Six Real Stories from Future-Ready HR Leaders

This leading healthcare payer has more than 300,000 employees across 33 countries. As one of the largest healthcare companies in the United States, its mission is to help people live healthier lives and to help make the health system work better for everyone. This can be especially hard with the tremendous pressure healthcare payers are under to maintain margins, support an aging population, and meet member expectations. That’s why motivated, well-rewarded employees are central to the company’s success. The company has been a long-time user of Oracle’s PeopleSoft HCM, including a custom-built compensation module. Due to growth and the desire to modernize compensation and business processes, it decided to implement compensation as part of Oracle Workforce Rewards Cloud, utilizing a coexistence strategy with PeopleSoft HR. By standardizing compensation, the organization is more agile than in the past. Managers are also more empowered to make informed decisions using real-time analytics, and the decision-making process has been pushed down further into the organization to the managers who know the employees best. This helps reward and retain employees accurately, impactfully, and at scale, improving the bottom line.

Additionally, human capital partners can focus more on value-added HR activities and less on administrative tasks surrounding the compensation process. HR transformation is much broader than just a system implementation, and the project team relied heavily on a group of change agents to help get key messages to the user populations. The project implementation aligned with a broader HR redesign within the business and the project served as a catalyst in many cases to force the desired changes.

The size, scale, and complexity of the healthcare company’s compensation solution in Oracle HCM Cloud is unique. Additionally, the company is running a daily coexistence process between PeopleSoft and Oracle HCM Cloud with 99.9% accuracy, and can keep up with the large volumes of employee changes that occur in the legacy PeopleSoft system, helping improve the bottom line. This enabled an Oracle Compensation Cloud rollout to nearly 200,000 employees, and is allowing this healthcare company to look at Oracle Global Human Resources Cloud with a connection to Oracle Financials Cloud in the future.

Your Key Takeaways: Flexibility and the Change-Makers

Cobham Advanced Electronic Solutions (CAES) is a leading global technology and services innovator, respected for providing solutions to the most challenging problems, from deep space to the depths of the ocean. CAES provides microwave electronics, radomes, antennas, radios, and satellite and mobile-communication capabilities to military and commercial customers in more than 100 countries. With such a high-stakes business that helps keep Americans safe and the military connected to home, it is essential for CAES to engage and retain its skilled workforce by building a unified culture, and providing HR and finance with real-time actionable insight into all employees. But this was a significant challenge for the company, which over the years had acquired businesses that were operating somewhat independently in different locations. With disparate HR systems and no HR help desk, there was a heavy administrative burden on local HR, and this limited overall visibility into organizational talent. Cobham also sought to improve its financial data management, planning, and security-compliance capabilities to better serve defense and security customers.

When Roger Casalengo came on board to lead HR, he took the initiative to bring everything together as “#oneCAES”—from the culture to the business processes—working with the rest of the executive team to make the decision to become a more nimble, agile organization. As a result, CAES partnered with Baker Tilly to implement Oracle HCM Cloud and Oracle ERP Cloud and develop a centralized back-office platform in the cloud. This provides better data integrity and vastly improves reporting capabilities that allow for real-time comprehensive reporting and analytics, enabling leadership to make strategic business decisions quickly and get all employees moving in the same direction, no matter where they are located. CAES was also able to develop an integrated talent-management system through the rollout of talent profile, career development, goal management, performance management, talent review, and succession planning. The flexibility within Oracle Cloud enabled the HR team to tailor its strategy for both corporate and manufacturing employee populations. It also allowed for standardized, best-practice business processes that will make the company more efficient and informed from hire to retire, reduce administration costs, and support compliance.

In the end, the positive working relationship and successful partnership between CAES and Baker Tilly played a key role in driving the implementation, change management, and learning necessary to succeed. CAES is now dedicated to pushing the needle forward to bring significant and lasting change to the organization through enhanced processes and technology.

