Yolande Hamnett-Taylor - Hilti Corporation

Speaker

In this podcast recorded at the SuccessFactors' SuccessConnect Europe event in Paris, Yolande Hamnett-Taylor, Global HR Project Manager for Hilti Corporation, the partner for the construction industry worldwide, discusses her company's use of SuccessFactors. This was recorded live at the customer presentation, and is approximately 34 minutes long.

Yolande

So, good afternoon, it's my pleasure to speak to you for a short while about the implementation of SuccessFactors at Hilti. I am quite nervous to follow such a good presentation from Rob, I'm glad it wasn't so dynamic as the one in San Francisco, there I was getting quite a few sweats during the night, but I will do my best, I don't know the product as well as any of the SuccessFactors' people, but I would say that I'm a very big fan of the products, and I've worked in HR and IT for my whole career, and therefore to find this partnership was very good.

First of all, who are Hilti? Apart from the people from SuccessFactors, did anyone in the room ever hear about Hilti? Wow! If it was only like that at our recruiting events, and then that would be amazing. Hardly anybody ever heard about Hilti unless they worked in the industry or maybe they have someone in their friends and family working for the company, but often I am coming to events like this, and I say, 'Yes, I'm from Hilti", and then they say, 'Oh, but why do you stay in this hotel?—surely you get a discount in Hilton?", and I say, 'No, I'm working for Hilti, not Hilton!".

So I'm proud to represent a company that's hardly ever known, but we're not small, and also a country that's not very well known, that's Lichtenstein, it's also very very small. It's, by the way, for those of you who don't know, it's in middle Europe, where Austria, Germany and Switzerland are meeting, it's a little place up in the mountains, it has a population of about 26,000 people, and shortly our headcount will actually exceed the country population. That's not our official vision, by the way, the government of Lichtenstein would not be pleased!

Yolande

So, I want to tell you a little bit about Hilti, just so that you have some understanding who we are, and our size and our geography, and our vision, what we want it to do, and then I will talk you through the implementation a little bit. If you have a question that's really burning, please don't hesitate to ask, otherwise there will be time at the end.

So, that's what I'm going to talk to you about, and Hilti in brief—here is the beautiful valley where we are, and my office is just here, so I get to look this direction to Switzerland, which is where I live, and it is a seven minute commute, or 12 if the cows are going to be milked.

Yolande

We are a private company, that makes us quite special, I believe, because we're able to make quite independent decisions about what we do and what we invest in and where we cut costs, which is especially something that's appreciated in the current environment. We are still recruiting quite aggressively in a number of our markets, and we didn't really cut anywhere either, but we have very strong retention plans, and against the Swiss market predictions, we're giving the highest pay rises too. It's www.hilti.com, if anyone wants to look at the recruiting page (not yet run by SuccessFactors).

So we are a market leader for professional fastening and demolition technology, this means tools, for the ladies in the room, 'drills and stuff", and yeah, not really very sexy products, I have to admit. I also did not ever hear of Hilti when I was contacted by a headhunter nine years ago, so you don't have to feel bad about it, I was like, 'Who?—I've never heard of them, OK, I'll go for an interview, fine. Sounds like a good job." And now I'm a huge fan of Hilti too, and we even have some tools in the garage.

We have 4.6 million sales in Swiss francs, 2007, and we have a presence in more than 120 countries. In some countries, due to the legal requirements, or the structure of the country, we are operating through agents, so we have partnerships with other companies. We have close to 20,000 employees, and we have just under 2,000 employed in FL, that's the little sticker you see on the car, it doesn't mean Finland, it means Fürstentum Liechtenstein, this is the principality of Liechtenstein, and it's in the Rhine Valley.

We have over 50 nationalities represented alone at headquarters, although we do officially only communicate in German and English. And we have a direct sales model, we are not selling through Saint-Gobain, or Home Depot, for those of you from the US, or from B&Q, for those of you from the UK, and I don't know all of the countries, what you have as DIY stores, but you won't find Hilti really in these places, you will find it only through direct sales, because we target the professional market, and not the home 'Fred in the shed", putting up his pictures on a Sunday afternoon.

So at a glance, just to show you one of our products, here it is, and I am a woman, so I always take the graphics with the woman in the picture, because we do have a lot of women salespeople, and they are the most successful, year on year; I don't know why, but they just have that way with the guys on the building site. So if you ever pass a building site, and you see these red boxes, you will remember Hilti.

