Global leader in human connection uses Oracle Fusion Data Intelligence for finance and supply chain
Zoom Communications Inc. is a technology company headquartered in San Jose, California. Founded in 2011 by Eric Yuan, the company initially focused on providing video conferencing solutions, and within 1 month had 400,000 subscribers and two years later it had over 1 million.
As people and businesses turned to Zoom to stay connected during the COVID-19 pandemic, their daily tally of meeting participants mushroomed to 300 million on April 2020, up from 10 million in December 2019. Zoom’s mobile app was the 5th most downloaded mobile app in 2020.
Oracle became an important partner to Zoom during this critical period. In just nine hours, Oracle’s engineering team took Zoom from deployment to live production on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, with enough capacity to meet the surge of new users.
Over time, Zoom has expanded its offerings to include a comprehensive suite of communication tools, such as team chat, phone services, and content sharing, positioning itself as an AI-first work platform for human connection.
Moving from reporting to analytics
Zoom also relies on Oracle for applications, using Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications for ERP and SCM. And complementing the applications, the company uses Oracle Fusion Data Intelligence (FDI), which provides prebuilt, cloud-native analytic applications that blend Oracle Analytics Cloud’s AI-powered capabilities with best practice metrics and domain content.
Bharat Kumar is Senior Finance Systems Lead at Zoom, responsible for the Oracle Fusion ERP estate including FDI.
Initially reporting on Fusion data at Zoom was done using Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence (OTBI). But when FDI was released, Kumar recognised the value of being able to analyze curated Fusion data across multiple domains—ERP and Supply Chain—and external sources. Kumar noted, “There’s a lot of Fusion Applications’ data in FDI kept up to date, refreshed every morning. My key users are in procurement. They use 4-5 dashboards, significantly reducing manual work which they used to do at the end of every month in Excel using pivot tables, 20-30 hours of effort each quarter. Now each morning, they can get an accurate picture in close to real time.” The team is transitioning all the OTBI reporting over to FDI over time.
Optimizing purchasing and spend with analytics
In addition to the standard dashboards delivered out-of-the-box, Kumar and his team have custom-built additional ones in FDI, creating new data pipelines blending Fusion Applications data with data from other sources. The first captures the expenses for all legal entities across the globe, analyzing all purchase orders, identifying top suppliers, spend by category, and spend over time. It enables procurement executives to track in detail how much is spent and highlights trends quarter by quarter and year over year. The second tracks suppliers: how many have been on-boarded by which parts of the organization, and how much has been purchased.
The third, and one that has proven to be extremely popular with users, is the cost savings dashboard. As Zoom negotiates with each supplier, they track how much they have saved per PO, per vendor. They use this dashboard for internal supplier audits, and auditors can run queries on the professionally curated data, creating their own views within FDI.
Kumar added, “Every organization has different needs; one size doesn’t fit all. So we need to customize, but the Oracle-built content in FDI give us guidelines and templates we can use to build our customizations. It’s very efficient, from gathering the requirement to having a new dashboard in production takes around two weeks.”
One area where FDI has helped is in multi-period accounting – for example, software spend when the purchase is paid up-front annually, but the expense is recognized monthly as the service is consumed. It’s important to be accurate for external audit – GAAP reporting – and internally because incorrect expense management affects P & L. Auditing used to be done manually, but now with dashboards and using AI this can be automated.
A lot of expense data is in Workday, so Kumar’s plans to pull that data into FDI to enable better predictions about expense fraud. At present there is a lot of manual work matching PO’s to invoices which Kumar is hoping to automate with AI.
Turning spreadsheets into analytics dashboards
Some users, particularly in Finance, have created very sophisticated analysis on Fusion data in Excel. Such analysis, built over a long time, has tremendous business value. But having seen the benefit of using analytics and having the data professionally curated, they come to Kumar and his team to build a dashboard to replace the spreadsheets, automate the analysis they do week in, week out, making it more user friendly and easier to maintain. Often, the spreadsheets and the dashboards will be run side-by-side for a couple of months to assure the numbers correlate before the spreadsheets are deprecated.
In analytics, AI changes everything
Looking ahead, Kumar envisions evolving beyond traditional dashboards toward a more AI-driven analytics experience within FDI, where users can interact with data conversationally and receive instant, decision-ready insights. A key priority is enabling capabilities such as automated flux analysis, where users could simply select dimensions or accounts and have the system generate variance explanations, narratives, and recommendations without manual effort.
In the near term, his team is actively working to operationalize AI by restructuring their data models—moving custom calculations into the semantic layer so they can be queried effectively by AI assistants—enabling natural language queries to return accurate, business-specific metrics. Longer term, his goal is to make FDI the central, intelligent interface for users, where AI not only surfaces insights proactively but also reduces reliance on multiple systems, ultimately delivering a seamless, “one-click” experience that drives productivity and adoption across the business.
“AI gives us an opportunity to radically change the way we consume information,” Kumar explains. “Relying exclusively on dashboards and reporting for information is becoming obsolete. For an executive, having to take time to find the exact dashboard or report that gives the answer to a business problem is frustrating. AI can empower them to ask any question using natural language and automatically create the views on our curated data to provide an answer. In addition, AI can predict an event that might impact business by analyzing all available data – including external data like weather, for example – and guide executives to the next best action to take advantage of it. Action might involve multiple teams: sales to spot an opportunity, supply chain to ensure they purchase the inventory to fulfil the need, or manufacturing to make what’s demanded.”
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