SAP might not always be the right bet
Global enterprises rely on SAP to run their business operations. The German software behemoth or similar vendors offer anything from accounting, production planning, and supply chain management to HR and beyond. These big players are so deeply woven into the fabric of global enterprises that the saying has remained true for decades now:
“No one ever got fired for buying SAP.”
The functional coverage of such software suites is impeccable. However, choosing the save bet often creates unintended customization challenges besides the high implementation, running, and switching costs. The requirements of a global enterprise function, take HR, will never fully match the customization options available.
In this sense, SAP can be compared to a website builder like Squarespace or WordPress. These tools and their existing templates will get you to a new website quickly, but they come with trade-offs. You might not be able to design it exactly the way you want it to, extend it with your new idea, or create workarounds to make it work.
These workarounds add up and take up valuable time. They become habits, and before you know it, you’ve lost a significant amount of the efficiency gains you set out to achieve by implementing the save bet in the first place.
The comparison to website builders is not entirely fair, though. The cost of leveraging a website builder is significantly lower than building a custom website from scratch. This is not the case with SAP.
Barry Callebaut, one of the world’s leading chocolate manufacturers, experienced these challenges when extending the SAP suite with SuccessFactors for its HR function. As the workarounds added up, they sought a pragmatic solution that would match their needs by reducing manual input and increasing the level of automation.
Why did they trust us?
Our partnership with Barry Callebaut has introduced us to the world of chocolate - figuratively and literally. We’ve had the sweet privilege to work with their HR, Operations, and Finance teams for many years. During this time, we’ve collected thousands of miles and spent hours on planes to meet with their teams from the US to Singapore and from the Ivory Coast to Belgium. At times, their headquarters in Zurich felt like our own office. Working with a partner for a long time creates valuable relationships and opportunities to push the status quo together.
We’ve launched their global job architecture, developed an internal career planning tool, and automated a capability assessment for global transformation projects. The deep understanding of Barry Callebaut’s culture, operations, and pain points gave us a head start to automate their compounded workarounds out of existence.
Finding a pragmatic solution
The HR team at Barry Callebaut recalled employee onboarding as the most time-consuming process and asked us for help. Onboarding a new employee involved coordinating between HR, IT, Office Management, and the functional line managers. Despite the go-live of SAP SuccessFactors, the overall process was still littered with manual interventions.
Examples were:
Updating Excel sheets to keep track of parallel processes
Copy/pasting between emails, files, and SAP
Adding key dates to the calendar and setting reminders
Requesting information from the candidate and line managers
Publishing news about new joiners on the intranet
Manually create documents for the authorities
The HR team sought a pragmatic and cost-effective solution to automate manual tasks. However, any solution provided should not interfere with the existing IT landscape but rather integrate seamlessly if possible.
We defined and developed a nimble application that automatically informs all relevant stakeholders about status updates, to-dos, and crucial reminders such as probation period endings. Switching the concept from a pull to a push model improved the data quality and efficiency gains. For instance, instead of asking for all relevant information via email, candidates would automatically get a dedicated master data form to provide and confirm their personal data.
Internally, reminders are set automatically, and even the intranet announcement is generated without lifting a finger. The icing on the cake was integrating with the existing system, adding the whole employee master dataset to SAP upon process completion.
The application allows the HR team to view dozens of processes in parallel without breaking a sweat, freeing up valuable time for non-trivial and value-adding activities. Soon after the launch of the automated onboarding, we jointly followed up to include the off-boarding process as well.
Less is more
Even though this nimble application remains in the background as an add-on to the much bigger software system, it provides a great example of understanding customer needs and addressing their pain points with a pragmatic yet poignant solution.
We’re convinced that strong partnerships, such as the one we have with Barry Callebaut, are key to improving the status quo. A trustful relationship is characterized by a win-win mentality—offering pragmatic and cost-effective solutions often leads to more significant steps forward than pushing an audacious vision for a product from the start.
Prominent vendors like SAP are still the go-to choice for many global enterprises. However, we remain convinced that often less is more and that a small yet dedicated team can build solutions that perfectly match the client’s needs and cost 10x less.
Thank you, Barry Callebaut, for taking the chance with us.