Lamar Advertising uses AI in Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP to accelerate efficiency

Lamar Advertising is one of the world’s largest outdoor advertising companies, with more than 360,000 billboards, airport advertisements, and highway logos that help businesses reach potential customers every day. The company’s strategy relies on a decentralized organization, with more than 160 operating units each running their own profit-and-loss statements. Lamar acquired many of those units, and it wanted to keep their entrepreneurial fire and local expertise. But the company was also looking for ways to gain economies of scale from automation and technology, and to give executives at headquarters a clear and timely view of financial and operating performance.

Lamar’s leadership also wanted to seize emerging opportunities in artificial intelligence. Doing so required having more centralized data that AI models could use, rather than managing data spread across disparate systems. With centralized data and AI platforms, company leaders saw the potential to make finance and sales teams more efficient, spending less time digging through disparate systems for information. “We’re trying to bring our data into one consolidated gold source, so we can unleash AI and make our salespeople more efficient and make our backup back-office function more nimble and agile,” says Lamar CIO Sukhvinder Singh.

Lamar chose Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP for its depth of capabilities, clear reporting, and ease of use for team members who manage finance, accounting, and reporting functions. Oracle Fusion Data Intelligence provided the robust reporting and dashboards that the company needed. In addition to helping improve the efficiency and performance of critical back-office teams, Lamar’s leadership wanted an application suite that could “also play offense,” says Singh, explaining that the company is implementing Oracle Sales, CPQ, and other revenue-driving applications in its second phase. Lamar wanted a cloud-based platform that would include frequent updates to add the latest technology, including AI innovations.

Oracle Customer Success Services was another important factor, because it helped choose applications and a systems integration partner. CSS also assisted with implementation, establishing a governance structure, and running ongoing operations.

Running its finance applications in the cloud would also give Lamar greater resiliency and availability, along with the ability to flex capacity up and down as needed. Using Oracle Cloud would help to lower the company’s business continuity risk from hurricanes by moving finance functions out of a primary data center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

With Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP, Lamar improved the finance team’s efficiency. The company’s invoice processing initiative offers a clear example of that progress. Using Fusion Cloud ERP’s AI-based intelligent document recognition, Lamar went from a manual data entry process for incoming invoices to a completely automated process for scanning. Within 90 days of implementing the capability, 40% of invoices were automatically scanned, ingested, processed, and paid with no touch by a finance team member. Lamar used this capability to centralize invoice processing instead of requiring people in individual operating units to scan and process invoices. And the share of invoices processed automatically has kept rising, as the AI model learns on its own to handle a wider range of invoices.

“That’s a home run in my opinion, because all of a sudden we make our accounts payable function more analytical, more savvy, so that there are fewer data entry people,” Singh says. “They can start doing analysis on vendors: Who should be our top 10 suppliers? Is there a potential to negotiate discounting or some other partnership with those top 10 vendors?”

Oracle Fusion Data Intelligence allowed Lamar to gather and report the information it needed to manage its decentralized operating model. Executives at headquarters have the performance visibility they need, and general managers in the operating units have at their fingertips the insights they need to run the business day-to-day.

Lamar gained a smoother and more efficient financial close using Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP. Previously, the monthly and quarterly close required IT staffers to shut down access to the financial system for anyone not working on the close, so they’d have enough capacity to manage the batch process. With Oracle Cloud, the finance team runs processes in parallel and creates reports using Fusion Data Intelligence as soon as the data is available, providing more relevant, real-time reporting. Finance staffers and operating managers are more efficient because their data is accessible in one place. The company also benefited from a single data model for its finance reporting, rather than the previous disparate systems where a customer might be called advertiser, agency, or customer depending on the application used, making companywide reporting difficult.

The cloud-based system also provided regular application updates to keep Lamar on the latest technology—a big shift from the on-premises legacy system that the company hadn’t upgraded in many years, due to the complexity of such an update. Those updates let Lamar quickly assess and adopt new technologies, such as AI, because they are embedded in Oracle Fusion Applications.