Moving Mountains

I have the fortune in my role as a HCM Presales Consultant at SAP SuccessFactors to work with lots of vastly different organisations on a weekly basis. From nimble tech start-ups to established investment banks, from century old law firms to quirky media agencies, from a 100 person local company to a 7,000 employee global organisation, the variation between the customers we get to work with never stops and it’s great. But with each new project comes another mountain to move, and "if you want to move a mountain tomorrow you need to lift a stone today". 

In this short blog I want to share some of the most common business challenges we come across in the HCM space with our customers and some examples of how we are helping them to tackle these challenges, or lift those stones if you like;

Doing more with less. In-house Recruiters need to reduce their agency spend and streamline processes. An  accounting firm we are working with had an eight person vacancy approval process and had an outdated external careers site. Using SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting and Onboarding they were able to reduce their agency spend by €20k+ per month, standardise their processes and attract the markets top talent leveraging social networks and university job boards.  

More innovation.  C-suite executives have read about how high-profile organisations are getting rid of the traditional performance appraisal process and want to know what is being done about it at their organisation. We are helping an investment bank who are looking into the use of our Continuous Performance Management solution to enable more regular, informal dialogue between employees and managers, which is more in line with their company culture.

Greater productivity. Many organisations do not link employee goals to corporate strategy resulting in a less engaged workforce and below par productivity. A customer from the manufacturing industry will be using our Performance and Goals module to ensure that fair and objective goals are set by management and clearly cascaded to employees quickly and simply so that everyone understands their purpose in the organisation.

Digitalisation. The word on everyone’s lips at the moment. Digitalising everything. To avoid disruption, businesses need to digitally transform immediately. Leaders need to accept the need for change and support changes to ensure the transformation is a success. HR has a key role to play again. A customer in the Retail sector are looking into deploying our Onboarding module to bring the entire new joiner process online, giving their new hires access to all of the information needed to become a more productive employee before day one.

The rise of the contingents. Contractors, temps and consultants are becoming less of a tactical fill-in and more increasingly part of the makeup of organisations. Keeping track of these people and their expertise is a challenge, particularly around compliance. In industries such as construction, we have a customers using our Learning solution to ensure building site passes and qualifications of their staff are kept up-to-date and so their people remain compliant.

Mergers and acquisitions. Particularly for the small and medium size enterprise, mergers and acquisitions are commonplace. M&A's are typically based on a product or market fit, but employee differences are often ignored. It's a mistake to assume that employee issues are easy to overcome and CEOs that fail to recognise them, may end up regretting it. Cultural differences, employee retention and communication usually falls on the shoulders of HR. A healthcare provider we are engaged with, who with have recently acquired two other companies, are investigating our core HR solution, Employee Central, to give them one single system of record for all of their employee data and the holistic view of the new workforce they need.

Employee Experience. Those pesky Millennial’s and their expectations of how work gets done! Business hours no longer seem to apply. Business applications simply have to be as intuitive, attractive, functional and accessible as personal applications like WhatsApp or LinkedIn. A chain of restaurants has been looking into how they can use our mobile app to deliver training of new recipes and cooking techniques to its chefs at any time and place using an iPad.

HR specific Apps. HR are looking for new and innovative ways to tackle long-standing issues such as employee engagement and skills shortages. Many customers are interested in developing their own bespoke apps for topics such as alumni, gamified learning and employee wellness. We enable our customers to do this using SAP’s development platform - HCP (Hana Cloud Platform).

These are just a few of the challenges we come across regularly and are well versed in supporting our customers with.

If you have a HCM mountain to move and need help lifting those stones, please feel free to get in touch at sam.thatcher@sap.com