the experience you and I have with every transaction we make on a daily basis. Engaged employees are happier employees according to some of the most recent studies.  Some companies build a huge base of totally loyal brand-ambassadors that spread good cheer and positive vibes about their beloved companies. How do they do it? Why do they do it? Can a company maintain great customer experience across the board and still remain profitable?

This week we’ll be taking a deeper look at “Customer Loyalty” to explore the current trends and success stories. Our featured guest blogger and thought leader this week will be Jeanne Bliss. As President of CustomerBliss , an international consulting business, Jeanne coaches executive leadership teams and customer leadership executives on how to put customer profitability at the center of their business, by getting past lip service; to operationally relevant, operationally executable plans and processes. Later this week, Jeanne will be featured in our Oracle Social Business Thought Leaders Webcast Series. Register today and join us on Thursday 3/21 or register and watch On-Demand after the 21st at your leisure.

Are Your Customers Your Biggest Fans?

Hundreds of companies have customers who admire them, but only an elite few have true advocates who are passionate, vocal, and loyal fans. Hear from customer experience expert and author, Jeanne Bliss, as she reveals the five common decisions these beloved companies make that enable them to thrive in good times and bad. Join us on this webcast to learn: What kind of decisions earn your company beloved status; How beloved companies drop the corporate veneer with customers; Why uncommon decision making can make a positive impact.

Your Decisions Reveal Who You Are, and What You Value

by Jeanne Bliss (from original blog post February 24, 2013)

When you make a decision, it results in an action. And the accumulation of those decisions and actions become how people describe you and think of you. It becomes your “story.”

• What is the story that the collective decisions of your organization are telling your customers, employees, and the marketplace?
• What is important to you?
• Are your decisions reflecting what you intended and what your company stands for?

Getting customers to love you begins with how you consider the people impacted by your decisions.

You tell customers every day how much you honor them by the way you direct decisions in one direction or another. And that’s what they play back to the masses. That’s what shows up on the Internet.

For more information see my blog post on Driving Culture Change in Chief Customer Officer 2.0. It provides profiled decisions made by beloved companies of every size and across many industries who earned the right to their customers’ stories. They are called beloved companies because of the emotional attachment customers have to them.

Here are a few recent profiles:
What Defines Your Experience?
Are You Remembered for Being There?
Do You Accept Accountability When Things Go Wrong?
Is Your Trusting Cup Half Full or Half Empty?

Beloved companies are acutely aware that their experience impacts how customers feel and respond. They take the time to make purposeful decisions about the contacts with customers. Beloved companies actively decide to connect who they are as individuals with the decisions they make in how to run their business.

Common to beloved companies is the concentration, angst, and passion that they put into decision-making. Suspending their fear that the dollars and cents won’t come swiftly enough, beloved companies decide to run their businesses with what each of us learned as kids – the Golden Rule.

The decisions we make in our business lives measure the depth of our humanity – our ability to apply that simple Golden Rule.

• How we choose to correct something that goes wrong.
• How steadfast we are in delivering the goods and ensuring quality.
• How we give employees what they need to enable them do the right thing for customers.

All these decisions expose what a company values. And the actions that tumble from these decisions expose the kind of people we are.

Think about how you experience companies throughout your life as both customer and employee.

• Why do you feel so connected to some and distanced from others?
• How does your feeling about a company relate to your natural desire to follow the Golden Rule?
• When a company makes genuine attempts to do the right thing, does this draw you to them?

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About Jeanne Bliss

Jeanne Bliss began her career at Lands’ End where she reported to founder Gary Comer, ensuring that in the formative years of the organization, the company stayed focused on its core principles of customer and employee focus. She was the first leader of the Lands’ End Customer Experience. In addition to Lands’ End, she has served Allstate, Microsoft, Coldwell Banker Corporation and Mazda Corporations as its executive leading customer focus and customer experience. Jeanne has helped achieve 95% retention rates across 50,000 person organizations, harnessing businesses to work across their silos to deliver a united and deliberate experience customers (and employees) want to repeat.

Jeanne now runs CustomerBliss, an international consulting business where she coaches executive leadership teams and customer leadership executives on how to put customer profitability at the center of their business, by getting past lip service; to operationally relevant, operationally executable plans and processes. Her clients include Johnson & Johnson, TD Ameritrade, St. Jude’s Children’s Hospitals, Bombardier Aircraft and many others. Her two best-selling books are Chief Customer Officer: Getting Past Lip Service to Passionate Action and I Love You More than My Dog: Five Decisions that Drive Extreme Customer Loyalty in Good Times and Bad.

