The purpose-built HR information system that Jotun had been operating for more than 10 years was getting old. As Anja Allouni, Jotun’s Lead SME and Change Manager, puts it, “Our recruitment and performance-management systems weren’t interlinked and there was no historical data, so you could never run a comparative report with the situation two years ago. Above all, you couldn’t really use it for any business processes, meaning it gave managers little or no value for business planning and decision-making.
“We needed more. We’re a complex business, and we needed a much more flexible solution that would actively help us develop the HR organisation and the Group as a whole. We identified Workday as that solution.”
Workday met our key criteria: user experience, one data-entry point and a full HR suite.
HRIS Solutions Owner
‘Big Bang’ approach drives user excitement.
When launching Workday, Anja Allouni and her colleagues went for a ‘Big Bang’ approach with all countries and all modules going live at once. With the focus on Change Management, the team used multiple tactics to create a sense of anticipation around the new tool.
As a result, the proportion of employees going live on the system during the first couple of days was comparably very high for the deployment. They weren’t disappointed.
As Allouni says, “Employees appreciate the career functionality and the feedback from new employees onboarding was also very valuable. We are very pleased with these two wins in a world where the fight for talent and competence development are two of our biggest people challenges.”
Managers, too, are rapidly recognising its value as a source of active, actionable data and insight. And both the IT and HR departments are, in Allouni’s words, “extremely supportive, thanks to its greater sophistication, allied with ease of use, that’s enabling them to do far more with less time and effort.”
Joined-up data in just one place.
Having access to data from across the organisation in a single place is a major benefit for people throughout Jotun, with no need any more to log into several different solutions and transfer data between them.
This goes beyond delivering a major time-saving for every user. It is also enabling people from across the organisation to access information fast and easily. As Anja Allouni says, “For the first time, managers are able to get and interrogate useful HR and financial information to help them build reports and do their jobs better.
“That’s a powerful source of improvement for everybody, and managers particularly enjoy the full overview they get of task progress.”
Update cycle drives continuous improvement.
“I am hopeful that Workday will push us to keep developing Jotun’s HR function,” says Allouni. “Every time a new release comes along, we have to try to understand what new doors it might open in the organisation. And that’s a really good thing, ensuring our minds are always open to change and improvement.”
Equally, having an in-house support team that is constantly working alongside HR to provide governance and develop the solution is proving to be a strong positive force.
“In the past, we had to rely on consultants to move the solution forward. Now, with a six-monthly update cycle and the constant opportunity to adopt new features, we’re constantly progressing it – often inspired by the experience of the other customers we meet in the Workday community.”
New insights into operational delivery.
According to Allouni, “We’re getting far better insight into operations right across the organisation.
“Until now, it’s been very difficult to govern how HR processes are carried out in more than 100 countries. It’s one thing to design and communicate how we want recruitment or performance-management processes to be carried out. But now we can actually see and influence what’s going on. That’s a giant step forward.”