The approval comes to the manager.
For a leading global customer data science and analytics company, helping major retailers and consumer brands better understand their customers and optimise business performance, we brought absence and expense approvals into Microsoft Teams. The request arrives in the manager’s chat, the decision is recorded in Oracle Fusion under their own name, and the employee hears the outcome in the same place.
- Sector
- Customer data science and analytics
- Platform
- Oracle Fusion HCM and Expenses
- Oracle Digital Assistant
- Microsoft Teams
- Assistant live since
- December 2024
- What we built
- Absence, expenses and approvals skills
- Proactive approvals in Teams
Managers lived in Teams. Approvals waited somewhere else.
Oracle Fusion HCM is the company’s HR system of record. An Oracle Digital Assistant answers thousands of employees on expenses, absence, approvals and general questions, with Microsoft Teams as its main channel.
One part of the day still pulled people out. Every absence request and expense report created an approval task in Fusion, and the task waited in the Fusion worklist and in email, while managers spent their day in Teams. Sending every manager into Fusion self-service was ruled out early.
Employees should never have to leave Teams or switch context.
Three skills, inside the assistant they already used.
The digital assistant runs nine skills. We built the three that carry time off and money: absence, expenses and approvals. Each one works with Oracle Fusion directly from the Teams chat.
Absence
Book time off in a short form inside the chat: the absence types Fusion allows that person, the reason and the dates. Confirm, and the absence is submitted to Fusion. Leave balances on request.
Expenses
Claim from a sentence or a photographed receipt. Airfare, mileage, meals and itemised hotel stays. Duplicates and policy breaches are flagged and fixed before the report goes to Fusion.
Approvals
The manager’s side. Pending approvals on request, the status of anything a person has submitted, and a live count of what is waiting. The approvals that arrive on their own are next.
One request, there and back.
Follow an expense report from the moment it is submitted to the moment its owner hears the answer. Two people, two systems, one chat each.
- 01Elena submits her expense report.Fusion’s own approval workflow creates the task, exactly as before. Who approves is still Fusion’s rule.
- 02The assistant finds the task.It waits for Fusion to assign the task, then finds the approver and the submitter.
- 03The approval arrives in Daniel’s chat.Daniel didn’t start this conversation. The card brings the itemised lines, the policy flag and the receipts, as Teams files he can open.
- 04Daniel approves, with a note.One tap, and an optional note of up to 500 characters for the record.
- 05Fusion records the decision as Daniel’s.He is authenticated against Fusion, so the task is completed under his own identity, his note kept as the comment.
- 06Elena hears the outcome in Teams.A green Approved card in her chat, with the details one tap away. Neither of them left Teams.
Step 1 of 6
Teams carries the decision. Fusion keeps the record.
The approval rules did not move: Fusion still creates every task and decides who approves.
Under the manager’s name
Each decision is recorded in Fusion as the manager’s own, with their note as the comment.
Never stranded
If a Teams step fails, Fusion’s normal workflow still routes the task, and the manager gets a link to it.
Receipts travel with it
Receipts open in Teams, next to the decision. Any that cannot be attached are listed in the card.
Which approval is waiting where your managers aren’t?
Absence and expenses came first here. Bring the approval your people leave their work to decide, and we’ll show you the round trip it could make.