Hearst connects finance, HR, and procurement with Oracle
Media company uses Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications to speed close, improve planning, support HR, and manage supplier spend.
United States | Media and Entertainment
“As we continue to grow and diversify, having a single, standardized cloud platform gives us the flexibility and discipline to scale. It allows us to integrate new businesses faster, operate more efficiently, and make better decisions across the portfolio.”
About Hearst
Hearst is a media and information services company with 360 businesses across 150 countries and 20,000 employees. The company has expanded from newspapers and magazines into television, digital services, healthcare, financial information, and global ratings businesses.
Business problem: Disconnected systems slowed decisions
As Hearst grew, finance and HR teams worked across many legacy systems. Finance managed 19 general ledgers and dozens of tools tailored to individual business units. Quarterly closes stretched into weeks, forecasting varied across the portfolio, and analytics stayed siloed.
HR also had thousands of job codes, manual onboarding, and fragmented workforce data. Procurement and supplier payment processes needed more consistent controls across business units and a clearer view of cash management.
Solution and results: Oracle Cloud brings core operations together
Hearst launched Project UniFi to replace a 25-year-old legacy environment with Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite. The program brought together Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)—including Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) and Oracle Fusion Cloud Procurement—and Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM).
Hearst consolidated 19 general ledgers into one chart of accounts, standardized processes across eight business units, and replaced six planning tools with Oracle Cloud EPM. Financial close accelerated by 66%, shrinking from weeks to days.
Oracle Cloud HCM helped Hearst reduce HR job codes from 7,000 to 1,700 and accelerate new-hire productivity by more than 30 days through automated onboarding.
Hearst also uses intelligent payments and dynamic discounting to support supplier payments. Early-payment discounts across 40,000 vendors helped Hearst save hundreds of thousands of dollars and improve supplier relationships.