Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Paolo Juvara, Group Vice President, Oracle Applications Lab (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What about engagement? What are your thoughts? Why is the program so popular?

Every time we run an edition of the program, there is tremendous engagement and lots of applications. There is a preparation time of six to eight weeks when we want people from Oracle to come attend the public roundtables. There is a tremendous number of people who keep coming to these. What do you think is at the heart of that?

Paolo Juvara: I think the program is very unique. This is a mini-MBA. There are not that many learning opportunities within Oracle to learn those skills. These are skills that people are very interested in. The popularity of entrepreneurship, in general, certainly helps. I also want to say that your reputation also helps. A person of your caliber helps. It’s very appealing for people. I also want to take this opportunity to thank Susan Hoffman in my team who’s doing a fantastic job in promoting the program in the company.

Sramana Mitra: Absolutely. The duo of Susan Hoffman and Maureen Kelly has really made a massive impact on the success of this program. The execution team is incredibly important. I’ve seen lots of execution teams not succeed in pulling off something that’s scalable and high-impact. Let’s talk about some of the ideas that are coming out of the program. What are some of the ideas that you like? What conclusions can we draw from those?

Paolo Juvara: We’ve been running this program for five years, so there have been a lot of ideas that came up. A lot of them have been things that I personally like.

Perhaps I’d start with an idea that came out of my team. It was strategic network optimization. Strategic network optimization is about using optimization techniques or artificial intelligence to determine the most optimal location for warehouses so that you can minimize the number of warehouses and your overall inventory without sacrificing the service level agreements with your customers. You look at where your customers are. What is their past ordering? That was a good idea that we deployed internally to optimize the warehouses for the Oracle hardware business. We gained a lot of economic benefits out of that idea.

Another one that was particularly interesting that I remember is regarding corporate social responsibility. This came out of an employee based in India. The Indian government was asking Indian companies to dedicate a certain amount of their revenue to corporate social responsibility initiatives. It became a bigger project than that. It is a global issue. Many companies were interested in that. That tied very well with the overall human capital management. It’s now available in Oracle’s product. That was a success story.

The last idea that I would like to mention is more recent. It hasn’t yet come out. It is an idea that I personally like. It is about leveraging artificial intelligence for contact setup and generation. Oracle has a set of products that are about automating the generation of contracts, sales contracts in particular. The configuration of those products is extremely expensive. To give an order of magnitude, we are in the process of changing from one generation of those products into the next.

If I remember correctly, it was around 60 people for 200 days. It is extremely powerful because once you have them in place, you can generate all of your sales contracts automatically. You can dramatically reduce the cost. The idea there was we had all this history of contracts that Oracle has generated.

Can we leverage all that to generate an artificial intelligence algorithm that will actually look at that to determine whether the next set of contracts can be automated, essentially eliminating the cost. I think it was proposed a few months ago. I think it has great applicability. I haven’t been successful yet in finding the right sponsor within the company but I’m working on it.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Paolo Juvara, Group Vice President, Oracle Applications Lab
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