Jeanne Bliss Blog:       www.ccocoach.com subscribe to my blog

Books:   Chief Customer Officer & I Love You More Than My Dog

Twitter: @jeannebliss

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This week, we've been focusing on how your business can realize significant cost savings by implementing automated capture and imaging solutions within your existing processes.  If you haven't already seen the screencast overview that illustrates the benefits of doing so, please take a look and share it with your colleagues at work.  We think it will be 7 minutes of your time well spent.

To further peak your interest, today we want to highlight a couple of recent customer examples from those that have already started using Oracle WebCenter Content and Imaging solutions along with their e-business processes.  The first customer that we will take note of is Texas Industries, or TXI.  As a mid-size company that is a leading supplier of cement, aggregate and consumer product building materials, TXI is very decentralized with 100 plants across 5 states.  Manual processing in many locations was proving very costly, to say nothing of the costs associated with managing, shipping and tracking of invoices and related documents. 

After implementing Oracle WebCenter Imaging, they have reduced the number of invoices that have to be manually verified by over 25%, reduced their invoice cycle time from around 30 days to less than 5 and reduced their shipping and storage costs by 50%.  Significant savings that helped TXI realize a fast return on their investment and fund further innovation.

Another company worth noting is Development Dimensions International, or DDI.  As a leading provider of Talent Management and Learning Systems, DDI works with thousands of customers and individual clients.  Enhancing back-end processes while securing sensitive content in a compliant fashion has paid immediate dividends.  Since implementing Oracle WebCenter Content and Imaging solutions in conjunction with their Oracle E-Business Suite, DDI has seen an 80% reduction in the costs associated with technical support and service and reduced reliance on manual, paper-driven processes has helped them save 20% on storage and management costs.

With today’s budgets and expectation to be as efficient as possible, it behooves any size company that relies on back-end e-business systems to evaluate how those processes run today and what can be done to make them more cost-effective.  Oracle WebCenter Content and Imaging solutions offer a powerful way to quickly realize cost savings be enhancing the systems you already rely on to keep your business running.

We hope you find this information informative as you look to improve the way your organization handles internal and external business processes. Thanks for visiting our blog and we hope to see you again soon!

Engage with Us

• Product Information on Oracle.com: Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle WebCenter
• Blogs: Oracle WebCenter
• Follow us on Twitter  and Facebook and YouTube

Lately a lot has been written about the opportunity available to companies that can take advantage of dynamic discounting when dealing with partners and suppliers.  But how can you get your organization to the point where you can also take advantage?  It can seem daunting but if you already are using Oracle e-business suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, JD Edwards or Siebel CRM, you are already halfway there!

Simply put, dynamic discounting allows you to negotiate favorable pricing when you have the ability to pay your suppliers very quickly.  Initially it might seem counter-intuitive that you can improve cash flow by paying suppliers early, but the numbers tell the story.   For example, if you can negotiate a 2% discount with your suppliers by promising to pay them in 10 days instead of the traditional 30, the return on capital is 2% in 20 days, or 36% annually.  That kind of return is certainly more than the interest earned by delaying your payments.

That's all fine and nice if you can actually guarantee quick payments with confidence.  But for many companies, the processing of documents, faxes, scanned images and other content is not anywhere near as efficient as their transactional processes.  WebCenter Content and Imaging solutions fill that gap and provide the automated capture, scanning and intelligent routing needed to accelerate invoice processing along with lots of other internal processes.

This week, we posted a new screencast that quickly illustrates how processes can be improved using WebCenter Imaging from Oracle.  You can view it here.  We believe you will find it insightful and that you can use it to get your company thinking about ways to further automate systems that can make a real impact on the bottom line.  For further details, please be sure to view one of our recent webcasts on how to optimize your e-business systems.

