Until recently, ConAgra Foods, Inc. had relied on a multitude of human resources (HR) systems to manage its talent pool of salaried and hourly employees with a variety of best-of-breed and homegrown systems for compensation, development, recruiting, succession planning, and talent review processes. While these systems worked just fine, there was very little integration between the different applications, so the company wanted to deploy an integrated talent management system that would enable its existing talent strategy and better serve the business.

“Having multiple systems with multiple support teams created a lot of fragmentation,” says KC Bradley, ConAgra’s Director of Talent Management. “We wanted to deliver a clear vision of where our talent management strategy was going.”

The result of this fragmentation was a host of data points and one-off documents that could not be combined easily to create insights. With little communication between systems, and sometimes no system at all, the data points and documents were siloed.

“There was a lot of data floating around that was not contained within any central system,” Bradley says. “As managers change and employees move around, HR loses access to that data, and it makes consolidating individual data points into business-relevant talent analytics exceptionally difficult.”

Stirring in New Ingredients

In 2013, ConAgra kicked off a project named “My Recipe” with the goal of streamlining its HR systems to more effectively develop and align a talent management system to better support overall business objectives. This work involved phasing out several best-in-breed systems, decommissioning its legacy homegrown systems, and integrating with its on-premise core HR system, all in favor of integrated modules delivered from a best-in-breed cloud vendor. Even though ConAgra is a long-standing customer of both SAP and SAP SuccessFactors solutions, the company did not automatically default to SuccessFactors as its cloud HR platform. Rather, after narrowing the search to three main vendors, ConAgra selected SuccessFactors for standing out in several areas, among them were an easy-to-use and customizable user interface (UI) to drive employee self-service (ESS) and manager self-service (MSS), and its seamless integration with other SAP SuccessFactors solutions and third-party modules.

“One main objective of My Recipe is to create an environment with relevant, easy-to-use tools and processes that encourage our managers and employees to have meaningful conversations about performance and career growth,” says Bradley. “SuccessFactors stood out by putting the pieces of the puzzle together, allowing managers and employees to have everything they need to confidently have those crucial conversations. My Recipe also delivers on a secondary objective critical to our business leaders, in that it provides a clear view of what our talent looks like today and how it is developing to meet the business needs of tomorrow.”

Setting the Timer

ConAgra divided the My Recipe project into three phases executed across 15 months. With phase one, which was completed in mid-2013, it upgraded the overall UI and implemented SAP SuccessFactors Learning and SAP SuccessFactors Succession & Development. In phase two, the business implemented SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting Marketing, SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting Management, SAP SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics, and SAP SuccessFactors Workforce Planning, which it rolled out in late 2013. In phase three, an SAP SuccessFactors Compensation implementation and an update to SAP SuccessFactors Performance & Goals, including the functionality for calibration, completed the project in mid-2014.

Bradley says that the implementation timelines were chosen to coincide with the designated time of year for the accompanying processes. SAP SuccessFactors Succession & Development, for example, was timed to roll out with the company’s annual talent review. “This was a big win for us,” she says. “Setting our own rollout path meant we were not putting in a system that sat dormant for six months, and it also kept the project relevant for our stakeholders; it was intuitive, easy to understand the big picture, and clear how one module would build upon the next. It kept everyone focused.”

Defined timelines also helped to drive adoption; users discovered early on that they were being given access to a “one-stop shop for HR,” says Bradley, and thus became invested in the project’s completion. This is proven by log-in records, which show that an average user accesses an interface of an SAP SuccessFactors solution about 100 times a year. “That is unheard of,” says Bradley. “You would never achieve that many manager and employee interactions with a fragmented collection of HR systems.”

Collaborating on the Right Mixture

New functionality responsible for a sharp spike in use includes linking an employee’s payroll records — payroll is processed in the core HR system — to a tile on the SuccessFactors home screen, allowing employees to view their payroll records directly from My Recipe. Other home screen tiles, which can be easily customized to a user’s liking, make it simple to access and understand the details related to an employee’s performance and career development. Ease of use is further strengthened with built-in reminders, so a manager viewing an employee’s objectives, for example, might be alerted that a talent review is upcoming for that employee.

