Indian multinational, Sun Pharmaceutical (Sun Pharma), the fourth largest speciality generic pharmaceutical company in the world, has partnered with SAP to automate and consolidate its six different human resources (HR) systems, spread across its different offices around the world, using SuccessFactors.
Prior to this, the firm lacked a single system for different HR processes, such as recruitment, onboarding, and performance, leading to the need for multiple data reconciliations and manual data feeds across its different offices.
Additionally, the firm had to prepare approvals and offer letters manually for new staff members.
Sun Pharma’s head of digital, analytics, supply chain, and emerging technologies, Nikhil Shembekar, told iTnews Asia that with SAP SuccessFactors solutions in place, key employee data points, such as ratings, grades, salary, and skill sets, are available to all stakeholders, including employees, managers, and HR.
Sun Pharma has noticed an 80 percent decrease in IT workload due to “reduced data-related” concerns, and a 40 percent increase in performance management processes, Shembekar added.
Single source of truth
Acting as the single source of truth for all employee records, the newly-deployed HR solution helped to build a people-centric business model, reduce time and effort in data reconciliation, and improve operational efficiencies, with better overall data compliance and security built-in, he said.
Prior to the SuccessFactors installation, most of Sun HR processes were “manual” and the company’s human capital management (HCM) systems were uncoordinated and lacked integration, Shembekar said.
Such “scattered data” made it “difficult” to get global and standardised reports, he added.
“A clear need was felt to harmonise our global HR processes and ensure strong HR technology, and hence the project was started with the approval from leadership,” he added.
The “consolidation” of HR processes with SuccessFactors has led to an 80 percent reduction in the employee onboarding time required by HR managers due to a 35 percent reduction in manual onboarding and recruitment processes, thereby increasing efficacy for both employees and the HR department, he added.
Lack of visibility
The earlier HR system also lacked accurate headcount and organisation chart visibility.
Further, matrix reporting (team members reporting to multiple leaders) was sub-optimal and cumbersome for performance analysis, Shembekar said.
He added that the company set up a global task force “with strong synergy between HR and in-house IT teams” to find a solution.
The aim of the task force was to develop a global unified system and database with a focus on increasing employee and manager productivity and bringing improvements in data quality and accuracy as well as improving employee and candidate experience, he added.
“After looking at multiple vendors, the team decided to move ahead with SAP”, Shembekar said.
The new system will help in “digitising” Sun Pharma’s hire-to-retire cycle, he added.
“In the long term, we expect the system to strengthen data governance, improve employee experience, and improve HR service delivery efficiency… We are undertaking some strategic projects like globally implementing payroll and time management, enterprise virtual assistant, and HR analytics,” Shembekar said.
