Erik Van Slyke

Client Issue

The SVP of HR of a Fortune 500 global manufacturing company announced at his executive committee meeting that he had just signed a deal to implement SAP HR globally.  Like HR in many manufacturing companies, they were under tremendous pressure to reduce costs.  They also were under equal pressure to deliver improved services to help the company drive higher levels of employee performance.

His vision was that that SAP would provide a platform to help drive drive down the cost of administrative HR, improve operational efficiency and provide a platform for better analytics.  It also would move them from over 200 different HR systems worldwide to a single system with standardized data, web tools, applicant tracking, performance management and succession planning.

The challenge, however, was that after almost seventy years of decentralized human resources, the team needed to identify global standards for data and process as well as migrate to SAP from their current tools.  They also recognized that these changes may have a dramatic impact on the service delivery structure, roles and reporting relationships.

Solution

Erik and his team facilitated a series of workshops across five global regions to introduce a process to address data, process, technology and structure issues.  We developed local action plans to gather the baseline data required for blueprinting the eventual solution.  And we assessed the change readiness of executives and employees as well as local HR and project teams.

Erik also led a second series of workshops that produced business requirements documentation for agreed solutions, providing the primary input to build functional requirements for the technology implementation.

Results

The workshops laid the groundwork for open communication across regions and established a cohesive HR team that began to agree for the first time on points of integration.  The workshops helped them understand the requirements for success and develop action plans to prepare for implementation.

Most importantly, they identified and addressed key change management issues that enabled them to secure executive support, additional funding and more detailed business requirements.