And rather than store relevant data in a filing cabinet, a centralized system means that individual data points are now part of a larger picture informing individual, team, and organizational plans involving performance, succession, and development. This system moves HR further down the path toward serving the business with relevant insights expected of a strategic business partner.

Following Step-by-Step Instructions

Of course, developing a completely integrated system with common processes was not without its challenges. First and foremost, ConAgra had to take a long, hard look at its existing processes and decide which ones warranted keeping and which would need updating. This required ConAgra’s talent subject matter experts to align their expectations with the delivered SuccessFactors best practices.

“A lot of research and discovery was necessary to ensure we knew what we needed each of our processes to look like with the implementation. It’s the age-old question: ‘Does technology drive the process, or does the process drive the technology?’” says Bradley. “Fitting processes and technology together is crucial with a cloud implementation; the modules where we had a clear process and direction were significantly easier to implement than the ones we didn’t.”

Another challenge was deciding the degree to which reporting would play a part. Because reporting had, on the whole, been a challenge when ConAgra had a fragmented HR landscape, analytics hadn’t been a priority at the outset of the project. This mindset changed quickly when the company started to realize how significant a change it would be to have easily retrievable HR data.

KC Bradley, Director of Talent Management, ConAgra Foods

“When you are deciding how to configure the system, reporting and analytics are sometimes the last things you think about, but really they need to be the first thing,” Bradley says. “Knowing what you need out of the system is the only way to ensure you create the data elements needed to deliver, but it’s easier said than done.”

Bradley says that during the implementation, PwC played a pivotal role in addressing each of their concerns and smoothing out other potential pitfalls. “We could not have done what we did without them,” Bradley says. “They tailored their experience to ConAgra’s particular needs. With compensation, for example, they became experts in our compensation structure and what it means to the organization and configured the implementation accordingly. They had the right resources that brought everything together, and having that depth of bench was crucial to the success of the project.” (For more information on the help PwC offers for cloud projects, refer to the sidebar.)

Dinner Table Conversation

Like a true HR professional, Bradley speaks about people rather than technology when discussing how SuccessFactors has helped ConAgra take HR to the next level. The true benefit, she says, is that it has helped facilitate conversations between employees and managers, arming managers with information that they can then articulate to business leaders about how each employee contributes to achieving business goals. Those conversations form a picture that rolls up to the C-suite, providing everyone the same snapshot with which to see if the right people are in place throughout the organization to help achieve long-term goals.

“It’s how HR is able to impact our bottom line. It’s where the rubber hits the road,” Bradley says. “If connecting people strategy to business strategy were easy, everyone would have done it by now. When those strategies come together and we don’t have to talk about it anymore, then we know we’ve done our job. That’s our focus, and the work we’ve done with the My Recipe project is helping us get there.”

 

What to Know Before Moving HR to the Cloud

 

Approximately half of all companies plan to increase hiring in the next year, creating a major spike in demand for talented workers. Tomorrow’s leading companies will be ones that attract and retain the best and the brightest individuals — and to do so, they must recognize the importance of the HR function to overall corporate success. Technology will play a bigger role than ever in helping companies recruit, retain, and manage these new workers. Workers from the millennial generation have different expectations than their predecessors around the use of technology and applications — particularly around the user experience. Many organizations are now assessing cloud-based HR offerings after hearing cloud success stories from peers at other companies. After the acquisition of SuccessFactors, SAP’s customers, specifically, have a number of questions when it comes to moving HR applications to the cloud. PwC answers these questions by providing a full hybrid cloud assessment to help customers determine what can be put in the cloud today, what should be moved to the cloud later, and what should stay on premise. An important factor in a cloud or hybrid assessment is organizational readiness. While the cloud offers a number of benefits, there are business process and foundational issues that must be considered in making the move. Implementing a newer, more intuitive technology does not negate the fact that companies have to evaluate their business processes extensively. PwC helps by performing thorough assessments, pointing out the root cause of the issue, and better aligning the business process with the cloud solution. For more information, visit pwc.com.