Author: Tom Baxter, VaaS™ Experience Director, de Novo Solutions
A New Era of Oracle Cloud – Why Does Redwood Matter?

For the last 3 years, Oracle has promoted that in 2024, the Redwood User experience would be released, with a requirement to transition in 2024/25 across the HCM suite and in 2025/26 across the ERP suite.

At first glance, whilst some customers were excited, many have been concerned by the perceived costs associated with making the transition. This is completely understandable—the transition does require effort and cost.

However, when you delve into the details, this really is the most exciting step change in Oracle Fusion SaaS since its first creation and demonstrates Oracle responding to customer feedback in a monumental way! Setting the foundations for your organisation to reap many of the benefits of the AI powered revolution with minimal costs, delivered through a modern consumer-grade interface. Just think, a workplace interface similar to the one’s we choose to use ourselves! We’re all used to bold claims, and I hear your scepticism, so let’s explore in more detail, and understand why now is the time to act and embrace Oracle Redwood.


The Redwood Benefits You Need

In today’s climate every organisation is focused on managing operational costs and maximising productivity. Recent government decisions have increased the urgency to act decisively, coupling this with a labour market where staff retention is critical to success, and these challenges are amplified.

This is where Redwood can help:

  • Enhanced User Experience – a simplified, consistent, and user-friendly navigation designed to make information easily accessible. We don’t go on training courses to navigate YouTube or Amazon—so why should the majority of non-specialist employees need training on interfacing with back-office systems. The intuitive nature of the consistent UX will alone bring benefits in reducing training costs, improving staff morale (arising from frustrating experiences), and reducing central queries. All this alongside the benefit of Redwood being specifically designed to work seamlessly across any device, from smartphones to desktops.
  • Improved Performance & Efficiency – Redwood UX pages load faster, are more responsive, and include new streamlined workflows. This is particularly relevant to productivity —imagine a faster system combined with the opportunity to optimise more processes and complete tasks with fewer steps, thus delivering improved and immediate efficiency gains.
  • Advanced Features & Functionality – Generative AI integration, Enhanced Data Visualisation, and Unified Search. Fully supported, pre-built generative AI assistants, fully maintained by Oracle. The ability for your organisation to adopt and benefit from AI without having to recruit teams of experts to develop and deliver your own versions to keep up with competitors. Generative AI assistants continue to be built and released in Oracle’s roadmap, but already they have the ability to pre-populate fields, generate suggested text, summarise performance reviews, and so much more—driving productivity gains for managers and admins across your organisation. The enhanced data visualisation moves towards the Oracle vision of data insights where and when you need them, helping organisations uncover trends, identify risks and act on opportunities. Finally, the adoption of unified intelligent search really transforms the users experience by making it quicker and easier to find information and actions from across the Oracle ecosystem— further reducing training costs again and increasing efficiency.
  • Personalisation & Customisation – Adaptive interface & enhanced personalisation. Redwood leverages machine learning to understand user preferences and adapt over time, offering a more personalised user experience and improving efficiency by putting regular tasks at the users’ fingertips. Redwood comes alongside the Visual builder Studio (VBS), an incredible low code, revolutionary approach to managing and deploying personalisation’s as well as pre-built Gen AI assistants. VBS truly provides limitless opportunities to personalise, extend Fusion and even build your own applications in future—all in the safety of a tool specifically designed for DevOps.
  • Accessibility & Inclusivity – Redwood design principles have placed accessibility at the core. A focus that emphasises accessibility improvements to ensure that all users, including those with disabilities, can easily use Oracle Cloud applications. This is essential for truly empowering your entire workforce to be successful.

The Risks of Not Moving to Redwood

So firstly, whilst we all hate being told what to do, the reality is, you have to move. Oracle has good reasons for driving this transition.  For many years, the volume of enhancements released each year, has for many been overwhelming, and as such they have pressured Oracle to provide more guidance—particularly in relation to keeping up with national and international trends. After all, you moved to the cloud to harness the benefits of rapid continuous innovation to do just this. Oracle has responded by inventing Redwood to enable customers to truly have the platform to:

  • Harness the latest iterations of AI
  • Improve talent recruitment, retention, and management
  • Deliver the tools to maximise efficiency and productivity

Now Oracle is motivating customers to adopt all these benefits, after all your success is Oracle’s success too.