Engage with Us

• Product Information on Oracle.com: Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle WebCenter
• Blogs: Oracle WebCenter
• Follow us on Twitter  and Facebook and YouTube
• Subscribe to our regular Fusion Middleware Newsletter

Author: Peter Reiser - Social Business Evangelist, Oracle WebCenter

 Solution Summary

Development Dimensions International, Inc. (DDI) has been helping hundreds of organizations around the world―including half of the Fortune 500 companies―close the gap between where their businesses need to go and the talent they must have to take them there. With associates in 42 offices in 26 countries, the company’s expertise includes designing and implementing employee selection systems and identifying and developing talent, from front-line workers to executive leadership.

As DDI continued to grow, it experienced escalating costs associated with searching, storing, and recreating critical, expense-related documents for its operations around the globe.

They  implemented Oracle Internet Expenses and integrated  a new document-capture solution based on Oracle WebCenter Imaging,  that enabled the company to overcome the limitations of its legacy system with an open, enterprise architecture that facilitates a flexible deployment.

DDI cut administrative costs associated with managing paper-based transactions, as well as operational costs associated with photocopying, faxing, and couriering documents and decreased its physical storage requirements & costs.  DDI estimates that it is saving the equivalent of one full-time staff member in IT management.  In addition, the company gained the ability to track, access, and manage information more efficiently to assist with regulatory compliance related to information protection and privacy.

www.ddiworld.com

Company Overview

Since 1970, Development Dimensions International, Inc. (DDI) has been helping hundreds of organizations around the world―including half of the Fortune 500 companies―close the gap between where their businesses need to go and the talent they must have to take them there. With associates in 42 offices in 26 countries, the company’s expertise includes designing and implementing employee selection systems and identifying and developing talent, from front-line workers to executive leadership.

Business Challenges

The company previously used a third-party system to manage employee expenses, a solution that was extremely complex to maintain, as it was not built on a standards-based architecture.  As DDI continued to grow, it experienced escalating costs associated with searching, storing, and recreating critical, expense-related documents for its operations around the globe. Every year, employees spent thousands of hours and the company expended significant financial resources distributing client-billable expense receipts across several departments globally. This largely manual system delayed employee reimbursement and client billing and prohibited the rollout of shared services centers, designed to elevate efficiency and customer service.

To address these challenges, DDI defined following business objectives:

• Advance DDI’s global, shared services strategy to help it to reduce costs, improve administrative efficiency, and expand its ability to deliver world-class talent acquisition and development services
• Enable the company to more efficiently capture and process employee expenses, eliminating manual processes and accelerating reimbursement, as well as customer billing
• Reduce IT complexity and management costs by eliminating custom integrations between the company’s business-critical applications and systems

Solution Deployed

DDI implemented Oracle Internet Expenses to accelerate expense report submission, approval, processing, and payment, and control expenses with flexible audit tools. The solution automated the approval workflow and accelerated and ensured accurate expense attribution in client invoices.
At the same time, DDI implemented  a new document-capture solution. It deployed Oracle WebCenter Imaging, a solution that enabled the company to overcome the limitations of its legacy system with an open, enterprise architecture that facilitates a flexible deployment. As part of the rollout, it integrated Oracle WebCenter Imaging with Oracle Internet Expenses. Oracle WebCenter Imaging operates as an infrastructure-supporting solution, as opposed to an application unto itself—so the company can leverage it as a shared service that extends wherever imaging is required throughout the enterprise. 

Business Results DDI cut administrative costs associated with managing paper-based transactions, as well as operational costs associated with photocopying, faxing, and couriering documents. Further, the company decreased its physical storage requirements and costs.  DDI estimates that it is saving the equivalent of one full-time staff member in IT management. The team can now apply time it previously spent managing and maintaining custom interfaces to more strategic initiatives. In addition, the company gained the ability to track, access, and manage information more efficiently to assist with regulatory compliance related to information protection and privacy.

We are very pleased with the way Oracle WebCenter Imaging enabled us to achieve process efficiencies by capturing receipt images up front and making them accessible to managers and other approvers all along the workflow. We also like that we can retrieve images not only from Oracle Internet Expenses, but also from Oracle Payables, as well as within Oracle WebCenter Imaging itself.

Mike Fieldhammer, Corporate Controller, Development Dimensions International

Additional Information

• DDI Customer Snapshot
• DDI Customer Video
  
• Oracle WebCenter Content
• Oracle WebCenter Imaging
• Oracle WebCenter Capture
• Oracle Internet Expenses
  

Ok, let's face it.  When we bring up a topic like automated capture, scanning and imaging, it might not make your heart flutter.  And when we see a blog post about automating processes like Accounts Payable Invoice Processing, I doubt your pulse quickens.  But maybe it should!  Let me explain...

