The manufacturer of aircraft parts B/E Aerospace is investing more than $4 million in cloud-based HR technology, as it helps to recruit more highly skilled engineers.
The firm, which has gone through a fast expansion in the last years, is rolling out HR technology from SuccessFactors in order to help it recruit and manage a workforce of more than 10,000 people.
The project will give the company a complete overview of its workforce and will pay for itself in less than a year, said Martin Ratelband, a director for HR at B/E Aerospace.
“Never underestimate the business benefits. It means we are able to deliver parts to Boeing on time, then it will pay for itself very quickly,” said Ratelband in an interview with Computer Weekly.
The company, which has seen its turnover quadruple to £3.4 billion over the past decade, began looking at HR technology in 2011, having realised difficulties in recruiting skilled engineers and supply chain specialists.
Until then, the aerospace manufacturer had invested millions of Dollard in ERP systems and project management software to manage its finance and supply chain. According to Ratelband HR technology had been a low priority.
Shortage of engineers
Securing funding from the company board was straightforward, he explained. B\E relies on innovation to stay competitive, and that means having the right engineers with the right skills.
“We need engineers. We don’t have enough, and we need to find them as soon as possible. We need to know where they are in the organisation, so we can use them [effectively]. It really is as simple as that,” Ratelband said.
He added that the firm had no choice but to introduce a cloud-based HR system, rather than an enterprise-based HR system, if it wanted it up and running with a matter of months across 24 countries.
“The speed of implementation was the reason for choosing SuccessFactors. We could not afford to wait five years, to complete module after module,” Ratelband said.
The firm began deploying the technology in September 2012 and had the first recruitment module in place by December. Other modules covering bonuses and merit pay, learning management and succession management followed during 2013.
First accurate record of staff in 26 countries
The cloud system, which replaces multiple spread sheets and paper based HR systems gives managers at B\E an accurate picture of the human capabilties for the first time.
Beforehand, the company relied on its payroll system as its primary record of the workforce. HR staff had to manually retype the data into B\E’s ERP system, and much of it was too out of date to be usable, argued Ratelband.
“Because we have everything in one database we can develop reports for management, for example, what our manpower skills are, what are global labour costs are. Until recently we could not produce any of those reports.”
Managers can approve a promotion from an iPad
The system gives managers the ability to view personnel records and to complete transactions, such as approving a promotion, on the go, using an iPads or an iPhone.
“Managers love it. They spend a lot of time travelling and at airports, and they can get work done,” explained Ratelband.
SuccessFactors has also speeded up the company´s internal HR processes, allowing jobs that previously took twenty minutes to be completed in five.
“In the old days if you wanted to make a change to a record, it was paper-based and difficult to track. Now you fill everything online,” Ratelband said. “Now you don’t have to retype salary, for example because it is already in the system.”
The hardest challenge was not the technology, but the need for the firm to agree standard HR procedures across 26 countries.
B\E put together internationalteams of HR specialists to pull together the best practices for each HR module, working at a rate of one module each month.
HR technology consultants, Aasonn, which won a $1 million contract from B\E, supported it in developing and integrating the HR modules.
Unexpected implementation problems
However it proved more complex to integrate SuccessFactors’s HR modules together into a complete system than Aasonn’s consultants first anticipated.
“We did not understand how everything would work together at the beginning, and we are now making some fixes,” said Ratelband.
As a next step B\E plans to develop the platform in order to enable it to develop an analytics capability for its HR data.
“My dream is as a manager that I come in every morning, open SuccessFactors, and look at a dashboard, and that gives me my workforce statistics,” added Ratelbrand.
Another project will integrate SuccessFactors into B\E’s payroll systems, starting with selected countries in Europe.
When it goes live in 2014, the system will allow changes made in employees records to be automatically reflected in salary payments. Analytics work is expected to start one year later.
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