(Under Rachel Illingworth)
What do you do when your HR experts are fragmented across multiple global locations, with each location owning a separate and different system?
Having such disparate systems over large geographical distances makes it difficult for HR to have a clear and reliable view of the company’s workforce. This is the problem that The Baumann Group, a European spring manufacturer, experienced last year. Because of this divergent system, Baumann’s workers had little understanding of their global workforce, let alone a headcount of their employees.
Considering the options
According to Stephan Peterhans, Group CFO and Group Head of HR, Baumann has “11 production plants in the world. Every plant was doing HR processes completely decentralized, and there was no common ground.”
The company determined that they needed help with integrating a cloud-based, fully-supported platform to provide support to their HR team. “We analyzed the market … who can support us in this implementation process?” Peterhans continued, “And that was when Appirio came into the game. We needed international support, but also [someone who] really understanding the application.”
Addressing the issues
At Baumann, tracking hours was a complex problem (that had previously been calculated by hand). And managing relatively simple tasks (e.g., keeping track of employee headcount) became a burden on HR administrators. To address these issues, Appirio implemented a personalized version of Workday Core HCM, which included Compensation, Talent, Absence, Time Tracking, and Payroll Integrations. The company leveraged Workday Core HCM to significantly reduce administrative time and resources, simplify report data, and smooth out the onboarding process.
This new, simplified, and centralized platform gave employees the tools they needed for success. Before Workday, Pete Roseman, Global Head of HR Systems and Processes, remembered that “for the employees, it meant a lot of work. A single day off meant filing a piece of paper, make sure it’s signed by your supervisor, and make sure it goes to HR because they will enter it into the system.”
Now with their new, fully-integrated platform, employee information is held centrally, eliminating the need for paperwork and multiple spreadsheets and systems. “Workday brings real self-service into the company.” Michael Kain, Assistant Head of HR at Baumann, continued, “for the employees, it’s much more easy to work than before. They know where the manuals are, all in the same storage. And that’s really a nice thing for all the employees.”
Workday saves the day
Looking at the bigger picture, Baumann needed Workday to achieve true success. Regulating one version of HR data globally creates the opportunity to focus on more strategic issues.
Roseman concluded with this statement, “the system is more efficient. We can focus on real value-adding tasks in HR instead of administrative tasks. The surprises for me were really the positive ones, it is basically used by each and every employee, including all the production people, on a daily basis.”
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