SAP’s SuccessFactors system has been utilised by Coles Group as part of its company-wide human resources (HR) and payroll transformation program.
In February 2019, Coles Group began its extensive relationship with SAP when it decided to run its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to transform the company’s digital operations across its core business processes.
In July of that same year, SAP was selected again to drive the retail supergiant’s “Smarter Selling” strategy. As part of the initiative led by implementation partner Accenture, Coles adopted SAP products such as SAP S/4HANA, SAP SuccessFactors, and SAP Ariba for procurement. As a key component of the strategy, SAP Ariba enabled procurement savings and streamlined processes for the company.
After successfully migrating to SAP S/4HANA at the end of 2019, Coles began implementing the other SAP systems. Fast forward to 2021, the company has now finalised the deployment of SAP SuccessFactors for its HR and payroll transformation program. The project has updated a 16-year-old patchwork of systems that was long overdue for modernisation.
In a session titled Elevate from Traditional HCM to Innovative Cloud HXM at the SAPPHIRE NOW 2021, Tammy Ryder, General Manager of People and Culture at Coles Group, expounded on the initiative which took 18 months of undertaking. She shared:
“We had a lot of separate systems that were interconnected and sort of plugged together rather than a seamless or deep integration [of systems]. What that meant is people were moving from different systems and different pieces of software to do different things and that led to confusion.”
Explaining why the company chose SAP SuccessFactors out of many options available in the market, she emphasised that SuccessFactors was deemed the “best solution” after a very competitive process.
“The ease of use and the team member experience, considering that our team members have such a breadth of diversity. Having something that everybody could relate to and use, and gave us that level of functionality is really important,” she explained.
Implementing SAP SuccessFactors System
Regarding the difficulties faced during the implementation, Coles experienced normal challenges expected of a huge project in such a “very complicated landscape,” according to Ryder. Given that the company’s team of 125,000 members is considered as 1{8bf2b29f36318f0ac46ab1cc03d7035abce669a1cea16c9ed62389a818fa22fd} of the working population in Australia, scale became a key challenge.
However, when the SAP SuccessFactors system launched, Ryder said that “the feedback has been fantastic.” The solution enabled the department to have all the processes such as onboarding, recruitment, payroll, and performance management in one system.
Sharing more about the reception of Coles’ team members to the system once it went live, Ryder added that over 100,000 people accessed the system in the first seven days of go-live.
“They love that it’s mobile-enabled and they can do things anywhere, anytime. They find it very intuitive,” she highlighted.
Coles Group also utilises SAP Enable Now. As a collaborative content management, and sharing platform for SAP and non-SAP systems, it provides training, learning, and online performance support for employees.
“There’s in-system prompts, we have Enable Now configured so you can use that to guide you through the system,” Ryder stated.
Ryder also shared that they were able to get rid of an estimated 240,000 forms a year of manual paperwork now that the full suite of SAP SuccessFactors solutions has been deployed.
Meanwhile, when asked about their payroll roadmap perspective, she explained that the company expects to see more automation, governance, and visibility to its people in the next coming years.
Expressing her excitement for the “potential that Coles has in front of them”, Angela Colantuono, Vice President and Head of SuccessFactors ANZ at SAP, concluded:
“And certainly a standout for us as one of our best deployments that we’ve seen in Australia for a little while. We look forward to continuing to work together to take it to another level.”