Your Key Takeaways: Culture and Personalization Matter

Headquartered in the Mauritius International Financial Centre with representative offices in South Africa, AfrAsia Bank specializes in private banking that builds bridges between Africa, Asia, and the world. Maureen Treanor and her team were eager to elevate HR at their organization with continuous innovation, standardized processes, and robust security in Oracle Cloud. Oracle HCM Cloud modules were implemented across two organizations in just nine months—helping keep HR processes all in the same family.

Oracle HCM Cloud transformed the way bank employees engage with HR and their own data, and enables leadership to improve talent management by intervening at the right moment rather than waiting until the end of the year. Bringing HR to a single cloud also unifies, streamlines, and automates the perennial HR issues the bank was having with self-service access for today’s mobile-savvy workforce, manual performance management, and accurate management of employee information. Candidate research, relationship management, performance appraisal, and career development are now easily tracked. AfrAsia now has access to talent analytics, crucial to ensuring that the bank has a ready pool of talent whenever and wherever the need arises.

Adoption of the new recruitment portal was 100% from day one, bringing to life the business benefits of the implementation. Results include complete adoption of absence management, performance management that aligns with individual goals, and fully automated payroll processing. Competency alignment and tracking start with the introduction of a new job-profile template and encompasses the competencies that the organization wants to promote in line with its vision. The recruitment platform provides visibility to stakeholders into the streamlined process, and updated information can be accessed through the platform at any point of the process.

To ensure success, an organizationwide HCM Champions team was created, with a member from each department participating in process and prototyping workshops and assisting in issue resolution on the system once live. A monthly steering committee included heads of relevant departments to ensure swift decision-making and issue resolution. There were more than 50 people from the organization who participated in the successful implementation and there was efficient communication and coordination between all stakeholders, with high levels of commitment. AfrAsia Bank believes that employee experience leads to customer experience. Thanks to Maureen and her team, employees now have the technology to support their skillsets through the learning module and can more easily align with the goals and objectives of the organization. Bringing together two organizations with a single HCM cloud allowed them to deliver operational excellence for the business.

Your Key Takeaways: Digital Innovation and Standardization

Grupo Bimbo is a global leader in the baking industry and an important player in snacks, responsible for the production and distribution of well-known grocery store brands like Entenmann’s, Oroweat, and Thomas’. The multibillion-dollar company makes fresh and frozen sliced bread, buns, cookies, snack cakes, English muffins, bagels, prepackaged foods, tortillas, salted snacks, and confectionery products, among others. Grupo Bimbo is on a fast track to deliver Oracle HCM Cloud functionality to 139,000 associates in 32 countries by 2020—and to leverage Oracle Cloud across finance, planning, and supply chain. The award is specifically for the company's implementation of Oracle HCM Cloud in Morocco, where the business was completely manual. The HR organization was using paper to deliver KPIs and other metrics, and was required to collect and manually store data. Oracle HCM Cloud would enable the business to drive results and maintain all the country-specific localizations. The project kicked off at the end of February and went live five months later.

Grupo Bimbo implemented solutions for core HCM, absence management, and three integrations to payroll, benefits, active directory, and a core performance tool. The implementation immediately transformed a completely manual process of managing six locations around Morocco into an automated Oracle HCM Cloud solution. The business was able to achieve measurable financial results and enabled its associates to focus on what they needed to do rather than time-consuming manual tasks.

Eric Cohen’s role was to lead the HCM project from the initial stages to completion and lead the charge to success. This project was managed virtually, and the implementation was performed using remote tools and processes. There were three key users from the local team and three project users—leading most of the work via conference calls and web sessions. The ease of transition and build was made possible by the tools Oracle provided. The Oracle HCM Cloud implementation earned recognition from the corporate offices and proves how quickly HR can be up and running in the cloud.

