Frontier Firms, or the top 5% of companies across industries, are trend setters in setting the pace for productivity and profitability of any industry. The other firms show a divergence from touching the productivity curve set by Frontier Firms, resulting in sappy profit numbers.
In a highly crowded environment where companies compete to have the lion’s share of profitability and market leadership, having an aerial advantage of cloud migration helps close the productivity gap created by such frontier firms.

The CFO, the finance team and their reportees are in the best position to leverage cloud migration, given their insight as business strategists and their oversight of investment portfolios in disruptive technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Blockchain and Intelligent Automation. Oracle’s report Intelligent Finance: How CFOs Can Lead the Coming Productivity Boom says, “By implementing a broad array of cloud services, digital technologies, and industry best practices, CFOs can help their enterprises keep pace with industry and global leaders, not just today but also in the future.”

The report spotlights key insights which serve as a checklist of what CFOs should be doing today to prepare for tomorrow. It is driven by research on seven organizations which leverage cloud for better business offerings. Here is a sneak peak of the checklist :

Leverage Cloud Offerings To Fill The Productivity Gap Created By Frontier Firms
A Wall Street Journal report says that cloud services could add $2 trillion to the US GDP over the next decade if adopted by sectors with comparatively low productivity. This productivity boom is coupled with benefits like reduced cost and improved efficiency gleaned from a lower IT resource commitment.

Hence, Cloud services can drive organizations to bridge the productivity gap created by frontier firms. Cloud technologies also drive industry best practices by leveraging disruptive innovators Like Machine Learning, Blockchain, Predictive Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Chatbots and other digital transformation initiatives.

Use Cloud Technologies To Propel The Efficiency Of The Finance Function
CFOs and their teams continually evolve and are in sync with the upgraded ‘technology toolbox’ of cloud as it helps them to be seamless and robust, hence springboarding the finance function. For example, when CFOs gain access to ERP data on the cloud, it becomes a key metric to drive analytics and Machine Learning in the context of the Finance function. When this is integrated with technologies like Predictive Analytics and Blockchain, it enables finance to work seamlessly across other siloed functions as one whole unit, with a single pointed focus on business growth. Migration of finance to cloud also makes it easier to standardize best practices by automating the whole process –something which normally requires abundant training resources.

Use Cloud To Disseminate Standardized Best Practices Across Industries
Cloud offerings allow the cross-pollination of best practices across high-productivity and low-productivity businesses alike. It is also used to transform traditional businesses and give them a disruptive technology edge and for a customer centric approach. For example, Shawnee State has put their students first with Oracle Cloud. They have undertaken a multi-year project of implementing cloud services to modernize and improve the efficiency of the university’s back offices; to better identify and track prospective students, as part of the admission process, and identify their best career pathways; and to track the academic and financial progress of current students, to make sure they graduate on time. The result was that Shawnee State was able to save nearly a million dollars in the current fiscal, besides automating many of their tasks so that their human resource can focus on doing what they are really good at.

Integrating Cloud Services To Drive Agility And Responsiveness
Cloud services allow businesses to be more responsive, competitive and nimble which are key metrics that bridge the productivity gap. Such organizations that are more responsive and agile are better known to capitalize and respond to market growth. The retailer, The Wonderful Company has migrated to a single ERP cloud platform using Oracle Cloud. Since The Wonderful Company had made some acquisitions, Oracle Cloud has enabled them to replace multiple legacy, archaic and siloed platforms. Oracle Cloud helped them to benefit from emerging technologies like AI and Blockchain, hence allowing them to monitor what’s going on across the company. Other benefits include but not limited to, aggregating purchases for better deals and to keep pace with the leaders in the industry.

The research also found that cloud migration was easier and faster than its on premise counterpart, besides cutting down on operational costs of its implementation. Cloud migration has a plethora of benefits like ease of implementation, low cost, scalability, integration readiness and standardizing best practices, making it a potentially powerful equalizer for low productivity industries and organizations. One of the cloud service providers who are at the forefront in providing cloud based services is Oracle Cloud. They provide cutting edge cloud services by leveraging disruptive technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Blockchain to help businesses bridge the productivity gap and keep pace with Frontier Firms.