As workforces become more complex, both in their geographical placement and working patterns, companies of all sizes are looking to the cloud to implement latest HR strategies – and increasingly, it’s logical for the finance systems which underpin HR practice to join them.

Both Finance and HR departments play critical roles in today’s business environment, and their positions are becoming increasingly intrinsically linked. The imperative to plan, budget and forecast business activities underpins the modern enterprise, and this has the most significant effect on these two key systems.

As Finance and HR systems unite and move to the cloud, they act as value drivers right across the business, from increasing overall business agility to staff efficiency.

Increasingly, organizations are realizing the benefits that cloud implementations of unified systems can yield. Linx Cargo, a diversified logistics infrastructure and solutions provider met with the need to transition off the company’s legacy Peoplesoft applications, including finance, HR, and labor planning onto new systems within a short timeframe to avoid significant upgrade cost while preserving business continuity. They turned to Oracle and adopted Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Cloud and Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) Cloud to enable this crucial task.

The outcome of the deployment over the cloud has helped Linx Cargo Group avoid up to US$8 million upgrade costs over 5 years and halved HR workload and improved the ability to attract more talent in the ports and logistics industry.

Many organizations right across industry’s spectrum are feeling the same impetus to change. It is no longer acceptable for those in financial or people planning to have to wait weeks for manual report and business intelligence data collation – commerce moves at the speed of digital, and industry has to react with the same imperative. To create better reporting for business leaders, real-time information is needed.

Efficiency and cross-departmental standardization are just two of the benefits of cloud-based systems available from Oracle. While these provide an immediate impact on the bottom line, savings made across large organizations are also achievable by adopting the agile working methods which a digital, unified cloud offers.

Clearly, unified systems help manage Finance and HCM more efficiently, but internal communications also gather momentum. Cloud options from Oracle include collaboration tools to get teams working better together, both amongst themselves and with other departments too. As intrinsic parts of the unified platform, working practices benefit as cross-departmental teams can meet, collaborate and communicate – all working on a single data instance drawn from both departments.

According to a study undertaken by MIT Technology Review of 700 C-level executives, senior management, and mid-level personnel, 88 percent of respondents said their expectations of improved communication were exceeded by the implementation of combined HR & Finance cloud solutions.

And 90 percent of executives and managers in HR and Finance departments in the same survey said that after a transition of their departments’ technology base to the cloud, costs were lower or fully in line with expectations and predictions, in the medium to long terms.

With HCM and ERP together in the cloud, resources are not tied-up in making manual updates to data in two systems. And departments find their practices transformed to a strategic footing, offering real business value where before, staff struggled with manual systems.

To learn more about the cloud’s new power partnership between HR & Finance, download the MIT Technology Review report today. Find out how the advantages offered by cloud migration can be realized. The benefits are clear: unify, save, empower and gain insight, by way of the latest cloud-based technology.