3 Ways the Franklin Financial Digital Assistant Can Optimize Operations

Financial tasks seem like they should be exact science, but you know it is not. There are too many variables that are outside your control. It’s hard to achieve 100% accuracy, but you try your best with the methods you have at hand.

Of course, you don’t do this work with just a calculator and a notepad. You have tools to help.

The latest tools help you on your journey to enhance your financial workforce. This article will introduce Franklin, the ERP Suites AI digital assistant specifically tuned to financing. With over 50 years of collective experience, the ERP Suites AI Advisory team has worked with numerous clients to assess their business and enhance it through best practices and new technologies – now including AI.

But how do these AI digital financial assistants work? Are they worth the investment?

Here are three ways a financial digital assistant can optimize your operations:

• Financial analysis
• FP&A (Financial Planning and Analysis) tasks
• Anomaly detection

Digital Assistants Are on the Rise – and So Are Their Abilities

AI digital assistants help accelerate your existing digital tool kit, and they’re only getting smarter. The next wave of digital assistants goes a step further than the Siris or Alexas of the world. Instead of just performing tasks, these tools are performing the tasks under your supervision.

Take Franklin, for example. This digital assistant is an example of a FinOps, or financial operations, tool. Proprietary to ERP Suites, Franklin is a powerful Financial Digital Assistant (FDA) powered by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Users can seamlessly interact with EnterpriseOne (E1) using natural language, driving faster, automated insights and empowering proactive, data-driven decision-making for your business.

Our AI Advisory team created and EnterpriseOne integrated Franklin using a combination of these tools available within OCI:

• Database AI
• Digital Assistant
• Machine Learning
• Large Language Model and
• EnterpriseOne

Whether you use Franklin or not, the potential is out there for powerful FinOps tools to change the face of financial tasks. Productivity gains range from 10% to 30% depending on complexity. At the core of Franklin is efficiency through AI, automation and optimization.

Need Quick Analysis and Numbers Crunching

Sometimes you need a simple answer when management’s peeking over your shoulder or before heading off to a meeting. Franklin can simply interact with EnterpriseOne and 3^rd party data. No extra bells or whistles. Users can query and retrieve data from structured ERP systems without needing to know SQL or other technical methods.

A financial digital assistant can quickly answer or provide:

• Does my trial balance, balance?
• Show income by Fiscal Year
• Show quarterly income for a given Fiscal Year
• What is Q1 income by Fiscal Year?
• What is the Debt Ratio for X year?

Franklin uses Generative AI to query, comprehend, and even create new content. It unlocks enterprise data in documents such as Excel, PDFs, text files and more. Including critical information from IRS 1020 filings or publicly audited financial statements and disclosures strengthens FinOps analysis and capabilities. The ability to expand Franklin’s ability to information is ever expanding.

Automating Planning Can Lead to Better Decision-Making

Mid-market companies face persistent challenges in accurately forecasting monthly financial balances. This is no real surprise; market dynamics these days are constantly in flux. But if these forecasts aren’t accurate, they can affect cash flow, budget allocations, and effective resource planning.

Inaccurate forecasts make it hard to adapt to seasonal variations, unexpected fluctuations, and long-term patterns. Traditional forecasting methods lack the adaptability and precision needed to handle complex data patterns. When done right, predictive, automated financial analysis can have long-reaching effects.

Traditionally, forecasting has been a simple manual task. JDE customers often use EnterpriseOne allocations to set a baseline to prepare next year’s budget. Or maybe they opt for a third-party budget management solution like Oracle Enterprise Performance Management, Hyperion, or One Stream.

Too often, a user extracts information from EnterpriseOne and then manually performs calculations using Excel. Regardless historical trend analysis, static budgeting / forecasting, multiple scenarios, bottom up and top down methods are time-consuming and error prone.

Franklin can eliminate these issues through machine learning and various data science techniques. It automates the calculations and number-crunching involved in financial forecasting.

Franklin can also provide multiple forecasting scenarios, based on historical data and patterns. These fall into three categories:

• Upper – What Franklin would consider an upper amount scenario
• Predicted – What Franklin considers the most likely to occur scenario
• Lower – What Franklin considers lowest amount scenario.

Financials developed by Machine Learning methods means that the numbers are created for you iteratively. This is one of Franklin’s biggest benefits: working 7 days a week, 365 days a year. This can easily free up finance and FP&A teams to focus on more strategic tasks. Franklin is constantly updating its algorithm and extending the math, giving you the best possible predictions.

Embrace the Transformation a Financial Digital Assistant Offers

Franklin has three key advantages:

• Expands the Workforce
  Franklin functions as an extension of your financial team. You’re adding basically a knowledge worker.
• New Capacity
  Not only is your company able to tackle more, you’ll find you’re also more capable. Teams can be freed up to focus on strategic tasks such as costing, market analysis, cash management, etc.
• Productivity Gains
  Gaining back hours by reducing mundane tasks while focusing on tasks better suited to humans.

From an abacus to the calculator to the financial digital assistant, tools that help manage your company’s resources have come a long way. Franklin is ever-evolving, with increasing more skills and capabilities. If you want to explore what an AI journey could do for your team, drop by our Enterprise AI webinar. Our panel of AI experts will cover how to get started and make AI work for your organization.