Car giant Renault will go live with a global, Cloud -based HR IT system next month in a bid to better equip HR with the tools needed to deliver business value.
Renault signed the deal for SuccessFactor’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) business execution solution in November 2011, setting an ambitious six-month target for the worldwide launch.
Adopting SuccessFactors will revolutionise its HR reporting capabilities. Until now, the company has found it hard to extract, share and make efficient use of HR information located in multiple of Excel spreadsheets and different IT systems.
Managers had also been too eager to delegate to HR, leaving HR mired in administrative tasks rather than focusing on initiatives that supported the business.
”We need to be more focused on what really matters. We spend far too much time on tasks with too few added-value benefits,” Susanne Consigny, vice president of HR operations at Renault, told delegates at Success Factor’s user conference in London. “So SuccessFactors is a key lever for our HR transformation. Our market is global and our company is global and our HR needs to be global.”
An implementation of a major new IT system could typically take two to three years in Renault’s French office, but the company did not want to dedicate a huge amount of resources to the project. Instead, the project team decided to keep system requirements as simple and standard as possible and prioritise ease of use to ensure a speedy and cost effective delivery.
“We decided to focus on results and not attempt perfection,” said Jean-Yves Gay, Talent@Renault project manager.
SAP recently acquired SuccessFactors, but there is still work needed to integrate the two product lines and the biggest IT challenge Renault found was establishing an interface between its SAP solution holding its HR master data and SuccessFActors. The bigger challenge, however, was change management rather than IT.
“The most challenging part was to struggle with reluctance where Renault had been located for a long time – especially France and Spain,” said Gay. “We wanted to avoid a specific tool for Renault. We would accept exceptions [to the standard software] only for legal reasons. We chose a tool to configure, not to develop.”
To gain support, Renault involved individual country HR directors early in the process and they worked together to identify HR common work practices across the group. From July to September, Renault will run workshops for 400 HR people across the world. “This is an opportunity to learn not only to use new tools, but help to change our current HR people into business enablers,” said Consigny.
These HR partners will in turn run workshops for 7,000 managers in September and October to help managers really understand the new product and ensure SuccessFactors delivers the business changes Renault requires. “Change management is at the heart of our rollout,” said Consigny.
