Flextronics HR Team and Workday

http://www.workday.com/customers/by_industry/manufacturing/flextronics.php

Flextronics is, obviously, very large. We are in thirty countries, eighty five locations, over a hundred fifty thousand employees and, from an HR standpoint, that's a huge challenge from cross cultural nuances, to large numbers of people, to a lot of geographical footprint and spread out, to the fact that we have people from production operators who work on our assembly lines up to senior executives. So, as a HR organization, we run a lot of challenges with, whether it's just hiring those numbers of people, retaining those numbers of people, staffing, training, motivating and engaging. Even just something as easy as motivation, it's not the same for every culture, it's not the same for every country, and it certainly isnt the same for every level.
We have eighty separate HR systems. So trying to get any data or any of those employees at any one point in time is incredibly inefficient. So, when we looked at moving to a more consistent HRS platform, we were looking for the ability to get that data much more effectively. We are looking for the ability to scale the organization because we anticipated further growth, and we also want to ensure whether we can do it cost effectively. So, that's really the three main drivers, really four drivers is consistency, there is efficiency, there is scale ability and then there is cost effectiveness are probably the key drivers that we looked at when selecting an HR system.
By doing the global processes up front, we started the change management process already. So those folks came in and they represented their groups, we made sure that the individuals that were there could make decisions on behalf of their groups, that they were tied back to their teams and to their leaders, and as we were making decisions that were, perhaps, different than what they were commonly used to, they were checking back and saying, OK, can we live with that, you know, what problems will that cause us, if any. And, by the time we walked out of two global design sessions that were held a few weeks apart from each other, we had a lot of consistency on the basic HR processes that will happen around the world. And then, as we get into the different countries, we will say, OK, now that were here, whatever the laws are, whatever the current work environment is, business requirements, is there anything that we have to make different because of your location, your nationality or labor laws, etc.
I think it's important for, I mean, not just across the company to be aligned the same way, because, currently, you have, you know, people in the same job in different countries with different job titles, they may be leveled differently, it might be that that's the way the country views that particular job, or it's just from historically how the structure has been built and then, sort of, has rolled forward, so it's pretty key for us to be aligned globally so that way, even if we have movement across countries, you know, someone can easily move across and so we know that anybody in the same job across, you know, any country is really doing the same thing in the same level and weve got everybody on par.
So, we've identified what we believe are the critical leadership traits to be an effective leader at Flextronics. Regardless of the region that you operate in, you know, what nationality you are, we believe those leadership traits can be applied consistently across the world.
If we went for an in-house solution. We really have to address the technical issues ourselves. Right? And we have to build up that expertise and we dont have expertise in an HR solution today so we either then have to rely on external consultant support or we have to build up a large infrastructure internally to support that. Whereas with workday we dont have to do that because the expertise resides with workday and the technical solutions reside with workday. Were actually using new expertise which means we dont, necessarily, have to incur a significant expense and build up our expertise in-house.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• HR Software
• Human Capital Management
• Workday
• Financials
• Payroll