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Human capital management (HCM) technology is one of the single largest investments an organization can make, yet many companies don’t see the expected value—a new report from The Josh Bersin Company highlights the untapped scope for HCM transformation and excellence using the SAP SuccessFactors Human Experience Management (HXM) Suite
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This latest report follows and builds on equivalent deep-dives into the most innovative HCM transformations enabled by Workday and Oracle platforms
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Latest HCM Excellence report features trailblazing case studies from leading users of SAP SuccessFactors, including Allianz and Microsoft
The Josh Bersin Company, a research and advisory company focused on HR and workforce strategies, has published a new high-impact report, Best Practices for HCM Excellence: The SAP SuccessFactors Edition, that showcases the best current global examples of excellence using the SAP SuccessFactors Human Experience Management (HXM) Suite. By building on earlier research, the tactical and strategic methodology shared in this new report also allows for broad applicability beyond SAP SuccessFactors technology users.
HCM technology, due to its cost and potential business impact, is one of the single largest investments an organization can make, yet many companies don’t fully realize its expected value. This is because they are not using the platforms to their full potential, and/or their HR-related technology systems are too fragmented or limited in scope, restricting overall employee/workplace visibility, say Josh Bersin Company experts.
Although many HCM best practices are determined at a strategic level, the role of technology can have a strong bearing on employers’ awareness of the opportunities for improvement, the particular issues holding them back, and the levers for success in their respective organization.
The third of three platform-specific reports on the challenge but also immense opportunity of HCM tech, Josh Bersin Company’s latest research analyzes leading examples of Human Capital Management transformation by the likes of Allianz and Microsoft using SAP SuccessFactors. Previous reports in the series have taken a similar approach to HCM excellence on the Workday and Oracle platforms, respectively.
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By first examining Workday implementations, Josh Bersin Company defined what HCM excellence looks like. This framework was then used throughout all the studies, and now forms a reference point against which business leaders can think about their implementations. Through the Oracle study, Josh Bersin Company dived deeper into how success is achieved, harnessing a range of leading case studies to explain how to achieve excellence.
Now, the deep dive into leading SAP SuccessFactors use cases reveals how:
- Allianz simplified processes across its 400 business units and various geographies to create an “irresistible” employee experience via a web portal and chatbot to guide employees to relevant materials for each country and role
- Microsoft’s implementation team engaged with more than 2,000 employees worldwide during the four-year implementation process, to understand and account for the variations and needs across its global businesses and 220,000 employees.
Critically, the report notes that the most successful companies do not treat their HCM implementation simply as a technology deployment. Rather, they apply their HCM platform more strategically to enable business transformation and an irresistible employee experience.
Other key findings include:
- Current HCM best practices include involving employees and managers in the design of the employee experience, allowing employers to fully leverage the HCM to make the company irresistible to work for
- The most successful adopters of SAP SuccessFactors and other HCM platforms are found to consciously plan ahead to leverage the full capabilities of the platform—bringing together recruiting, talent management, performance management, learning data, talent marketplace insights, and the full breadth of the employee records combined with the job architecture to build out talent intelligence and people analytics
- Business rules governance is another powerful determinant of success, but such decisions need to be made strategically in large organizations, as scalable processes often have to interact with HRMS business rules, business rules in the corporate learning management system, or even financial or facilities rules
- Most companies aim to transform the HR function using an HCM platform, but the HCM system alone won’t do it—rather, companies need to work across functional siloes of HR to build a systemic HR capability.
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Kathi Enderes, Senior VP of Research at The Josh Bersin Company and author of the study, said:
“Learning from major HCM implementations around the world, we’ve identified that companies have to be more agile to adjust business success measures, accounting for new realities in the future of work, such as hybrid working. Using a human experience management (HXM) platform like SAP SuccessFactors allows companies to go beyond HCM, incorporating more of the employee experience, along with sophisticated analytics. Using such platforms to govern global business rules in that system can really help as companies strive to keep pace with the evolving workplace. Ordinarily, you’d build an employee experience platform on top of a HCM system, but leaders like Allianz and Microsoft have built this into their HCM, bringing business rules down and allowing managers to approve requests in the same platform.”
Josh Bersin, global HR research analyst and CEO of The Josh Bersin Company, said:
“Historically doing more with HCM would have been a challenge: where would this information live, where do you get the analytics? There were also concerns it could compromise employers’ ability to make strategic decisions, because the data wasn’t all in the same place. But these are the issues that modern HCM, or HXM, platforms can help solve now, and pioneering employers we highlighted in our new report are really leading the way and showcasing what’s possible.
“These latest insights, especially when combined with the full picture of the earlier HCM Excellence series installments, are very timely, particularly as all kinds of companies grapple with talent challenges and look to do something different—something which sets them apart.”
The new report, Best Practices for HCM Excellence: The SAP SuccessFactors Edition, is available to Josh Bersin Company corporate members from December 1. The research will also become part of the comprehensive HCM Best Practices collection which provides detailed guidance for companies that are considering investing in (or have already invested in) HCM technology as a cloud solution.
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[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]