On the finance and operations side, Grupo Bimbo’s business growth across 22 countries made it increasingly difficult to respond to changes as well as simplify and standardize best practices and lean processes across its enterprise. By moving to a complete cloud solution across finance, planning, and supply chain, the business achieved a 40% reduction in annual IT support and maintenance costs. With a complete cloud for its back office, Grupo Bimbo increased productivity and gained a scalable way to move the business into a modern and agile digital enterprise.

Your Key Takeaways: Complete Cloud and Remote Tools

With more than 923,000 hotel rooms worldwide, this hotel chain is one of the largest and most recognized hospitality companies in the world. The well-known business has 17 hospitality brands in 113 countries and is passionate about delivering exceptional guest experiences. That said, the company was struggling with a segregated HR system that was not easy to manage or to use to gather insights. This is why it selected Oracle HCM Cloud to build an integrated, state-of-the-art team-member experience. Its workforce is distributed across its individual properties. With most of the hotel staff working away from a desk, mobile devices are the main way they connect with each other and the organization. Leveraging Oracle HCM Cloud helped provide HR services to employees (from requesting absences to submitting address changes and reviewing pay stubs), in an easy-to-access solution across any device. In addition, the teams benefit from guided learning: a built-in feature that offers step-by-step training and in-system notifications that mean they can learn naturally, on demand, as they navigate through the system.

Your Key Takeaways: Mobility and Deskless Workers

Mondadori Group is one of Europe's top publishing companies, and the leading web-publishing presence in Italy. It has a history of over 100 years in the search for innovation and excellence in the book sector. It started its HR transformation program using Oracle HCM Cloud implemented by Accenture. The organization took a phased approach, starting with Core HR. The other Oracle HCM modules planned include: Learning, Recruiting, Onboarding, Talent, Performance, and Compensation. The HR function of Mondadori Group defined a dedicated change and communication strategy to manage the significant impact brought by all the systems and process changes in progress. Part of this strategy is based on an online training program (based mainly on video tutorials) to make all employees, managers, and back-office users aware of the new processes and systems. Mondadori Group needed to roll out the learning program on the new processes and systems before the Oracle Core HR go-live, but the company did not have an LMS in place. Thinking ahead, Mondadori Group asked Accenture to plan an early implementation for part of Oracle Learning Cloud to use it as an LMS. In just one month, Accenture had the Oracle Learning module with the online training developed by Mondadori Group live for its 2,200 employees.

Using the knowledge gained from its Oracle Learning solution, Mondadori Group managed to quickly deliver critical learning content on new processes and systems, including a new contract agreement for its employees. Thanks to the reporting capabilities, the HR function of Mondadori Group managed to monitor the progress on the training execution and follow up with employees who did not complete it to make sure every employee was aware of the significant changes from the HR and IT transformation program.

Your Key Takeaways: Start Early and Monitor Progress

Whether you are trying to bring disparate businesses and systems together, like CAES, or hoping to give better insight and control to managers within your organization, like the leading healthcare payer, it is essential to approach any new technology decision with a cohesive plan for communication, learning, and adoption. To enable continued learning in this age of digital transformation, our customers find it helpful to be able to share tips and ideas, and learn together as part of an online community going through similar changes. Now that companies like the internationally recognized hotel chain and Grupo Bimbo are in the cloud, they benefit from product updates that continue to improve their agility and mobility. AfrAsia Bank also had these regular updates in mind when it decided on the cloud—bringing the latest ways of working together into its business processes to benefit its largely millennial workforce. Continuous innovation is tremendously important as HR leaders look to have a bigger influence on the C-suite in today’s competitive, dynamic labor market. Without emerging technologies’ agile cloud processes in your toolkit, it will only become harder to keep pace with competitors.

HR and finance cloud solutions are the key to becoming a future-ready organization that contributes to employee engagement, growth, and profitability. Most importantly, bringing the enterprise together in the cloud can free up valuable resources so that you can focus on your brand and provide your customers with a great experience.

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