Heathrow Airport is one of the world’s most renowned and largest travel hubs. With more than 83 million passengers travelling through its gates last year and an extensive web of routes to 230 destinations in over 85 nations and regions. With over 90,000 working at Heathrow, it’s the biggest single-site workplace in the UK. Heathrow is the UK’s largest port by value. In 2024, it handled £200 billion in trade across nearly 50 global destinations, more than all other UK airports combined and exceeding major seaports and the Channel Tunnel.
Behind the bustle of international travelers lay challenges common to many large enterprises: outdated reporting, slow access to business insight, and siloed sources of data that impeded clear decision-making.
Driving a culture of data-driven, evidence based, decision making
Alan Petrie, Heathrow’s Head of Master Data Management and Insights explained, “Our business leaders had no real insights, just manual reporting and spreadsheets. And no feedback loop, so we were unable to understand what we were doing badly, or well, and then make changes to improve efficiencies, increase revenue and create a better passenger experience”. Petrie’s mission was clear—to lead a culture shift toward data-driven, evidence-based decision-making.
In 2022, as passenger numbers were growing significantly, Heathrow embarked on Project Magenta, partnering with Oracle to deploy Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications to improve the efficiency of finance, supply chain, and HR processes. Following Magenta’s success, Petrie chose to implement Oracle Fusion Data Intelligence (FDI) for ERP and HCM. Built for Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications, FDI brings together business data, ready-to-use analytics, and prebuilt AI and machine learning (ML) models to deliver deeper insights and accelerate the decision-making process into actionable results. Petrie explained his decision was an easy one “Heathrow is already using Fusion ERP and HCM. It made perfect sense to move to FDI because it already contains that same ERP and HCM data and makes it available very quickly and in a very usable format that users really got on board with”.
Analyzing people data
The transformation began within Heathrow’s HR organization. Here, FDI gave visibility into Diversity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, letting leaders examine whether certain groups were underrepresented in the hiring pipeline or if unseen barriers appeared later in the process. The sharpness of detail allowed patterns to emerge—providing both the evidence and the impetus to adjust recruitment policies and practices. Beyond DEI, the HR function tapped into a decade’s worth of historical data for their workforce, using predictive analytics to identify staff likely to leave. Patterns in salary history, leave of absence, and department transfers emerged as key indicators, allowing managers to anticipate and reduce attrition.
FDI made it easy to blend finance and HR data to provide further insight. Heathrow’s teams could break down staff costs and trends in nuanced ways. They compared the costs of permanent employees with contractors, tracked overtime spending, and identified opportunities for optimizing workforce composition in every department. “It’s all about striking the right balance between flexibility, efficiency, and quality of work,” Alan explained. FDI let Heathrow’s leaders see where budget allocations matched actuals, and more importantly, where costs could be brought under control.
Increased efficiency for procurement managers
Before FDI, areas of procurement had the burden of performing inefficient manual and laborious invoice checks—matching invoices to transactions in ERP, correct VAT numbers, and other issues that cascaded upstream. Heathrow used AI—Oracle OCI Document Understanding—to automatically code invoices so FDI reports could instantly flag errors and discrepancies. Analytics revealed outliers and trends, giving procurement managers the means to combat fraud, accelerate workflows, and evaluate supplier performance at a granular level. “The impact was immediate,” Alan noted, “driving efficiency and reducing risk.”
Winning hearts and minds
Yet even the most sophisticated analytics platform is useless without engagement and adoption. Petrie quickly saw that winning “hearts and minds” was as important as deploying innovative technology. The team launched roadshows, hands-on clinics, and demo sessions, tailored to demystify analytics and highlight real business value, meeting with team leaders to understand their unique challenges. Data-curious employees were encouraged to step forward as embedded FDI champions. Once trained by Petrie’s team, they created a grassroots support network across every department. These champions became the frontline advocates and advisors, translating curiosity into widespread adoption.
This dual approach—combining executive dashboards designed by a central analytics group with robust self-service tools for every business unit—ensured that both control and creativity flourished. “If you centralize everything, you become too slow. But with self-service, you need to provide support or people lose interest,” observed Alan. Regular ‘surgery sessions’ let users share tips, request training, and ask ad hoc questions, sparking a culture where analytics were woven into everyday decision-making.
The narrative soon shifted: “Now, people come to us with dashboard ideas, knowing what’s possible,” said Alan. FDI dashboards are starting to replace PowerPoint as the go-to source of data in meetings; business leaders could interrogate data live, drilling into the ‘why’ behind the numbers on the spot. “In meetings, the question is not just what happened, but why it happened—and FDI lets us explore that in real time.”
Keeping sensitive data secure
Security concerns were never far from mind in such a data-rich environment. Heathrow, Alan admitted, is “rightly cautious about data breaches.” The native synchronization between FDI and Fusion’s security model kept sensitive data safe, ensuring privacy and compliance without slowing down access for authorized users. “It’s a key advantage—could you imagine trying to lock down all that data in a generic tool?” Alan emphasized.
Blending passenger data
The journey didn’t stop at finance and HR data. Recognizing opportunities beyond his domain, Alan and his team accessed commercial operations data—like passenger numbers—from the Heathrow Insights platform on Microsoft Azure using a remote gateway. By creating new dashboards using both data sets, analysts could now, for example, correlate revenue data from FDI with passenger flow to uncover new insights into income per passenger.
The journey to insights
Adopting Oracle Cloud and FDI fundamentally increased Heathrow’s agility and innovation. Teams can spin up new environments for experimentation without the delays associated with on-premises infrastructure. This capability meant that Heathrow could respond to changing operational dynamics with newfound nimbleness, supporting a culture of constant improvement.
Looking ahead, Alan sees the promise of AI and machine learning for Heathrow’s future. Early pilots with Oracle’s AI assistant for FDI hint at a world where users can converse with data as naturally as having a chat, lowering barriers for non-technical staff and increasing data literacy throughout the organization. Machine learning, meanwhile, was set to deliver powerful predictive analytics in both financial and operational spheres.
Heathrow’s journey illustrates a profound shift—from reactive, manual processes to a culture where data is everyone’s business: accessible, secure, and actionable. That journey, Alan reflected, was propelled as much by persistent advocacy and visionary leadership as by the technology itself. The future, for Heathrow, is one where innovation is fueled by insights—delivering improved experiences for employees, passengers, and the wider business alike. The transformation is ongoing, but its momentum—and value—are now undeniable.
Learn more about Heathrow and FDI, and you can always ask questions in the Oracle Analytics Community.