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INFORMATION

CONSOLIDATES

Improving Engagement

Cash Flow and

Profitability for

Consulting Services

Risks to your firm’s cash flow and profitability

are everywhere. With Oracle’s solutions for

consulting services, you can capture and process

all project costs and improve the accuracy of

billing and revenue management while effectivelyaddressing governance, risk, and compliance.

In the competitive world of consulting

services, time is money. Law firms,

accountants, management consultants,

systems integrators, and public relations

professionals cannot afford to spend time

processing and presenting inaccurate bills.

All the effort and activity involved incompleting a successful project translates

into lost revenue—and a faltering business—

if it takes too long to generate correct

bills. Oracle offers the industry’s most

comprehensive consulting services solutions,

so you can capture and process all project

costs and precisely map them to contract

terms. With Oracle’s solutions for the

consulting services industry, you can gain

tighter control of your finances and protect

your business’s profitability through better

project accounting, billing, collections,and corporate governance processes.

Capture, Control, and

Process All Project Costs

Profitability in the consulting services

business demands correct billing—the first

time. Oracle’s solution for consulting

services firms automates project operations

and integrates them with back-office

systems, from capturing project costs

to defining cost controls, burdening,

expenditure classifications, and adjustments.

For example, employees can charge detailedexpenditures and other costs incurred while

performing a task, and you can define

different labor rates depending on the

employee, job, organization, or time period.

Once you have captured all your direct

project costs, you can easily apply indirect

costs, such as allocations, transfer pricing,

and Selling, General, and Administrative

(SG&A), to determine your true cost of

doing business. And because all cost

information is consolidated into one system,

you can easily measure budget versus actualsaccrue revenue based on rules, invoice based

on contractual fulfillment, and capitalize

assets when necessary.

Additionally, Oracle gives you multiple ways

to enter project expenditures at any level of a

“Capgemini required Web-enabled

applications for our changing

organizational structure. Our

managers also needed project

visibility across legal entities in a

single instance. Oracle E-Business

Suite met those objectives.”

Christine Hodgson

Chief Financial Officer

Capgemini UK

“Just by integrating [Oracle’s]

PeopleSoft Enterprise Expenses

with invoice processing, our DSO

[days sales outstanding] has come

down 10 percent. In terms of close

time, we’ve shaved two days offthe cycle.”

Cal Yonker

Chief Executive Officer

CedarCrestone

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project. Enter them one at a time or in a

batch, or upload them from a spreadsheet.

Oracle Project Costing solutions support

the need of your global workforce to incur

transactions, receive reimbursements,

generate accounting entries, and review

project costs—all in different currencies.

You can also configure different operating

units or projects to use specific currencies.

And you can use transaction controls to

limit the expenditures that can be charged

to specific projects. Similarly, budgetary

controls help you manage your project costs

by processing transactions only if sufficient

funds are available for a project; and

adjustments allow you to adjust your project

costs, align the adjustments to your financial

systems, and provide a historical audit trail

of all adjustments.

Increase Billing and Revenue

Management Accuracy

When clients understand your bills, they

are more likely to pay on time. By retriev-

ing billing data from multiple data sources

(for example, contracts, order management,

project management, or legacy systems) and

providing a template-based configuration

of online bills, Oracle Bill Presentment

Architecture allows for more-understandable

and comprehensive bills, increasing thelikelihood and timeliness of bill payment.

Oracle enables you to give billing control to

the engagement manager, who can configure

varying billing cycles and methods, review

and adjust bills before they are processed and

sent to the client, and use multiple billing

formats to accommodate client needs. You

can also generate invoices by configuring

billing cycles for a single project or across a

range of projects, support retention bill-

ing, and invoice at the project or top-task

level. You can review, adjust, and approve

invoices online and print and post invoices

in multiple formats. Revenue can be accrued

based on various policies and agreements:

as billed, by percentage complete or spent,

by time and materials, or by milestone. In

addition, Oracle enables you to separate how

revenue is recognized from what you bill the

client—two tasks that often conflict. So your

bills are not constrained by the accounting,

and you can configure and present bills in a

highly flexible manner.

Oracle Collections gives you a tool for

efficient collections management. Work

is prioritized and delivered to the collector’s

desktop based on user-defined customer

scoring models and strategies that deter-

mine when and how to deal with

delinquent customers.

Improve Governance, Risk, and

Compliance Processes and Content

With converging global compliance

standards and accelerating performance

expectations, organizations are facing greatercomplexity in coordinating and managing

their governance, risk, and compliance ini-

tiatives. Based on best-practice frameworks,

Oracle Governance, Risk, and Compliance

Manager automates the management and en-

forcement of internal controls and improves

the efficiency of your organization’s compli-

ance processes. Oracle Governance, Risk, and

Compliance Manager monitors business pro-

cess risk and control performance across the

enterprise, automatically highlighting areas

of control weakness and initiating corrective

actions with automated loss and investiga-

tions management. Oracle integrates robust

process management capabilities, automated

controls monitoring, and enterprise resource

planning application segregation of duties—

all built on best-in-class content manage-

ment capabilities. Whether your organiza-

tion leverages one of the Oracle Applications

product lines or uses SAP, legacy, or custom

applications, Oracle Governance, Risk, and

Compliance Manager works across diverse

applications and system environments.

Manage Success

As the leading global provider of scalable,

reliable, and secure software solutions

for consulting services firms, Oracle is

constantly innovating to deliver fully

integrated, best-in-class business solutions.

With Oracle’s solutions for consulting

services firms, your business reaps results

within unprecedented time frames—in

even the most competitive and rapidly

evolving markets.

Fact: Of the top 35 most innovative

consulting and business services

firms, 27 run Oracle Applications.

Improving Engagement Cash Flow and Profitability for Consulting Services

C15969-01

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