Our employees, just to give you a snapshot, because I know it's important to have to some perspective when we talk about HCM implementation, what are we talking about, and where are we based? Here you can see a split, we are predominantly based in Europe, but we have a very very large market in North America, and that is growing still quite fast. In Asia, it's not so well known as a brand, and there we have some struggles to hire and retain people, but we do have aggressive growth in China and India. We also have a couple of plants there. And in the near and Middle East and Africa, we're operating mainly through agents, so we have here, on our official employee headcount, a relatively low number, but it is higher than that, if we represent all 120 countries.

Things that are important to us at Hilti—there are a lot of things important to us, making money for sure, but of course we are very passionate about global processes, and we started a project around ten years ago now, to define global processes, and that was a basis to implementing an enterprise system, and we do have a global back end system, and it's been implemented in every single country as a single instance, including for human resources during the last six or seven years, and we just recently completed an upgrade project, so we're all ready to go with Unicode, and everything like that. So our backbone is in place, and now we're looking to achieve the productivity, and our markets, our local organisations, are also pushing us for productivity, because some of them waited six or seven years now since they got their enterprise system, and they're still doing some things offline, on Excel, on paper—well, you know how it goes.

Things that are also important to us is employee satisfaction, and we do have a global opinion survey for all our employees. It is actually available online in 16 different languages, and we support overall 33 different languages, and there are 87 versions, because there are some local questions. So we take input and feedback from our employees very seriously, and this is, why I mention it here is, it's important for us to achieve a high level of employee satisfaction. We're not a public company, we can't look at our share value or something like this and try to correlate it with things that we're doing inside of the business, what we do is we look at our employee satisfaction and our customer satisfaction surveys, and there we look for an increase, as well as on the bottom line. So that's important for us.

We also are able, in our employee satisfaction survey, to look at specifically our HR processes, there are questions hidden in there at random which are specifically speaking to our HR processes, so there we get feedback from an employee and a team leader level, we can split them out in reporting, and find out what they really think about the processes. This information was particularly important in 2007, because our HR function went through an HR strategy review. There we wanted to come up with our top HR strategy priorities that would help Hilti reach its Vision 2015. By 2015, we actually want to achieve, the status as being great as a company, in many surveys, I'm sure everybody is thinking about that, and we also want to become a company that has great profitable growth. We want to double our sales, and we want to more than double our profit by 2015. Now it's looking quite ambitious, but let's see.

What is our roll out scope?—so you already know that we are global, we are in many countries, we want multi-language systems, we have a back end system, and what are we doing with SuccessFactors? We have actually signed up for the goal management, the performance management, and the succession, or talent, and we just recently signed and had a kick off two weeks ago for the recruiting module. So we take this partnership very seriously, and we do have an aim to keep our HR landscape as simple as possible. We did do a very extensive vendor evaluation process from October in 2007, and we signed the contract with SuccessFactors in April of this year. So we have a very long process, and a very serious one involving our board members.

Our roll out scope for performance management in January 2009 is shown here, so we're covering quite a few countries, and we're covering nine languages. In 2010, we want to extend it further, we want to add another minimum 11 languages, so we're still pushing for Swedish, Hebrew and Thai, by the way. I know right to left is an issue in the IT world, but we're still hoping. And we will gain an additional 32 countries, so we will have the system by January 2010, languages pending, working functionally for every single employee in over 60 countries, around 65 to 67 countries, and that's representing quite a lot of legal entities, because we have plans, we have marketing organisations, or sales organisations, plus we have regional offices too. So this is our goal, it should bring us to around 97 to 98% employee coverage.

Why are languages so important to us?—well, during our HR strategy year in 2007, I was responsible for conducting benchmarking with other considered leading companies, to find out what automation do they offer for their team leaders, or managers, and their employees, and I met with representatives from Microsoft, from Hewlett Packard, from Danone, from BMW, from Porsche, just to name a few, to conduct benchmarking with them, and there we saw quite a differentiation between Hilti and some of these other companies that have so-called global best practice solutions in place. We saw that we were very serious about minimising the number of vendors in our landscape to keep things simple, we also saw that we were an organisation that did not draw a line through our organisational chart, we do not differentiate within our hierarchical structure about career development or talent development, we take it to every single guy on the shop floor in every single plant in every corner of the world, and some of the other companies I met with, when they really dug into the detail, I saw that they do have a cut somewhere in the organisation. That is why it's important to us to provide this system in a very simple way that can be used sometimes offline if necessary, that doesn't require a huge training manual, and that is available in everybody's mother tongue.

