Using OCI AI Services to Enhance ERP Operations
OCI AI is becoming more practical for businesses, offering organizations new ways to apply artificial intelligence to specific processes without requiring a massive transformation.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) provides a range of AI capabilities, including OCI generative AI, that can help organizations process documents, interact with enterprise data, and make information stored in business documents easier to access. For companies looking for practical ways to bring AI into their ERP environment, here are three areas worth exploring.
1. Automating Document Processing with OCI Document Understanding
Document processing is a natural place to look for opportunities to apply AI.
Consider invoice processing. Organizations may receive invoices from hundreds of vendors, and those invoices don’t always follow the same format. Different layouts, labels, terminology, and document quality can make automated data extraction challenging.
An invoice might call the same field “Invoice Number,” “Bill Number,” or another vendor-specific name, while the location and layout of that information may also change from one document to the next.
Traditional approaches may require organizations to create rules or retrain models when document formats change. That ongoing maintenance can make document automation difficult to scale.
OCI Document Understanding is part of OCI AI services designed to extract text, tables, and other key information from documents. It includes prebuilt AI models and options for customizing document extraction for specific business or industry needs.
For example, information extracted from an invoice could include:
- Invoice number and date
- Purchase order number
- Supplier information
- Line items
- Quantities and prices
- Taxes and totals
Instead of treating an invoice as a document that someone needs to manually read and enter, AI can help turn that information into structured data.
OCI Document Understanding in Action
From Document Extraction to ERP Workflows
Once the data has been captured, it can potentially be:
- Extracted
- Validated
- Structured
- Passed into downstream workflows
- Used in ERP processes
For organizations processing a high volume of documents, automating this type of repetitive work can help:
- Reduce manual data entry
- Improve processing efficiency
- Handle variations in document formats
- Free employees to focus on exceptions and higher-value activities
The goal isn’t necessarily to remove people from the process. Instead, AI can handle repetitive extraction while employees focus on information that requires review or judgment.
2. Using OCI Generative AI to Interact with ERP Data
ERP systems contain enormous amounts of information but accessing that information isn’t always simple.
Users may need to:
- Navigate through multiple screens
- Locate the right report
- Understand how information is organized
- Know which fields or data sources to use
- Ask someone with technical expertise to retrieve the information
OCI Generative AI can provide another way to interact with enterprise information: natural language.
Instead of requiring users to understand database structures or write queries, generative AI can allow them to ask questions in a more conversational way.
For example, a purchasing employee might ask:
“Which suppliers carry a particular item?”
A natural-language interface would retrieve the relevant information and present the results in a more accessible format.
From Finding Information to Taking Action
With conversational context, users can ask follow-up questions without repeating everything from the previous request. This creates the possibility of moving from retrieving information to taking action.
For example, a user could:
- Ask which suppliers carry a particular item.
- Ask which supplier has the best on-time delivery performance.
- Use that information to determine which supplier best meets the business requirement.
- Initiate the next step in the purchasing process.
Because the conversation maintains its context, the user doesn’t have to repeat the original request at each step.
When connected to enterprise data and appropriate business processes, it can become a more intuitive way for employees to interact with an ERP environment.
Oracle’s OCI AI services are designed to connect Oracle AI agents with enterprise data and knowledge sources and define workflows that can use tools and APIs to complete tasks.
3. Using RAG to Make Business Documents More Accessible
Not all of an organization’s important information lives inside its ERP.
Businesses also rely on:
- Employee manuals
- Policies and procedures
- Spreadsheets
- Technical documentation
- Reports
- Other internal documents
Finding a specific piece of information in these sources can take time, particularly when employees don’t know exactly where to look.
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) provides a way to connect generative AI with an organization’s own information.
Rather than relying only on information contained within a language model, RAG retrieves relevant information from an organization’s data sources and uses it to ground the response.
Making Internal Knowledge Easier to Find
For example, an employee could ask a question about a company policy or technical manual instead of manually searching through dozens or hundreds of pages.
The same concept can apply to other types of business information. Employees can use natural language to find information across:
- PDFs
- Spreadsheets
- Manuals
- Reports
- Other internal files
This can make organizational knowledge easier to access without requiring employees to know exactly where information is stored.
OCI Enterprise AI supports connecting AI solutions to enterprise data and knowledge sources, including structured systems and vector-search retrieval for unstructured content.
Start With the Business Problem
These use cases are very different applications of AI. But they have something important in common: each starts with a business problem.
That’s an important consideration for organizations evaluating OCI generative AI.
Look for processes where employees:
- Spend significant time on repetitive work
- Struggle to access important information
- Have to navigate complicated processes
- Spend time manually moving information between systems
- Encounter unnecessary friction in their daily workflows
From there, OCI AI services can provide tools and capabilities to help address those challenges.
AI doesn’t have to mean replacing an entire ERP system or launching a massive transformation project. Sometimes, the best place to start is a single process that can be improved, measured, and expanded over time.
For organizations exploring how OCI AI can fit into their ERP environment, the opportunity is to connect AI with the data, processes, and information that already drive the business, and turn that technology into something employees can actually use.
