Bupa is an international healthcare company serving over 43 million customers worldwide. It employs over 82,000 people across the UK, Asia Pacific, Europe and Latin America.
Bupa Global Product Owner for Workday Lorraine Sasikumar says, “In 2017, we decided to start the process in what was then our Australia and New Zealand region of developing a single view of our people. We knew that this would bring us the simplicity and agility we need to help our market units [MUs] respond fast to emerging and changing needs.”
Overcoming the challenges of a fragmented IT landscape
At the time, Bupa’s disparate systems were preventing a consolidated view of its people. “We have global processes, such as global talent, performance and merit reviews, all of which rely on the ability to consolidate data,” Sasikumar says. “Our fragmented HR information systems landscape across the world made this very challenging. So we started to seek a system that would bring all our data together in one place.”
Ultimately, Bupa’s decision to select Workday was straightforward. According to Sasikumar, “[Workday] was the market leader with many implementations under its belt. It had a global infrastructure of support partners. And it used the SaaS model, which was our preferred solution, because it’s always up to date, trustworthy, and performing.”
We can respond far more quickly to business changes without having to wait for IT to deliver change for us.
Lorraine Sasikumar, Global Product Owner
Developing internal capabilities to accelerate change
With Workday now in place across much of Bupa’s worldwide footprint, there is increased ease and agility involved with managing change. As Sasikumar explains, “Previously, this part of the agenda had been driven or owned by IT. Now, a far higher volume of change has been enabled simply because you don’t need to be a developer in coding to configure Workday.”
Sasikumar is delighted by the progress that has been made to date. “We’ve developed our internal capability really well, and have digital teams that sit alongside the people-operations umbrella, so we can respond far more quickly to business changes without having to wait for IT to deliver change for us.”
This is proving to be a highly significant advance. “Bupa is an organisation that changes extremely fast, due to our federated structure that includes multiple business lines that often have their own agendas,” Sasikumar explains,” so a faster response to change is a major gain for us.”
Streamlining operations and removing vulnerabilities
Workday has enabled greatly improved visibility across the organisation. “We used to have to work with multiple different local processes for managing leave, using different tools in different areas of the business,” Sasikumar says. “Now, having the visibility of absence calendars and making it easy to request time off and receive approvals has been a real win for us. It’s also allowed us to eliminate vulnerabilities arising from the local use of spreadsheets and peripheral bespoke applications.”
Another important area of advancement is being driven by Workday mobile capabilities. As Sasikumar adds, “This is really beneficial in our APAC region, where many of the roles in our provision businesses are not traditionally desk-based roles.”
The way Workday acts as an enabler is very important, bringing the community together so you can learn from customers who are further along their journey.
Lorraine Sasikumar, Global Product Owner
Learning from a joined-up customer community
A key differentiating and valued factor is the Workday community.
“The way Workday acts as an enabler is very important, bringing the community together so that you can learn from other customers who are further than you along their journey,” Sasikumar says.