dunnhumby connects insights across finance, HR, and sales

A global leader in customer data science, dunnhumby needed to go beyond the operational reporting in Oracle Cloud Applications to provide finance, HR, and sales deeper insights into revenue, pipeline, retention, and costs. The commercial finance team initially built an Excel-based solution to join data across systems for sales teams to use in their daily client activities. This approach resulted in several manual steps to download the data to desktop BI tools and fix data gaps along the way. dunnhumby realized the system wasn’t an enterprise solution that would meet the expanding analytic needs of the company.

The company selected the Oracle Fusion Analytics family for ERP and HCM because it delivered a unified data model and Oracle-managed data pipelines, which automatically adapt to changes in Oracle Cloud Applications. Together, these capabilities help dunnhumby improve data governance, lower support costs, and provide better resiliency to change.

dunnhumby realized that Oracle Fusion Analytics could be very useful because of its prebuilt data warehouse and subject areas with more than 1,000 metrics. With Fusion Analytics, the company doesn’t need to worry about maintenance and upgrades because they are managed by Oracle. These prebuilt subject areas allow analysts to easily create dashboards without customizing the underlying data structure.

The company is implementing Fusion ERP Analytics and Fusion HCM Analytics so finance and HR managers can have self-service access without engaging IT or re-loading the data from Oracle Cloud Applications. The finance and HR users have instant access to key metrics such as profit and loss by cost center, attrition, and retention metrics by department and location. With the data engineering tools in Fusion Analytics, dunnhumby analysts no longer need to download data to their desktop to combine and integrate external or departmental data.

The company built a CFO dashboard that shows company performance by business unit, region, and cost center. For HCM, dunnhumby created a positions report to help with hiring plans, and intend to replace the existing operational reports within Fusion Analytics because users like the clean interface.

Because users want to see the data in their own way, dunnhumby needed the flexibility to tailor the reports. Fusion Analytics offers an extensibility framework to integrate external data and meet the specific reporting needs for procurement.