Global paint supplier unites hr departments across 70 countries

A new vision: Global consistency with shared service

Without proper visibility over its assets, the company could not easily report the number of its deployed devices, their locations or compliance status. This lack of visibility resulted in time-consuming and failed regulatory audits. And like many organizations, this company struggled with manual processes such as spreadsheets to track hardware and software assets. The company’s size and highly mobile workforce complicated tracking. Beyond compliance requirements, the lack of visibility made managing risk, security and cost efficiencies difficult. The company partnered with NTT DATA to find a solution.

With no HR shared services structure in place, this organization had a vision for a larger transformation: to implement regional HR shared services centers, including hiring agents, setting up the center locations, and implementing phone and interactive voice response (IVR) systems. The system needed to keep up with the growing needs and expectations of their employees and unite their international employee base and business units under one umbrella.

Prior to embarking on this HR transformation, the company had designed a new global HR operating model that would be delivered in a multi-year, three-wave program. The organization’s main goals were streamlining global HR into one hub and saving money where they could, considering current economic and political trends.

A strategic ServiceNow HR service delivery solution

NTT DATA worked with this paint supplier to streamline and consolidate HR services and activities with a single access point, utilizing ServiceNow’s HR workflow to create a global employee portal and provide solutions for global HR case management and knowledge.

The project was set up from an organizational point of view: IT personnel wanted to be able to look out across their organization and see where their “pockets” were and where their deficiencies were, including their onboarding and offboarding processes. They needed to be able to view and manage HR services globally, as they were currently without one unified global system of HR management.

With its international employee base, staff need not only whenever but wherever –– which, for this organization, could mean a traditional office, warehouse or research lab — access to the HR portal. It was equally important to create a mobile-friendly version for the organization’s younger employees, as their generation demands accessible data on the go. However, many seasoned employees still preferred to access the portal through a desktop browser, so equal attention was given to both mobile and web versions.

Simple, quick solutions for challenging HR needs

This organization took a global approach to HR and used ServiceNow as their platform of choice to automate HR as a shared service. In just under a year, the team implemented a custom Service Portal, including chat, HR case management, and Knowledge for the company’s HR teams, employees and leadership. ServiceNow also included an integration with their new IVR platform to automatically create cases from phone calls. Another integration connected to their existing Workday system of record to bring over employee data and initiate HR cases from certain transactions so HR agents could engage with employees with a background of information.

Reports and dashboards were rolled out for executive-level presentations to track cases by channel (phone, chat, portal, email), portal and knowledge use, as well as first contact resolution and employee satisfaction.

With a global reach, the company wanted to make sure their employees located around the world would be able to access the HR Portal in their own language — resulting in 700 hours worth of configuring translations in ServiceNow. Portal pages and widgets, HR catalog items, chat queue messaging, case surveys and over 350 email notifications were developed and translated into nine languages (not including English) so employees could navigate the pages, find solutions and view communications in their mother tongue. Additionally, routing rules were configured so employee cases were directed to assignment groups who spoke the same language for better support.

8,000 knowledge article searches in 10 languages on day one

The project went live on time with 47,000 users across over 70 countries — a huge accomplishment for a company that had never undertaken an HR project of this magnitude. NTT DATA implemented the first phase for Case & Knowledge in Europe, but the HR Portal was accessible to all.

Now, the global paint supplier is empowering its users by providing them with on-demand self-service solutions.

Over 8,000 Knowledge Article searches in 10 different languages were conducted on day one — and only a few hundred HR cases were created. The new ServiceNow HR Portal funneled users to the knowledge base before they could obtain support – whenever, wherever they needed it. Chat options and other more personalized help solutions were also enabled and encouraged users to find their own solutions.

With their new ServiceNow HR Service Portal, employees are self-serving by gathering and leveraging knowledge — all through a simple single-access solution, thanks to ServiceNow.

Looking ahead

With the first rollout targeted for only EMEA countries, the organization is now moving forward with wave two, rolling it out to the other regions and executing it in-house, thanks to the training and knowledge transfer. The organization looks forward to more successes — empowering their employees to solve their issues easier and faster, and releasing their HR department from mundane, repeatable tasks.