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Customer Success Story: Tenova

Tenova at a glance

  • Employees: 2,500
  • Employee locations: 19 countries
  • Headquarters: Castellanza, Italy

Tenova values its people and considers them critical to the organization’s success and innovation. With continued growth on the agenda, the company recognized the need for an HR system that could support international expansion and engage an evolving workforce.

The challenge: A growing issue of people management

Tenova’s success has resulted in significant expansion on an international level. Headcount grew 25% in just one year following several acquisitions. Ensuring continued efficiency as complexities increased, meant achieving a list of essential goals:

  • Global governance
  • Central control of HR processes
  • Insights for local and global decision making
  • Standardized people management

The existing HR and IT systems didn’t have the functionality to sustain Tenova’s rapid rate of growth. And with different HR systems in each country, some still using manual processes, pulling together reliable, up-to-date HR data was a tall task.

Strategic decision-making, uniform people management, and common ways of working through policies and procedures, were all critical to continued success. Achieving these goals called for expert guidance.
 
Tenova was looking for a partner with global and local experience to design and build an agile HR platform. At the top of their needs list: trusted expertise with the innovative insight to achieve total HR transformation.

Enter Alight Solutions.


The scope: Global integration streamlined

The HR Platform Project covered the entire organization with access in five languages: Chinese, English, German, Italian and Russian. The new HR system had to incorporate core process flows already in place while integrating seamlessly with the SAP HCM landscape.

Main objectives included the streamlining of major talent management and HR analytics functionalities, including:

  • Performance, compensation and benefits
  • Organizational structure
  • Recruiting and selection
  • Training and development
  • Workforce planning
  • Reporting and KPIs

3 steps to success

The project was split into three key pillars, each with specific goals:

  1. Strategy: Provide top management with HR dashboards and KPIs — on different dimensions and with varying degrees of geographical / organizational detail — to help drive business strategy and enable HR management to better manage functioning and alignment with business evolutions.
  2. Operating: Support human capital by improving related process efficiency and HR data quality and establish a common way of working with a strong worldwide focus on people development.
  3. Basic HR: Harmonize data collection at the corporate level by leveraging single-master data, allowing for standardization of data sets and coverage, data consistency and reliability, and increased availability of information at the global level.

A hybrid approach to HR excellence

Tenova selected Sap SuccessFactors for its Talent Management redesign. Alight took charge of implementation, including the employee profile, performance and goals, compensation, succession and development, and recruiting and learning modules.

  • A Nakisa solution was then integrated to modernize organizational structure management and ensure all future personnel changes can be made and shared accurately and efficiently.
  • SAP Budget and Planning Consolidation (BPC) was deployed to sustain workforce planning and analytics, headcount reporting and cost analysis.
  • The existing SAP ERP HCM environment would be used as the single master data for all HR information at corporate and local levels. This would be integrated with the SuccessFactors platform and local legacy payroll systems.
  • The gradual approach to deployment would start with a pilot, followed by three phases for the various functionalities. Alight will also provide post-project training using the “train the trainer” approach.

Results: Quality and efficiency up. Costs down.

The project go-live is well underway, on time and within budget. Tenova has already estimated 10% savings on HR activities, thanks to improved quality of information and increased process efficiency.

The sources of savings were many, but several areas stand out: 

  • Real integrated HR landscape, avoiding duplicate recording of data on multiple systems, redundancy, errors, reworks and manual checks, and ad hoc requests for HR information, thereby allowing for fast execution of all HR processes
  • Increased coverage of performance management and efficient process traceability at the corporate level
  • Ability to perform hiring approvals directly on the system, allowing the tracking of candidate selection for current and future job opportunities in a common database
  • Regular updating and alignment of organizational charts with structural changes, both at local and corporate levels
  • Elimination of main ICT local solutions

Tenova’s core asset is its people: Talent management is a key process and the HR platform we developed is the foundation. We now have access to our employees’ skills sets, career experiences and performance. We can easily share these through our company network and access our organization’s talent much more efficiently. Our HR team is accessing an accurate employee database while management has abandoned any other HR self-developed applications, thanks to the ease of use of the SuccessFactors platform and the excellence of Alight. I believe we have strongly improved our talent decision process. It is more fact-based while enjoying, from an IT perspective, a global, common and secure platform.

Andrea Lovato
Tenova Chief Human Resources and Information Officer, M&A

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