As e& grows as a multinational provider of comprehensive digital services, Oracle Fusion AI Data Platform enables the company to optimize people’s performance and take care of employees
e& is a global technology group serving 38 countries across the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Central and Eastern Europe. In 2021, they embarked on an ambitious digital transformation journey: once rooted in the traditional telco business, e& has evolved to offering everything from cloud computing and cybersecurity to managed services and enterprise networking, serving 250 million customers. e& helps organizations thrive in a rapidly changing digital landscape.
The challenge of getting insight from multiple HR systems
Such rapid expansion brought complexity. In a short space of time, the company grew organically and through acquisitions, resulting in siloed systems across 36 legal entities. In HR alone, employee data was fragmented: full-time employees in the UAE were managed in a legacy Oracle E-Business Suite, contractors in a third-party application, and outsourced employees in SAP. This proliferation of systems made it difficult to extract even basic workforce insights. “Handling three different HR platforms within an organization is a very tedious job,” reflected Vinod Gowda, Director of HR Technology at e&. “If management wanted data, it would take days for people to collate this into one single presentation—data was rarely up to date.”
One platform group wide
Recognizing these challenges, in 2024, e& set out to consolidate all HR data onto a single group-wide platform, choosing Oracle Cloud Fusion Applications and Oracle Fusion HCM Analytics, a part of Oracle Fusion AI Data Platform (FAIDP, formerly Fusion Data Intelligence) provides prebuilt, cloud-native analytics to help HR professionals and people managers make informed decisions about their workforce. The transformation was guided by Vinod Gowda, who reports to e&’s Group Chief People Officer, and delivered with the support of Accenture and Oracle experts.
Consolidation delivered transformative results. For the first time, e&’s executive management—twenty senior executives and six HR vice presidents—could access real-time, comprehensive data about every employee across operating companies, countries, and contracts. With FAIDP’s prebuilt dashboards and customizable analytics, leaders could instantly unpack workforce information by country, department, management hierarchy, or contract type.
Before implementing FAIDP, getting the simplest information about employees was complex, time consuming, and error prone. It involved manual data extraction from multiple systems, importing it into spreadsheets for analysis, then creating presentations that management used to consume the information. “Now it’s all at their fingertips, even on mobiles,” Gowda shared. “In meetings, leaders can look up the numbers in real time using their phones, resolving data debates on the spot.”
Delivering a personalized view
While the prebuilt KPIs and dashboards offered by FAIDP delivered immediate value, executive management soon requested further customization. They needed reports tailored to their unique Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) targets and the specific business imperative around workforce Emiratization—a key concern in the UAE, where companies must manage the proportion of international versus local talent. With almost 90% of the UAE workforce being foreign, accurate nationality data enables e& to manage risks in workforce continuity from geopolitical changes that affect talent flows. Gowda and his team, with the help of experts from Accenture and Oracle, were able to use the curated, accurate, complete HR data in FAIDP to rapidly build the custom dashboard using Oracle Analytics Cloud, the Analytics platform foundation of FAIDP.
Becoming self-sufficient with help from Accenture and Oracle
The transformation wasn’t limited to top management. HR professionals and operations teams, previously reliant on IT for all reporting needs, received training to become more self-sufficient so they could create their own reports, visualize trends, and interrogate data on demand. Accenture played a vital role. Gowda commented on the partnership, “Accenture has been very helpful. They’re not only developing custom dashboards but in parallel they’re training our team to understand the capabilities of FAIDP. And if there’s anything they don’t know, they have a great partnership with the product experts in Oracle. They have gone above and beyond to help our team upskill. When we started, we didn’t have any FAIDP skills, but now we are fully trained and more self-sufficient in creating new reports and dashboards.”
Data sovereignty and security
Security and compliance were fundamental to e&’s technology choice. Strict UAE data sovereignty regulations prohibit employee data from leaving the country or being processed on public clouds. The implementation of Oracle Cloud Fusion Applications and FAIDP on Oracle Dedicated Region (a complete cloud infrastructure located within the customer’s own data center) ensured compliance, security, and local control. While development and testing could start in the Oracle public cloud, the final production environment was seamlessly migrated to the dedicated region, delivering the cloud experience on-premises while fully adhering to regulations.
An example of careful collaboration among the three companies was security and access. FAIDP inherits Oracle Fusion Cloud’s user roles but defining who could access which datasets required additional customization, for instance, enabling specific HR leaders at group level to view organization-wide data to enable strategic oversight, while restricting other executives and managers solely to their hierarchies. e&, Accenture, and Oracle experts worked together to understand these nuances and create solutions.
Helping employees to pursue their career goals
Looking ahead, Gowda wants to extend the insight provided by FAIDP beyond HR and executive leadership to individual employees themselves. The next steps include rolling out dashboards that would, for example, show staff their own learning trends, performance history, and gamified engagement metrics (like leaderboards for top learners).
Blending FAIDP data with legacy data
Group HR leaders at e& are eager to have a unified view of all their data, so Gowda and his team are working to pull legacy data into FAIDP. A particular focus is payroll data, currently mostly held on premises in Oracle e-Business Suite. Gowda explains, “It’s not without its challenges, particularly from a data security point of view, but we’re working on the architecture and Oracle’s Cloud Infrastructure remote gateway technology is helping us do that securely.”
The road ahead
The road ahead also holds the promise of new opportunities thanks to artificial intelligence. e& is actively preparing its infrastructure (including adding more processing power to the Oracle Dedicated Region) to unlock Oracle’s generative AI capabilities, like natural language querying in dashboards. This expansion will help business and HR leaders ask complex questions of their data and make it easier for them to surface trends and risks proactively. e&’s digital HR transformation is a leap towards a culture of data-driven decision-making, operational agility, and strategic workforce management, increasingly powered by automation, analytics, and artificial intelligence. Their journey is ongoing, but the current changes are already reshaping how e& operates.
Learn More
For more information, visit e&’s website and ask questions in the Oracle Analytics Community.