“We needed a solution with built-in machine learning that integrated with our ERP, eliminated complexity, and simplified application development. Running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure means we close our accounts receivable process four times faster.”
Business challenges
Founded in 2007, Dropbox develops smart content and collaboration products used by 600 million people across 180 countries. With demand for its distributed work solutions growing rapidly, Dropbox wanted a unified solution that could automate and cleanse the financial data coming from high volumes of monthly transactions. Next, it wanted to deliver that information quickly so that its finance teams could analyze and guide current and future resource allocation decisions.
To scale the business rapidly while minimizing cost and risk, Dropbox embraced automation—using “touchless transactions” across all finance operations wherever possible, setting a goal of eliminating 20,000 hours in manual labor by the end of 2020.
Why Dropbox Chose Oracle
An early adopter of Oracle Cloud ERP and Oracle Cloud EPM in 2017 and Oracle Cloud Risk Management in 2019, Dropbox recently expanded its footprint to include Oracle Analytics Cloud, Oracle Integration Cloud, Oracle Database Cloud, and Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse to turbocharge its financial processes, including consolidating invoices and automating data delivery to Oracle Cloud ERP.
An empowered finance team will help the company capitalize on the shift to distributed work.
Results
Using Oracle Cloud ERP, Dropbox has cut its financial period close in half and its accounts receivable period close from four days to one. Oracle Cloud Risk Management helps the company automate user access controls to ensure segregation of duties (SOD) compliance worldwide for all business units.
Finance turned to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to create a simple, secure invoice consolidation process to manage that large volume of monthly transactions. OCI gives Dropbox direct integration paths with its ERP system and lets users access application development tools as a bundle with Oracle Integration, allowing finance to take direct action on the information passing through its systems. Using the prebuilt adapters and low-code automation from Oracle Integration and OCI, Dropbox was able to cut the cost of financial records processing and reduce the volume of transactions, while accelerating time to market by 4X.
Other finance automation initiatives underway include a pilot of Oracle’s new Intelligent Document Recognition tool to automate the scanning of invoices. Under a big data pilot program, Dropbox is using Oracle Analytics Cloud, powered by Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, to provide its finance team with access to dashboards, data visualization tools, and self-service analytics to monitor and improve business performance. Together with Oracle Cloud EPM, finance can also leverage those augmented analytics to manage cash flow, model the impact of new product offerings, and reallocate resources to higher-value initiatives.