New Jersey’s largest diversified energy company, was challenged to integrate and harmonize its human resources and payroll systems to connect all processes in the employee lifecycle. Among the goals was to increase mobile functionality and provide a better user experience to employees and managers.
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Cloud infrastructure
The diversified energy company based in Newark, New Jersey, wanted to implement a new technology platform that combined its human resources and payroll systems. Chief goals of the transformation were to move HR and payroll to a highly secure cloud solution and empower the workforce with a more user-friendly platform with mobile functionality.
The company is New Jersey’s largest provider of electric and natural gas services, the company’s energy generation assets include two nuclear power plants, so maintaining highly secure systems and meeting industry regulations is of paramount importance.
The company’s workforce is made up of more than 12,500 employees, along with nearly 5,000 contractors spread out across New Jersey, New York and Connecticut. Among the HR challenges for the company was to implement a better, smoother process for onboarding new employees and for rehiring contract workers, tasks that were traditionally done by filling out paper-based forms.
“There were a lot of manual, paper-based processes within HR related to how employee information was managed. We thought this would be a good environment to digitize and figure out ways to automate, create workflows and drive a lot of self-service capability. This would help speed up processes and make sure that the data is always up-to-date and accurate.”
Director, Applications, Products and Services
Moving from paper to digital
To better empower its workforce and improve people management, the company wanted to implement an integrated platform connecting all HR and payroll processes in the employee lifecycle to make tasks like onboarding new employees faster and easier. The company’s director, Applications, Products and Services, says, “There were a lot of manual, paper-based processes within HR related to how employee information was managed. We thought this would be a good environment to digitize and figure out ways to automate, create workflows and drive a lot of self-service capability. This would help speed up processes and make sure that the data is always up-to-date and accurate.”
Leveraging more than 20 years of experience working with the customer, DXC Technology helped guide the company on its HR and payroll systems transformation. When considering the best options for where the centralized system would reside, DXC worked with them to apply the basic principles of DXC’s cloud approach, which emphasizes going with the right solution on the right platform. Due to the stringent security and regulatory requirements, the choice was made to have the solution run on a secure SAP-owned private cloud operated by SAP National Security Systems (NS2), an SAP spinoff that provides SAP systems in highly-regulated computing environments.
Because the company had a number of SAP business applications already in place, the company chose SAP SuccessFactors as the primary platform for the integrated system. A lift-and-shift approach was performed to migrate all payroll and time data into the SAP NS2 cloud. Leveraging SAP Cloud Platform Integration (CPI) technology, numerous disparate systems were integrated into around 30 downstream systems.
The HR transition also included a complete overhaul of the company’s online learning platform. DXC coordinated the migration of more than 20,000 inactive course records and 2 million training records to reduce technical debt and increase efficiency. DXC also provided vast change management expertise to support it’s efforts in preparing for the transformation to the new platform. “We needed to do a good job of communicating the changes and the benefits, and DXC was our core partner for change management,” the Director says.
Smoother, faster employee onboarding
Benefits of the transformation included the successful implementation of a single, integrated HR/payroll solution, improved security and an enhanced user experience for employees. “The new system enables the workforce to initiate a lot of HR processes,” the Director says. Before, if someone was given a salary increase or needed to transfer from one department to another, much of the work involved was paper-based. “We saw this system as a way to digitize a lot of those processes and establish workflows where the manager submits a request and it goes through the chain of command, then automatically updates the payroll.”
Value delivered
Moving to SAP SuccessFactors running in an SAP NS2 cloud also gives the comapny the benefits of a software-as-a-service (SaaS) pricing model. The customer cites reduced costs as a key benefit of the SaaS model. “The fee structure is more simplified, and all of the underlying components are part of the solution. It also gives you clarity into your costs because now I don't have to think about license costs, server costs, database costs, network costs or storage costs,” he says.
A key to the success of the transformation was that DXC was able to leverage its two decades of experience working with the customer, which fostered familiarity with the IT landscape and good lines of communication. DXC professionals listened closely to what it’s pain points were, understood their business goals and prepared a well-constructed plan to tackle each problem area. “I consider DXC a trusted partner,” the Director says. “I think DXC has really good people — people who care.”
Reflecting on the 20-year partnership, he adds, “DXC is always there. They’re a partner that I know will always rise to the occasion to help us get through whatever we need to do.”
