Oracle JD Edwards users enjoy the flexibility to customize the system to fit their specific needs. With features dedicated to different job roles, JD Edwards is a trusted system across multiple industries. But even with the advantages it offers, finance teams still grapple with growing skills gaps that prevent them from successfully completing essential tasks.
In a survey of 375 Oracle-driven finance leaders, insightsoftware and Hanover Research found skills shortages soared to the number one factor that drives Oracle users to be more efficient, with 92% of Oracle ERP finance teams grappling with skills shortages to some degree. Although market fluctuations have calmed in recent years, skills shortages remain a key challenge. How do you manage as technology rapidly evolves and it becomes increasingly more challenging for your team to keep up?
Here, we discuss how automation can bridge the skills gap.
What Causes Skills Gaps?
Rapid technological advancements, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cloud computing, have only caused skills gaps to broaden, creating a higher demand for skilled professionals. At the same time, the imperative to migrate to cloud-based systems introduces complexity and demands specialized expertise.
This trend, coupled with evolving work patterns like remote work and the gig economy, has significantly impacted traditional talent acquisition and retention strategies, making it increasingly challenging to find and retain qualified finance talent. The top missing expertise for Oracle finance teams include:
- 38% Advanced data analytics
- 37% Data governance and data quality management
- 35% Artificial intelligence expertise
- 34% Strong communication and collaboration skills
- 32% Financial modeling and forecasting
- 32% Financial technology savvy
These skills gaps not only hamper daily operations but also impede strategic initiatives as organizations struggle to fill critical roles with qualified talent. Several specific skill areas are in high demand within finance teams that use Oracle ERPs like JD Edwards.A few key ways to reduce skills gaps are streamlining processes and improving data management. While many finance leaders plan to address the skills gap through hiring and employee training and development, a significant percentage of leaders are also looking to data automation to bridge the gap.
With the right technology investments, finance teams can automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks, freeing up resources to focus on more valuable activities. Automation can also help resolve skills shortages by reducing the need to learn specific technical skills or relying on IT teams to supply those skills.
Bridging The Skills Gap: How Automation Makes Finance Teams Less Reliant on IT
Access ResourceKey Initiatives to Address Skills Gaps in the Workplace
Given the shortage of talent finance teams are facing, they are under pressure to do more with less to maintain productivity. However, it’s important for finance leaders to find ways to create efficiencies without disrupting their employees’ work/life balance; after all, no leader wants to see their staffing issues exacerbated by burnout and high turnover.
Keeping this in mind, finance leaders are strategizing ways to address the challenges their teams are facing. Approximately equal numbers of leaders are turning toward the job market to hire more people and planning software and ERP upgrades to address skills shortages and create efficiencies.
Whether organizations want to increase staff, tech investments, or both, it’s clear that scalable, agile solutions are needed to meet the office of finance’s ever-evolving needs. Finance decision makers should seize every opportunity to automate processes when possible, freeing up resources for deeper analysis and strategic planning and forecasting.
How Upskilling and Reskilling Can Help Close Skills Gaps
As important as it is to hire new talent to close skills gaps, organizations find themselves running into hiring hurdles. According to the AICPA, the number of accounting graduates with bachelor’s degrees has fallen 7.8% while those graduating with master’s degrees decreased by 6.4%.
This downward trend indicates a shortage of new CPAs entering the workforce. What do you do when hiring the right talent becomes a major challenge?
Upskilling and reskilling can help close the gap. Upskilling involves expanding the skills of your existing team, while reskilling is taking an existing employee and teaching them new skills on the path of transitioning them to new roles. By upskilling and reskilling, you can make the most of the talent you already have.
Having the time and resources to train employees to upskill and reskill is a must. Because JD Edwards is complex, finding those who already possess the technical knowledge required can potentially cause workflow delays.
This is where automation can help. When looking to streamline your existing processes, seek out technology that’s easy enough to use for anyone on your finance team to create reports without advanced technical knowledge. Get your team trained quickly with intuitive software that will help them do more with the resources they have.
Using Automation to Make Up for Missing Skills
Finance leaders have expanded their arsenal by realizing the advantages of automating processes. Solutions for financial reporting, budgeting, and planning have become more widely used in recent years, and financial technologies are now starting to make their way into the routine operations of every finance function.
Relieve the pain of skills gaps and keep up with rapid technological change with Hubble by insightsoftware, an integrated suite of performance management tools. It offers reporting and analytics in a single quick solution that fully understands and simplifies the complexity of JD Edwards. Hubble integrates your critical business systems so users at all levels can interact with live data and return data with extraordinary speed. With this type of visibility and access, everyone can easily understand, manage, and predict the business.
With Hubble, you can:
- Get up and running quickly. Enable both finance and business users to build refreshable reports using easy-to-configure, pre-built templates, or by creating a custom report in minutes.
- Close skills gaps with self-service. Hubble enables user-friendly access to all JD Edwards financial and operational data with the ability to drill down into details.
- Connect to JD Edwards in real time. Real-time integration with JD Edwards puts you in control with live data so your decisions are based on consistent, reliable, and accurate information.
Ready to learn more? Tune into our on-demand webinar to find out exactly how you can reduce skills gaps with Hubble.
Bridging the Skills Gap: Empowering Your Team with Hubble
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