Today, we have posted a new "screencast" that walks you through a short before and after scenario showcasing how the use of Oracle WebCenter Imaging can slash the costs associated with AP invoicing.  It's about 7 minutes long and the perfect thing to watch before you head off to your next meeting.  While many companies use Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise or JD Edwards to optimize how business transactions are handled, the handling and management of associated documents and other files are often disconnected.  Fixing this problem and driving further efficiencies is certainly a great way to become bit more popular around the office.

Here's how.  Many companies are still relying on paper forms, faxes, letters, scanned images and digital content as key elements within business processes.  These items should ideally be easily referenced, stored and managed within the scope of the process, but when it is a piece of paper or a fax, that can get very tricky.  That invoice might be in a stack of papers on a specialist’s desk over at headquarters.  Or maybe that fax with the new contract terms got routed to a clerk’s e-mail but he is on vacation for the next 10 days.  You get the picture; the information is in the company...somewhere.   But when paper or disconnected and unmanaged files are involved, everything becomes a manual process which of course means it is error prone, slow and likely under a poor level of governance.

That's where Oracle WebCenter Imaging Solutions come in.  With native integrations for Oracle E-Business applications, you can automate the capture of documents, images and forms and automatically detect the type of form or document, retrieve line item information right off the document and route it into the appropriate process.  And that is where the appeal comes in.  When you bring in WebCenter and start improving first one, and then multiple processes, you will start seeing immediate results that drive significant cost savings.  Having that sort of vision and eye for strategic business improvement drives recognition and visibility within any company.  And who knows what might happen next with your newfound recognition?  Perhaps your boss sees your value and gives you that big salary increase you now so clearly deserve.  Upper management hears about the difference you are making in your part of the organization and invites you to present your ideas at the next leadership meeting.  The next thing you know you are having cocktails with the CEO's daughter on the porch of their summer house in St. Tropez. 

Admittedly, your scenario might be somewhat different from this one but when it comes to making significant improvements to the company’s bottom line by optimizing back-end processes like AP Invoicing, the results are proven and tangible.  Learning more about how your organization can save money and be more efficient is certainly time well-spent, and just might pay some personal dividends.  Check out the screencast to learn more and check back on this blog throughout the week for more information.  You may not end up in St. Tropez, but no matter where you work, being smart and saving money is always sexy.

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Today's customers are "plugged in" 24/7. They demand instant access to information and transactional capabilities when they want them, are savvy when it comes to making purchase decisions, and are not afraid to change brands if a company no longer meets their expectations.

How are companies responding to the new environment of rapidly rising customer expectations and disruptive innovations like social, mobile and cloud technologies?

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Some of the key research findings include:

• Brands recognize the significant financial impact of poor customer experiences, yet struggle to develop and execute successful strategies. The report indicates businesses can lose 20% of revenue from poor customer experiences yet many are stuck in an execution chasm.
• 91% wish to be considered a customer experience leader in their industry yet 37% are just getting started with a formal customer experience initiative.
• Executives report significant opportunities for improvement when asked to assess their organizations' effectiveness on delivering the experiences that customers expect.
• Executives cite limitations from inflexible technology, siloed organizations and systems, and insufficient investment as the biggest obstacles to delivering the best possible customer experience.
• On average, businesses estimate they will increase spending on customer experience technology by 18% in the next two years. Improving the cross-channel experience and customer analytics are top priorities.

The report highlights the need for new approaches to cross the execution chasm and succeed in customer experience. Visit the Global Customer Experience Survey Microsite to download results by industry, region or country or complete the CX assessment survey to see where your organization stands. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

Visit the Global Customer Experience Survey Microsite

******

Are Your Customers Your Biggest Fans?

Hundreds of companies have customers who admire them, but only an elite few have true advocates who are passionate, vocal, and loyal fans. Hear from customer experience expert and author, Jeanne Bliss, as she reveals the five common decisions these beloved companies make that enable them to thrive in good times and bad.

Attend this webcast to discover:

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Register now for the webcast, The Five Critical Decisions Made by Beloved and Prosperous Companies.
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Date:
March 21, 2013

Time:
10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET
Presented by:

Jeanne Bliss
President
CustomerBLISS

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