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Solvay, a global leader in specialty chemicals, sought a streamlined way to support and engage employees around the world. So they integrated a single global HR solution — one built for today’s workforce challenges and ready for tomorrow’s opportunities.
Solvay at a glance
- Founded: 1863
- Industry: Specialty chemicals
- Employees: 23,000+
- Headquarters: Brussels, Belgium
The challenge: agility on a global scale
In 2011, Solvay made the move to reorganize business units. The goals of the reorg: get closer to customers and improve agility. The company also aimed to be better equipped to seize opportunities and realize growth ambitions.
The complexities of Solvay’s global presence and innovative mindset, required a partner focused on providing services of the highest quality and efficiency. Their HR provider needed the capacity to manage more than 40,000 people, including retirees, in more than 64 countries.
The search for a single source
After a thorough process review, Solvay had no question that the best way to deliver additional efficiencies was to implement a global business service and break away from traditional functional silos.
The main objectives of this decision:
- Improve HR service delivery through the optimization of HR & payroll
- Outsource payroll processing, freeing up internal resources to focus on HR strategy
- Evolve towards a single HR technology supporting global processes and tools
- Increase the satisfaction of Solvay’s HR customers: its global workforce
Solvay needed a leader in the market who could deliver on every objective and efficiency. They wanted an organization willing to establish an ongoing partnership.
A customer-centric relationship
One organization checked all the boxes — Alight. From the start, Alight took time to listen to Solvay’s challenges and understand their needs.
According to Solvay, Alight’s strengths include:
- Customer-centric mindset, truly aligning with Solvay’s stakeholders
- Global HR solutions combined with a flexible approach
- Qualitative HR service delivery models
- The right HR knowledge and experience to support Solvay at the global level
- Willingness to establish a trusted, ongoing partnership and evolve towards a more efficient future, together
Transformation at work
Alight’s SaaS HR IT cloud platform — euHReka — was chosen as the underlying HR technology to support Solvay’s global workforce. This innovative solution covers all geographies and HR processes in scope, and offers the necessary flexibility to meet Solvay’s current and future HR needs.
In their current collaboration model, Alight manages all operational aspects of payroll process from A to Z, while Solvay stays in charge of HR data entry and service delivery. This enables Solvay to focus on strategic HR matters and free up time for value-added activities.
Every time we had an issue or problem, the spirit of both Solvay and Alight was to find a solution, and not reasons to disagree. We had the freedom to ask Alight what was the best solution for a specific issue, based on their experience. And they were always open to it.
Solvay
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