Recently, Perficient digitally transformed for success by migrating to Oracle Cloud HCM. To share our story, we invited key stakeholders Andrea Lampert, Michael Zucker, Cathie Meyers, and Mike Grennier to join a panel discussion moderated by Stuart Massey, Principal of our Oracle ERP practice.
As Vice President of People, Andrea is responsible for working across the company to support business goals by driving the implementation of strategic people objectives reflecting Perficient’s commitment to our people and our culture. Michael Zucker, Vice President of IT, is responsible for internally facing technology solutions and infrastructure. Cathie Meyers is Director of HR and Mike Grennier is Director of Talent Acquisition.
In the first blog post of this four-part series, Andrea and Michael discussed the Challenges of Legacy Systems, Guiding Principles, and Roadmap. In the second blog post in the series, we learned about the wins for HR and IT. For the third blog post, we will hear about the deeper dives into our Oracle Cloud HCM journey.
To view the entire panel discussion, click here.
How did Oracle’s global solution help your team manage day-to-day operations as well as being able to scale in the future?
[Cathie Meyers] We connect employees globally and we do that well! Our leaders are working from the US to India, as well as Latin America related to HR actions and projects. In general, we have our standard HR processes along with some manual processes but the one thing that we were missing was the ‘system connection’.
A prime example is global connections where we have many of our employees progressing in careers as well as moving from country to country. The one thing that we want to do is to be able to manage that seamlessly. Our goal is to get them from the transferring country into the receiving country without a blip. We want to make the experience great for our colleague. Moreover, we went behind the scenes, to make sure that all those systems, connections and data points are efficiently happening since it was previously a very manual process. As we move into this system, what is going to be helpful for us is that it is going to be seamless and unified in the cloud, not different systems.
One additional advantage is that the history of the employee is going to follow. Prior to that, we would term them out of one system. We would then have to rehire them in another system, and we lost a lot of valuable data on that employee. Now we’re picking up that record and the journey continues for that employee into the receiving country which is very valuable data when we’re moving them around between countries. Will it be more efficient for the team? With a click of a button, things are hitting all areas such as the teams for projects, operations and payroll, so this is very, very efficient.
It allows us an opportunity, as Michael said, to develop our employees and give them time in different areas. Therefore, we are really looking forward to the efficiency that we’re going to see, such as from the previous example. There’s many more, but I do like to cite that one example as our global depth continues at Perficient.
As you transitioned to a fully integrated solution like working in Cloud, how have you found the transition and what are some tips you would share with other clients?
[Mike Grennier] ‘Trust’ is the first word that comes to my mind. We trusted Oracle as it is the best-in-class solution and can be configured to operate in different environments, depending on the work culture. We already had our on-premises system which was not quite updated. We made our processes work with band-aids and duct tape in which we butchered the process to make it work for us, which was fine, but we recognized that we were far from a standard recruiting process here at Perficient.
And we had to spend a lot of time trusting what Oracle could provide to us as best-in-class solution. That’s why I said it was so important for us to hear from our consulting partners in terms of what is possible with Oracle, what it really can do. And once we got past the point of trying to make Oracle operate like our old on-prem, taped together, band–aided system, then the process of adoption really accelerated. We realized that we were trying to fight against this new Oracle system, which is a best-in-class solution and I say best-in-class, tested and used by hundreds of companies.
Now each company must make configurations work for their culture and environment, but the reality is that the recruiting process in most companies should be similar. Therefore, we had to trust that this new cloud–based solution would work, and this resulted in a dramatic increase in adoption. And I think that the key moment for us is when we let our hands go up a little bit and say trust that Oracle is going to be doing the right thing for us, configured our way, of course. But it’s been a really eye-opening experience in that we’ve been able to move to a much more modern experience from a recruiting standpoint and it’s been fun to watch.
From a user perspective, can you speak about how change management was executed on our project?
[Andrea Lampert] So first, I will say that change management was executed early and often. We were very fortunate to have a change management resource internally who helped us really think this through from the start. We had to reflect on many questions such as “How do you help people identify with what they do today and what they’ll do tomorrow?”, “What’s different about that and why it makes sense to take that journey?”. We spent a lot of time thinking about how we communicate and train people about organization changes. We were very active in developing personas and taking people really through a day in life and understanding what it meant for them to walk through the change and that was meaningful for us from a change management perspective.
[Michael Zucker] In our weekly conversations as a steering committee, we also had change as one of our key topics. So not only was it early and often, but we were also discussing it as a leadership team. Specifically, we talked about the upcoming changes by investing in an internal page on our internet site and made sure that it was constantly updated. As we promoted different activities, we were directing applicable people to that activity and the change management became more intuitive. We didn’t have to focus on training as much, but we still had all the communication vehicles available for connecting with the business sponsors. And this leadership group put a lot of thought into it early and often and it paid dividends.
[Cathie Meyers] Just to add! It was very important to train our teams in becoming the SMEs, so we banded together. That gave us enough bandwidth to provide help not only from the backend, but also from the frontend as a user. In turn, they were also SMEs to all of our employees, which was a huge help when we implemented Oracle Cloud HCM.
Want to know more about the deep dive we mentioned and how we executed it? We will soon publish the fourth blog post of our four-part blog series ‘Our Digital Transformation to Oracle Cloud HCM’ which will contain a lesson learned viewpoint.