So, this is just a summary, where we are today, and we do have a self-service solution that we've built in house, which we will look to replace. Our vision, I'm sure it's matching what most people in the room also were thinking, and we said that our system should be developed with our area sales manager in mind. In the Hilti population, around 60 to 70% of our employees are working in direct sales, they're out and about in the Hilti vans or the Hilti cars, they're on job sites every day, that includes the managers. So we had to keep them in mind when designing the system, and this was a statement made very early on by our executive board sponsor, and it's kind of a mantra we carried through the project. We have some, how can I say, very creative people in our HR community, and they're very comfortable using HR jargon, and they somehow like to feed their ego sometimes with having very good ideas on paper, and we always quoted them, 'Keep the area sales manager in mind—if he cannot fill this in, if he cannot use this system, we have failed, and there is actually no point." Our pre-requisites were clearly multi-language support to achieve productivity, and to support the HR strategy and our Vision 2015.

Why do we need to take our HR processes to a new level?—we discovered, through our HR strategy, and this is an extract from our fact base, we did a, in addition to the global employee opinion survey we run every year, we did a team leader survey specifically asking from the HR community questions about our HR processes, and where we can improve productivity, and in respect, satisfaction for them and their employees. 90% of our respondents indicated that we lacked discipline in implementation, but most of them commented the processes as defined were good. Now, bearing in mind that six or seven years earlier we had actually defined global processes. Six or seven years down the line, these global processes had been through local adaptation, shall we say, and through doing on site auditing we've found that there were different opinions on definitions and codes and classifications and the forms that we had developed were no longer just translated, they were completely butchered, and they just turned into something completely local. So how to get back onto a global process was an issue for us, but at the bottom line we were told our processes were fine.

We also got much better feedback on performance management processes than we did on talent development, and we also got feedback that people are quite good at setting business targets, but not too good at setting development targets, they're a little bit fuzzy, and the link between all of our HR processes was quoted as being insufficient, so this is why we wanted to go with a vendor where we could potentially link all of these processes together, not just as a process, but also supported by an outstanding system.

Following the quote that our executive sponsor had, I had this stuck up in our project room for quite some time, because we said, everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. We had a tendency in our project to go sometimes very complicated, with excellent ideas that were very high level and coming from senior management, about what should be in the system, and their expectations, what a sales manager should fill in, or what they would expect a salesperson to do with his performance review, when he gets it home after being on site all day on a dirty, noisy, dusty construction site, and he's been carrying these boxes around, then they expect him to go online and fill in a performance review that's a couple of pages long, and push it through a workflow?—don't think so, that's not going to happen. But we also sometimes made things too simple, and made some work around, 'Oh let's just put a hyperlink here, we'll put a document behind it", but it always doesn't work, so simple, but not too simple.

So other feedback that we had was that our processes were seen as paperwork, with many managers saying, 'But these are HR processes—why am I doing them?" Our response, of course, is always: 'It's actually your job, we're the owner of the process, but you have to actually execute the process with discipline to get the business results". We had no comment on electronic formats, and we had no structured or easy process to document coaching conversations. A lot of good coaching conversations, whether it was critical feedback or praise, was simply lost, it's in someone's email account, it's just told to them at the end of the day, and we wanted to be able to somehow put all this information together, that it can be considered in a year end performance review. Our back end system and our self-service system has been tweaked over the years, and it's used now by very few people, because it's become quite cumbersome to run. We also discovered in our HR strategy review that world class people organisations have far better integrated and automated solutions than us, that's why we wanted to look for a new vendor.

Some challenges that we faced, and how many of you are already implemented? OK, not so many, so most of you maybe at the same stage as us, going through your implementation process or prospective customers, so maybe some of these things are of interest, if you're going through an implementation. We had the challenges in the process area, I already mentioned this, that we had in our opinion very strong processes, but they just lacked disciplined execution. They were understood around the world, but they had been a little bit adapted, so for some countries, when they go live now with a system that's designed to support a globally-defined process, they will find themselves going through a change management project, because over the years they've deviated from a global process—more fool them, they have some extra work to do.