So, the real question is what’s the risk of not moving now?

Again, the reality is that early adopters often have the benefits of being more influential in product development but are forced to commit significant resources in identifying these product needs, as well as having to manage elongated transition periods. Whilst late adopters will feature many of the risks below. We believe there is a sweet spot, when the product is ready, knowledge of how to deliver the transition is peak, and your organisation is positioned to reap those benefits. That time is now! I’ll explain further on, but for now the risks:

  • Competitors adopting Redwood will quickly gain operational efficiencies, outperforming companies using the outdated interfaces. Remember, non-Redwood pages will remain slower and without the benefits of those streamlined workflows that could bring you increased productivity.
  • Already many new features are only available in Redwood—the longer you wait, the harder it will be to close the gap and adopt these benefits into your organisation.
  • From 25C, almost all the HCM suite will be unsupported by Oracle support unless you are on Redwood. Can your organisation afford to take those risks?
  • Every organisation is talking about the need to adopt Generative AI; until you’ve transitioned this leaves you out in the cold when it comes to Oracle. Does a delay to your organisation in having the ability to make smarter, faster decisions – really seem the best decision?
  • The later you start the transition, the higher the rate of change and cost will be, and the more it will cost you in lost efficiency gains in the interim.

Why Now? The Sweet Spot

Whilst new module implementations have been directly delivered to Redwood since early 2024, and EPM has already transitioned, the reality has been that early Redwood pages sometimes offered limited functionality. No business wants to take a backwards step in functionality, and putting our customers first, we have done the heavy lifting, testing, building and implementing to be confident that the functionality exists to move forward confidently. The fact that we have experienced experts who have been working with Redwood and VBS, should give you the confidence we know what we’re talking about. Equally it is important not to leave the transition too late and miss out on those benefits your organisation so dearly needs, e.g. maximising ROI, increasing productivity, increasing efficiency, reducing TCO’s and enhancing user experience.


How de Novo Makes Your Redwood Transition Effortless

Begin your 3 step Technical Journey to Redwood...

First

Empower

Learning together about the Oracle Redwood Framework

Then

Envision

Converting exploration findings into detailed journey planning

Then

Embark

Collaborating to complete the ambition – navigating to Redwood

Our 3-step process recognises the uniqueness of your organisation and places you at the core.

Empower – gain access to our library of pre-recorded training, so you are empowered to truly own your Redwood journey.

Envision – we do the discovery to truly understand transitional impacts on your organisation, both from a human and technological perspective and provide a genuinely unique roadmap and recommendations. We also seek to identify those early efficiency and productivity features and incorporate these in the recommendations, so that you see ROI from Day 1.

Embark – Choose from full-service delivery by our Redwood specialist transition team, to hybrid, to s self-managed transition with our guidance.

All the way we consider the human journey ensuring organisational readiness and maximising user adoption.

Why Choose de Novo?

de Novo is an organisation with links and experience dating back to the very earliest days of Oracle Fusion and beyond, and these relationships with Oracle Strategy and Product Management remain strong. We’re an organisation that still today gets the call when organisations need a trusted partner that’s not just got a proven track record of successful implementations from scratch, but has also demonstrated its ability to step in and deliver complex implementation rescues where other SI’s have failed. Backed by an industry-leading VaaS™ team, we focus not only on Managed Support but on proactive, continuous benefit recognition.

We are more flexible and responsive than many others in the market, demonstrated by the broad range of our customers, both in terms of size, but also geography and industry sector.


The Bottom Line – Make the Move with de Novo Before It’s Too Late!
  • Seize increased productivity
  • Benefit from efficiency opportunities
  • Maximise staff retention and development
  • Reduce the total cost of ownership
  • Enhance your competitiveness

We wish you every success in this next exciting step of your Oracle journey. If you’d like to discuss further, please don’t hesitate to reach out to helen.crisostomo@de-novo-solutions.com.

For more information, please visit: Oracle Redwood UX – de Novo Solutions