Exertis: Implementing a hybrid HR platform to deliver the perfect employee experience

Driven to deliver the perfect employee experience

About Exertis

Industry: Technology distribution
Employees: 2,700
Headquarters: Dublin, Ireland

Exertis is one of Europe’s fastest growing technology distribution and service providers. To support its growth, the workforce quickly began to expand in both number and locations. HR leadership recognized that to maintain its reputation for customer service excellence, delivering an optimized employee experience was vital.

Prior to conversations with Alight, HR leaders from across the organization had concerns that existing manual HR processes would not be able to support the changing dynamics of its workforce. This was specifically a concern as the company had a known strategy for growth through mergers and acquisitions.

As a result, Exertis decided to move its HR processes to the cloud to promote highly efficient, flexible and user-friendly HR and payroll processes.

Exertis sought a solution that could:

Maximize employee engagement.
Accelerate HR-related business change.
Introduce standard processes for all employees.
Increase the process and financial efficiency of HR processes.
Reduce process duplication.

An optimized HR solution

The implementation of a hybrid HR platform combines the best of SAP’s SuccessFactors Core HR platform with Alight’s own proprietary payroll solution.

SuccessFactors is comprised of Employee Central, Performance, Goal Management and Learning. Subsequently, Alight used Dell’s Boomi tool to create a single interface, which introduced a seamless flow of HR and payroll data. As a result, data is now triaged, analyzed and fed back into the business to improve efficiency.

The process

Alight needed to conduct a complete redesign of existing business processes to ensure they aligned with the new digital HR systems. Consequently, the digital HR platform went live in May 2015 and took just six months to deliver from concept, design and build, to go-live.

Alight delivered its elements on time and within budget, and is now engaged in ongoing systems maintenance, training and consultancy. Therefore, Exertis continues to get the best operational return from its investment.

“Alight’s experience extends well beyond technology implementation. The team was able to support us through the huge cultural change we were introducing. Our workforce was going from no access to their HR profile to complete interactive visibility. This was a major learning curve for staff, made easy by Alight.”

Ryan Marr
HR Project Manager, Exertis

Positive culture shift for fast employee adoption

The end result was a complete cultural shift for Exertis’s business. Exertis has moved from a laborious, manual HR function to one that is slick, automated and functional.

The ability for employees to take control of their own HR administration securely, around the clock, and from any device has not only proved to be empowering, but has also greatly reduced the time and cost spent by HR teams administering these processes. HR specialists can now focus on strategic business initiatives, including talent management and employee development, instead of time-consuming manual tasks.

The results

These highly efficient digital HR and payroll processes require little or no user intervention at the administrative level. The focus is now very much on people, not processes, and employees know exactly what their payroll and awards entitlement is. The entire workforce is reported to feel empowered by this visibility. It has helped to foster more open communications between the business and employees, and employee engagement, despite the growth, is extremely high.

The benefits of implementation included:

Highly efficient digital HR and payroll processes.
Analytics from the integrated HR and payroll processes brings huge business. intelligence returns
Visibility of real-time workforce performance.
Fast resolution of HR tickets.
Elimination of duplicate processes.

“The project success was made possible by the partnership, knowledge & commitment Alight demonstrated throughout the planning, implementation and ongoing maintenance program.”

Ryan Marr
HR Project Manager, Exertis

A partner of choice

Alight proved to be a true partner throughout the entire process of implementation. Open communication — coupled with a seamless ability to migrate a disparate payroll and HR system to a standardized digital platform — showcased Alight’s strength during the entire process.

Additionally, Alight’s standing as a leading innovator of HR cloud technology instills confidence in Exertis that Alight is a long-term partner. Equally, Alight’s global footprint mirrors that of DCC, opening opportunities for the group to extend the expansion of its digital HR platform.

Conclusion

Throughout implementation, Alight clearly demonstrated its understanding of HR and payroll processes and the business cases delivered against these. It took the best technologies on the market and made them deliver against the specific needs of the business to make HR work better for Extertis.

As a result, employee engagement is high, managers have complete visibility of their teams, employees can take ownership of their own training and development, and the board has the data it needs to make smart changes to the business.

Technology summary

SuccessFactors
Employee Central
Talent Management
Learning Management System,
ResourceLink payroll

Process scope

Process re-design:
Core HR
Learning Management
Performance Management
Payroll

“Alight’s consultants took the time to understand our business now, and to help us to visualize the future. This gave us the insight to see what we could achieve for our business beyond the standard SuccessFactors platform.”