Nuts and Bolts: It takes two to dance

MUMBAI, INDIA: When Voltas embraced the SAP HCM solution, there were many incidental issues and appendages it had to deal with, like any major IT related business transition. We get to talk to the Asmita Junnarkar, Chief Information Officer, Voltas Limited and Swapnil Navalkar, General Manager — Corporate HR , Voltas Limited,to discover just how a rare but outstanding footwork together can help one dribble the football called IT to one’s advantage.

How has the solution performed in terms of UI, backward compatibility and reporting dashboards, third-party aggregation (MS SharePoint or FlashBuilder etc) and consolidated views? Would you consider internal resources for customising any part or application?

Asmita Junnarkar: We did face some UI-related challenges initially but SAP has improved the UI considerably through Ehp4. We managed to close all UI issues after applying Ehp4. Our core ERP is also SAP ECC, so there were no challenges in J: The backward compatibility as such. Considering that our core ERP and HCM are on different physical servers,ERP in this case is from SAP only. Though we had to incorporate a few additional interfaces , but it wasn’t a big challenge per se. As far as dashboards go, we have developed MIS dashboards in BIW & BObeen doing it for other modules, so. I do not see any technical challenge for HR dashboards. Regarding customization, we have a heavily customized Leave functionalityHCM because we have developed it for our other modules earlier as well.

Swapnil Navalkar, GM - Corporate HR: And as far as customizing goes, we have had custom-developed applications earlier. But it would mostly be for India employees. Forand not for overseas employees, we do not have any customized functionality except for a few reports. applications.

Any migration and deployment challenges or lessons?

Asmita Junnarkar: Migration, as is always, was challenging as we were replacing multiple systems onphases with diverse technology platforms. Each country had a different legacy system,The implementation experience was just one of multiple phases and data migration challenges to SAP HCM were unique to each country. Regarding deployment challenges, we mitigated these by adopting a phased approach. Indiahad our share of challenge in that as well.We first initiated the implementation phase with Indian geography wentdealing with the issues of going- live first; we used the ‘lessons learnt’ and ‘best practices’ from this deployment for our later undertook the overseas deployment. Overseas HCM went live in four months without any customizationmarket.

There has been a lot of buzz around pricing of an alternative called Oracle Fusion. Any remarks? Also the relevance of SaaS vendors (Workday etc.) in your consideration list as a customer, especiallyspecially with factors like frequent updates and subscription pricing?

Asmita Junnarkar: We have not considered these options as of now. We already had SAP ERP and we were happy with that. We did look at competition but competitiveness of pricing and our confidence factor in SAP played a part in the decision. For all critical applications, our strategy would be towards on-premise.

Swapnil Navalkar, GM - Corporate HR: SaaS is not a good idea because for us, HR data is critical and of a sensitive nature. Although there is a fair amount of security available in SaaS, the fact that our data would not be in our sole custody makes us feel uncomfortable.

What or how strong is the role of analytics as a component of HCM?

Swapnil Navalkar, GM — Corporate HR: We will be using SAP Business Objects to create role-based dashboards for senior management. Our vision is to give single click HR dashboards on desktops and mobiles for senior management. We do not want employees asking for Reports. Whatever information they want to seek should be available to them on their own desktops, within the desired authorization rights. We have already identified a mammoth 130+ KPIs related to HR, which we would like to gradually place on the Dashboard, in a phased manner.

Asmita J: Business Intelligence and warehousing for now are some components, but HR has big plans for this angle. A lot of reports are sought after in this area, which are very ad hoc, so analytics has a lot of scope to evolve here.

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The industry usually faces skill-gap issues with such transitions. What’s your take?

Asmita Junnarkar: In our case, the support is outsourced to TCS. We do face this challenge sometimes but the scenario is very different from. Yes, an in-house team. We have an option of digging into the huge resource pool of outsourcing partners. in certain cases is better. It’s not that tough to bridge that gap though.

You both seem to have a great alignment, more so for the typically diverse functions you head. How did that, or any other factors helphelped? Any advice bits?

Asmita Junnarkar: During the India geography implementation phase,J: It was a well thought of decision, as we realized that there is going to be knew this merger would call for comparison with the legacyprevious application for every business process. We had to agree. However, IT agreed on user demands in orderand managed to go- live on schedule. It in April. We took almost a year to talk and convince our users about benefits of using standard SAP processes. For example, We helped them understand the impact of both the scenarios. Example- Leave module of HCMSAP has a big balance sheet impact if something goes wrong. Employee liability parts take time and effort in rectifying, and these are things people learn from experience. Before SAP ERP HCM, I used to personally spend at least one day per week resolving HCM data-related issues. Post SAP ERP HCM, I hardly spend any time on such issues. We achieved greater employee satisfaction with real- time access to HR services and information via a self-service portal.  By standardizing all the processes of human resources — including time management, training, performance management, expense management, and recruitment — the company was able to improve productivity and reduce staffing costs.

Swapnil Navalkar, GM - Corporate HR: Talk of any ERP application and it comes with its own sets of best processes and best practices, which can be globally accepted in various scenarios.is a natural scenario to get from IT. When one gets into it, one realizes that SAP has its own best practices and benchmark processes, too. It is only a matter of leveraging these Best processes and putting them into practice.  Having done a fair bit of. This is where we improve our process.  SAP implementation myself, during my consulting years, Ihas taught me that you have learnt that one has to get in and understand what SAP offers and then align our processes to these readily available ones. This perhaps is the only way in which one canbend your ways and that’s when you will utilize the real SAP potential, to its fullest extent, and thus make every penny spent in an SAP Implementation count.