We also have some issues still outstanding and that we faced through the implementation to be able to fully support multiple languages and authorisations. The way we are structured, and we are not by any means the largest customer of SuccessFactors, but maybe because of our global scope, the number of countries where we're present, and the way we structure our HR community, we have global, regional, sub-regional and local HR, we find sometimes some issues in getting the permissions concept that we have on paper to really be realised in the system. So if any of you are customers who are also facing that, I'm very keen to speak to you and see maybe some creative ideas, how you got around it.

In our HR landscape, we also had quite a battle with our internal IT department with regards to interfaces, because what is quoted to make an interface from a back end system to SuccessFactors, and the reality that our IT guys turn it into, is something else, and the infrastructure and security, we had, I don't know how many of you have gone for single sign on?—do many of you have single sign on?—OK, that's more than I expected. I don't know about you, but I had huge huge nightmares about how to get single sign on working and get the support of our IT department. Maybe it's because they're Germanic or something, and I'm not Germanic by the way, I'm from the UK, so a little bit of history maybe there, but there was quite some challenges in getting them to support that we wanted single sign on. They could only every think of the pitfalls of single sign on, but now we are ready to go, but it's the first time that Hilti takes a software as a service solution, and it's the first time we will have any single sign on, so we are making a real step forward in the HR department, and HR does not normally go first with anything.

And project management, I have in each of the countries you saw named on the list, a local project manager, so being able to manage these people's activities around all these timezones and get them on board for web conferences has been a little bit challenging. In addition, we had to discuss quite a lot of legal requirements or requirements on behalf of the workers' council, if anyone's coming from a German organisation, you'll all be agreeing with me here, but even in Austria, Spain and France, we have very long and ongoing discussions about how to meet their requirements, so in terms of centralised project management, a global implementation like this, where you're dealing with so many countries, it's rather more invasive on your time than you may think in the beginning. Whatever you've budgeted in terms of resources, if you're going in those countries, and you want single sign on, and you're doing a lot of languages, maybe now is a good time to try and double it, rather than fighting for resources next year.

What is our launch approach? As I said, we're going to go live with our performance management in January 2009, and we're going to follow on with a go live of talent in March. We have used a presentation to try to create some local excitement, we've been drip feeding information since August to our local management teams through our HR project managers; we have a video message from our CEO speaking about the importance of these processes and how HR is a very important strategic player in the business, it's not an administration department like people perceived in the past, and that we can support productivity and we can have an impact on the bottom line. This has been translated and dubbed into all of the languages, so everybody all around the world is seeing this video message.

We have Train the Trainer, which we will handle internally, because we have to become experts ourself in the system, and our processes, and we will train our HR and super users, and they will then train our team leaders, because in some countries they will need to do change management projects where they're training on process as well as system. In other countries, they will have e-learning modules that the people can just learn how to use the system.

In terms of printed materials, we have a quick guide and a more comprehensive manual, depending if you're the kind of person that likes to just get stuck in and have a play around, or if you like to have a bible printed out on your desk and go through and tick everything off. We have quite a few people in research and development, and they fall into the latter group, but the sales guys, they just play around, so we had to think about these different needs, and we will give additional web-based training for reporting and administration.

Performance management and goal management probably is far more simpler, but a few words to how we do our talent review sessions in the future at Hilti. We start off always with the succession org charts, you can see Brooke Brown, I think, everybody employs Brooke Brown, I think she's holding about six million jobs around the world currently? We actually start off there, and of course we took the opportunity to customise our icons and the content for the org chart. It used to be twice the height, and then we went back to, let's keep things simple, and we cut a lot of stuff out, and moved it into the profile. I'm very pleased, from Rob's presentation, to see some potential development on the quick card, and making it like a portal, where you can find all the information, that's also been our feedback, that we would like to go into this quick card, and jump into whichever things are important for us, without having to navigate in and out the system, we want all the hyperlinks there that we want to use at Hilti.

We do use the employee score cards, and I am pleased to say that we are one of the customers who's already had a couple of web conferences with SuccessFactors regarding Pixel Perfect, it is a very nice tool, especially when you have, as Rob already said, some people who have a desire for a certain layout, maybe in your senior or executive teams, they like to have these talent books maybe printed in hard copy to carry round with them, or even that you can just have a one pager or two page report that you can send on encrypted email, if you have some restrictions with permissioning for some data, if you want to share some information about talent within the HR community, that's how we would see to do that. So we are discussing it, because the score card is an excellent short version of the profile, we do appreciate that very much, and it's what we were looking for. However, there are some things in the portal, the portlets, that are hard coded and we can't switch off, which are not used at Hilti like expected rating and gap, we don't make a competency profile for every single job at Hilti, so here we could, it's a very nice tool, but we may be adding some confusion, because there's some content in there that we just don't use, and it's really not Hilti terminology.

