Morrisons supports 100,000-person retail workforce using Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM

Morrisons, the UK’s fourth-largest supermarket chain, partners with farmers to provide farm-to-fork traceability for many of the products it sells, including beef, produce, and flowers. Like other supermarket chains in the UK, the company is facing significant economic pressures, including food price inflation and rising labor costs. To improve job satisfaction and productivity for its more than 100,000 employees, Morrisons wanted to remove friction from the workday, such as making common human resources tasks easier. As part of that effort, the company replaced its on-premises HR applications with Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM, which also helped it lower administrative costs and enhance talent management practices. The chain is now better positioned to attract and retain employees who are essential to sustaining its growth and profitability.

Morrisons migrated to Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM because it offered a clear path to helping solve its HR challenges. Morrisons had moved its Oracle E-Business Suite finance applications to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), gaining some benefits of the cloud while protecting its technology investments. But for human resources, its highly customized, on-premises Oracle PeopleSoft application was more than 10 years old and had become too outdated and expensive to maintain. Employees could access HR systems using only a company-owned computer at a store or office, and managers used paper-based processes for tasks such as performance, talent, and compensation management. Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM offered solutions to these challenges, and it had proven integration with Morrisons’ E-Business Suite financial management system.

The move to Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM gave company leaders the opportunity to rethink how HR services are fashioned and delivered for the workforce. Still early in its Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM effort, Morrisons has implemented core HR capabilities, Oracle Payroll, and Oracle HR Help Desk. Employees and managers immediately gained a personalized, self-service HR experience using any device, giving them the kind of intuitive technology they use outside of work. Employees no longer face the frustration of spending excess time on administrative tasks when they would rather be helping customers.

Beyond core HR management and payroll, Morrisons plans to add automation to previously manual processes across recruiting, performance management, and compensation using Oracle Talent Management. Moving to a full suite of cloud HR management applications makes it possible for Morrisons to eliminate multiple integrations and simplify its technology architecture.

The company is also looking at ways to apply OCI Generative AI Service to HR operations. IT staffers are exploring the use of AI to handle Oracle HR Help Desk case summarizations that cover an overview, progress made, responses, and planned next steps.

Morrisons’s leadership is also benefiting from being more engaged with peers in the Oracle ecosystem, including on emerging AI use cases. “The value of Oracle as a technology partner is the size and scale. Oracle has customers that do very similar things that Morrisons and other retailers do. We’re able to access that customer network, and it’s incredibly helpful for us to be able to come to Oracle events, talk to other Oracle customers, and share ideas for solving problems,” says Dan Ward, senior people manager for systems improvement at Morrisons.

Tata Consultancy Services supported Morrisons in moving Oracle E-Business Suite financial applications out of the grocer’s on-premises data center and onto Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).