Transfield Services HRIS program director, Michelle de Wet, who spoke at the SAUG Summit 2012, shared the key steps in Transfield Services’ decision-making process on choosing its SAP Human Capital Management (HCM) direction.
Following SAP AG’s acquisition of SuccessFactors earlier this year, the company made some key announcements about the future strategic director for the SuccessFactors cloud-based HCM solutions, versus the SAP HCM Talent Management suite, hosted on-premise. SAP confirmed that while there will be ongoing support for the on-premise Talent Management solution, future innovation and investment will be directed towards SuccessFactors HCM modules in the cloud.
This, therefore, has implications for many organisations, which are now being forced to re-evaluate their HCM roadmaps.
Transfield Services is one of those companies. When SAP made the announcement, Transfield had already commenced its global Quantum program, which aimed to install the SAP ERP platform across Transfield Services’ operations, to drive common policies and processes. So they had to consider how to proceed – whether to continue with an on-premise implementation, or consider a hybrid model incorporating SuccessFactors.
Despite already being some way down the path with the SAP ERP model, Transfield decided it was the right time to take the leap into the cloud. The fact that the company had very little in the way of automation in the Talent Management space made that decision easier.
“For such a large organisation, a lot of our people processes are manual, driven by spreadsheets. So from a landscape point of view, it didn’t really hurt us whether we went down an SAP ERP path, or decided to go with cloud,” de Wet said.
Having already completed the blueprint phase of the Quantum project, Transfield Services was able to give SuccessFactors the complete map of its processes and business requirements, and ask the crucial questions on whether whether cloud could deliver on these.
“We were under pressure, because we had the Quantum project up and running, and still had to make sure we delivered on regional deadlines. We completed the whole change request process from end-to-end in eight weeks, which was a large achievement in itself,” de Wet said.
On 10 August, Transfield Services became the first customer in the Asia Pacific to sign up for the hybrid model, combining SAP and SuccessFactors.
Key decision factors
So what got Transfield over the line on the cloud/on-premise hybrid model?
From a business perspective, Transfield Services was looking to expand its HCM self-service offering, make it much more user-friendly, and centralise it globally.
“We really want to get better at managing our people as people are really at the heart of our business. We are a people business, we sell people with certain skills to deliver certain services, so we have an opportunity to get better at that,” de Wet said.
The attractive user-interface of SuccessFactors was a key factor in Transfield Services’ decision.
“For us as an organisation, because we had a large amount of manual processes and our workforce is mainly blue collar, we needed to make sure that the user interface is something that people will actually want to work with” de Wet said.
Transfield Services also considered the level of access and reach in the organisation.
“We have a very distributed workforce, some in remote locations across multiple geographies, so we considered the cloud providing benefits in this area” de Wet said.
Transfield Services also discovered that implementing SuccessFactors would actually reduce project implementation costs.
“The cloud is very different to SAP on-premise. There’s nothing to build as such, no customisation, only configuration, so it’s literally out of the box. You switch on a few things and design forms to suit your organisation, but really it should decrease implementation costs,” de Wet said.
Transfield also had to consider the long-term commercial impact, including operating costs, which were found to remain unchanged.
The hybrid model
Transfield Services has chosen to implement the whole SuccessFactors cloud offering, with the exception of Employee Central, as this functionality will be kept in the SAP on-premise system, and feed data into the cloud.
The future, de Wet said, is for the SAP on-premise system to include core HR, Organisational Management (OM), Personnel Administration (PA), Payroll and Time Management, while Talent Management will be held in the cloud, with an ESS/MSS Portal integrated with the cloud.
Lessons learned
While Transfield Services is still at the beginning of its implementation journey with SuccessFactors, de Wet said they have already learned some lessons along the way that others may benefit from when undertaking a similar process.
Though most are familiar with the concept that cloud has a subscription model, it may not be clear that subscription fees kick in as soon as the project begins implementation, rather than when the system is live.
“Also, it’s not really the number of users of the solution, it’s the number of employee records in the cloud that will determine the price. It’s very important to be aware of that point.”
De Wet also stressed that when considering cloud, companies should revisit their original business case and adapt it to the new functionality cloud provides.
“You may be able to deliver more benefits because the cloud operates differently. It takes a mindset change, and it’s going to impact what you do and how you manage people.”
This article was originally published in Inside SAP magazine Summer edition