We are already planning to use, and we fully tested this instant nominations solution, so if any of you got excited by that, and you want to talk about it, I have tested it and have some experience, if you want to discuss it. We did want a nomination process to be automated at Hilti, but the one that we saw around August time, we actually found that it was a little bit cumbersome, and we had huge question marks: do we offer it to the line, or only in HR, or what about approval stamps?—we don't want just a huge pool of people all just floating around, and then the pool gets so big and so out of hand, and HR people and team leaders start thinking, 'Oh I need to nominate at least two of my team in a pool, because he nominated two people in his pool", and it just goes into a chaos situation.

What actually happened at Hilti is interesting: earlier I said to you, the feedback from our team leaders was that our processes were fundamentally sound, we just lacked execution. What we found, working with SuccessFactors is, they have developed so much functionality in their tools and Performance Management and Succession being two very advanced tools, more or less the bread and butter I would say of the business I guess, although I'm not internal, maybe you make more money on something else, I don't know; but they seem to be the most advanced modules, and I'm sure nobody is sitting in some hotel making up functionality for fun. So it's obviously driven by other customer needs, and if you look at the customer list, there are some very very big names on there, and there are names of customers who have much bigger employee populations to manage than we do. So with respect to that, we actually in our project took around four to six weeks' time out and took a strategic decision to delay our implementation of talent management, because we wanted to fully explore some of these new functionalities coming available. What we've ended up doing, not at the request of our line management, and not according to benchmarking with other leading companies, we've actually redesigned our succession and talent management process in about an eight week period, and this was not planned in 2007, we said, 'Our process is fine, we just need to find a system to automate it." The reality is, SuccessFactors challenged us really by presenting such opportunities, and we said, 'OK, if other companies are using this stuff, maybe we should too."

These are some words from our project sponsor, and I believe he made a short video, so maybe some of you will see it tomorrow already, but just to summarise, this is his comment … and what we're expecting in the end is that it helps us to align our priorities to our Vision 2015. In the goal plan, we've designed two goal plans in a way that people are obliged to set both business and development targets, and we're using this smart wizard to try and increase the disciplined execution, and therefore hopefully the quality of the goals that are set. We make people align their personal goals, whether they're business or development, two elements under our Vision 2015. This will provide full transparency, the higher you go in the organisation on the alignment and the execution of people's goals, and what they're working on in order to support the company vision. We've now made a very clear link between performance and talent management that we simply didn't have on paper, we have a talent search solution, which our HR community has been screaming for for many many years, even though we had our own home-built self-service solution, which did to some extent support some talent information, but this whole issue of cross-border access, if I'm running a talent search, and I'm sitting in Hong Kong in the region office Asia, and I know I have huge growth in my two main countries, China and India, and I'm looking for talent, people in Europe, even though they speak the language, and they've noted a wish or a desire to have mobility to these regions, these people are just not turning up on a list. Yesterday, HR was still calling and emailing the other HR people looking for these people. Even the HR people didn't have full transparency, no matter how many nice Excel sheets they'd made. Now we really get everything in one place in a system, and with the right permissioning, people should come up if they have expressed a desire to work in a certain location, in a certain timing, and they have the right skills and competencies.

So to summarise, we believe that by setting the right business and personal development priorities, by executing them with discipline, to coach and review regularly, with the support in the system, that we can achieve our ambitious targets.

And a final word, because I like this very much, and I've been quoting it to our local project people: when they're all complaining, when they're doing translation about how basic the field labels are, and I tell them, 'For you, yes, you work in HR, I'm sure you would like a nice acronym, but for goodness' sake, the beginning of wisdom is to call things by the right names. If you want your sales managers and your sales guys and your plant workers to use this system, you just have to keep very simple. And with that, I finish with my favourite graphic from our archive, because it's the woman again! - and I'm having a boy by the way, but I already have a girl, so I'm trying to keep things very balanced in the universe—I will wrap up my presentation, and can take any questions that you have.