Oracle launches a new sustainability app for Fusion Cloud EPM

Oracle has announced the launch of Oracle Fusion Cloud Sustainability — an app that integrates data from Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP and Oracle Fusion Cloud SCM, enabling analysis and reporting within Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) and Oracle Fusion Data Intelligence.

Fusion Data Intelligence — which can be viewed as an updated avatar of Fusion Analytics Warehouse — combines enterprise data, ready-to-use analytics along with prebuilt AI and machine learning models to deliver business intelligence.  

Emission factor mapping and other capabilities

As part of Oracle Fusion Cloud Sustainability, enterprises would get access to features such as automated transaction records, contextualized data, pre-built dashboards, emission factor mapping, and audit capabilities.

According to Oracle, the automated transaction records feature would enable enterprises to increase the speed, accuracy, and transparency of sustainability reporting by using AI, classification rules, and sustainability metadata attributes to automatically create activity records and add transactions to a sustainability ledger.

The contextualized data feature, alternatively, would enable business leaders to gain the context needed to drive impactful decisions by allowing them to view the operational data in Oracle Cloud ERP, Oracle Cloud EPM, and Oracle Cloud SCM so they can see assets, processes, suppliers, or products that need attention.

Enterprises would also get access to prebuilt dashboards as part of Fusion Cloud Sustainability, offering a holistic view of sustainability performance and a drill-down into the underlying details by automatically exporting data to sustainability dashboards with prebuilt key performance indicators (KPIs) and custom analyses in Oracle Fusion Data Intelligence.

The audit capabilities of the new application, according to the company, would allow enterprises to improve reporting accuracy and transparency by providing financial-grade audit traceability and tamper-proof ledger entries that deliver a full record of all activities and events with sustainability impact, along with any associated emissions.

Further, Fusion Cloud Sustainability’s emission factor mapping capabilities is designed to allow enterprises to calculate their carbon footprint. Enterprises would automatically be able to calculate emissions for any type of activity using representative values (emission factors), and comparisons (global warming potentials) and perform the required conversion of units of measure and currency.

Other features of the application, according to Natalia Rachelson, group vice president of Fusion Applications at Oracle, include the ability to integrate data from third-party applications and data sources via REST APIs and spreadsheets.

Growing market for sustainability tools

Oracle’s new sustainability application is likely to face stiff competition in a market flooded with similar tools from companies including Salesforce, Microsoft, SAP and several tech startups.

The growth of this segment, according to experts, will be driven by pressure from investors, customers, regulators and governments forcing enterprises to adopt carbon neutrality and net zero goals by 2030, thereby proliferating the adoption of sustainability-enabled monitoring to manage energy consumption and the practice of keeping a close watch over carbon footprint metrics.

While Microsoft offers similar data unifying capabilities via its Cloud for Sustainability, IBM has a suite of solutions clubbed under the company’s portfolio, named IBM Sustainability Solutions.

These offerings include IBM Envizi, IBM Maximo, the Sustainability Accelerator, and the Cloud Carbon Calculator along with support from IBM Consulting.

Similarly, SAP offers multiple products as part of its sustainability solutions. These include the SAP Sustainability Control Tower and suites, such as Sustainability Footprint Management and Responsible Design and Production.

Salesforce offers the Sustainability Cloud, renamed as the Net Zero Cloud — a carbon accounting product for enterprises — that, too, provides data-driven insights to drive climate action.

According to IDC research manager Amy Cravens, Oracle has been planning to add the sustainability application for some time now.

“The timing of the Fusion Cloud Sustainability application launch aligns well with the broader geopolitical environment of impending regulation and resiliency planning,” Cravens said.

Last year in November, Oracle published a product framework and statement of direction on the now generally available sustainability application.