Discover more about Jigsaw Cloud in this SAP Partner Spotlight.
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If you’d like to find out you can benefit from SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Litmos from Jigsaw Cloud, just get in touch.
When the pandemic forced organisations to shift to remote working, many had to quickly adapt their learning and development strategies – and in some cases, even put them on pause.
Training Industry Magazine reported that only 33% continued their training programmes as they were, while 56% retooled and repurposed theirs, and 37% delayed the rollout of new programmes altogether.
But now that organisations have welcomed their workforces back to the office – or put the measures in place for a permanent remote workforce – many are looking to refine their learning and development strategies for 2022 and beyond. And that means finding a learning management system (LMS) that can help them deliver intuitive, modern training experiences that’ll keep employees engaged.
In our recent webinar, we explored why finding a future-proof LMS is so critical to creating successful learning and development plans today – and offered a closer look at SAP Litmos, an industry-leading LMS used by organisations worldwide.
Read on to find out how a forward-thinking engineering consultancy company uses the LMS to deliver industry-renowned training courses to its clients across the world.
Merlin – Delivering essential online learning with SAP Litmos
While SAP Litmos can be a powerful LMS for educating your own employees, it can also be a valuable system for delivering professional training courses outside of your organisation.
During our webinar, we were joined by Neil Armstrong, Engineering Director at Merlin, to hear exactly how the company has used the LMS to take its online learning to new heights in 2021.
Merlin serves a wide range of sectors, supporting any company that’s looking to drill complex wells of up to 50,000ft. Every operation involves significant risks, and if anything goes wrong, it can be catastrophic – from both a financial and safety perspective.
The risks make strategic, well-thought-out training programmes essential for any team planning drilling projects. And that’s exactly what Merlin offers – four in-depth courses covering extended reach, managed pressure, geothermal, and complex well drilling.
A chance to rethink what modern learning looks like
Previously, all Merlin’s courses were delivered in person to clients worldwide, involving frequent travelling for the company’s instructors and a significant volume of printed resources for their learners.
While time consuming, it was a method that proved successful for the company, generating almost £650k in revenue for Merlin in 2019. But when the COVID-19 pandemic forced educators to move online, the team had to rethink its strategy.
We had already started shifting some of our courses online by the time remote working started. We implemented our first LMS in April 2020 – it initially made us much more efficient, but we encountered a lot of problems with the system we used.
Neil Armstrong, Engineering Director at Merlin.
Merlin wanted to find an alternative LMS that offered its team greater flexibility and full control over the learning experiences they’re delivering.
“With our previous LMS, we had to rely on an external vendor any time we wanted to make changes to our courses and learning environment,” said Neil. “Even something as simple as changing our registration confirmation emails couldn’t be done in-house.”
After taking a step back to compare potential solutions – and redefine its course strategy – Merlin chose SAP Litmos to host its professional courses.
Intuitive modern learning powered by SAP Litmos
In just three weeks, Merlin set up its entire online course library on SAP Litmos, complete with the company’s branding and customised content. Using the LMS, Merlin offers its clients intuitive self-guided and instructor-led online courses that include pre-built and custom-built modules tailored to the drilling industry.
“Our courses have really taken off since our migration to SAP Litmos. We can now offer a wide range of interactive learning resources, pre-course and post-course assessments, course completion certificates, and much more,” explained Neil. “We can even offer our clients post-course reports on their employees’ performance, generated from data within the LMS.”
Critically, SAP Litmos offers Merlin’s team complete control over its entire learning environment – allowing trainers and administrators to easily customise course content, engage with learners, and make system changes without external support.
SAP Litmos offers greater flexibility than our previous system, and it’s much more cost-effective. We’ve been really impressed with the results so far – we’ve delivered 31 courses on the system, received a lot of positive feedback, and significantly reduced our carbon footprint.
Neil Armstrong, Engineering Director at Merlin
Watch the full webinar to see SAP Litmos in action
Merlin’s impressive course delivery is just one example of what’s possible with SAP Litmos. Watch the webinar on demand to discover some of the systems’ most compelling features, with an expert-led demo by our own SAP Litmos Specialist Alex Rae.
(P.S. You’ll also find out how to get a free 14-day trial for SAP Litmos, so you can see how it fits into your own learning and development strategy)
With a mission to be “the point of every payment”, Paysafe Group PLC is an entrepreneurial company with strong growth ambitions.
The Challenge
Rapid growth at Paysafe was driving the need to formalise how the business worked – particularly in the human resources function
The firm’s HR practices lacked consistency between territories; and its HR processes and data were being managed manually in Excel. The resulting inefficiencies and potential for errors were creating several challenges:
- an inconsistent and unsatisfactory employee experience
- a lack of control over HR budgets
- a lack of insight to inform strategic HR decisions
Paysafe needed to manage its people in a more structured way – without stifling them with bureaucracy.
“Our success meant that the company needed to grow up, but without losing our entrepreneurial edge.“We needed a platform to manage our people seamlessly across 20 locations around the world, and to integrate new hires and acquired businesses quickly and easily.”
Nick Walker, Global HR Director, Paysafe
The Solution
In 2011, Paysafe called on Jigsaw Cloud to help. They were impressed by our track record of delivering HR capabilities with SuccessFactors, and felt they’d found a kindred spirit in Jigsaw Cloud.
“Like Paysafe, Jigsaw Cloud is a young, entrepreneurial company. The team understands our culture and mindset,” says Nick. “And as many of them have worked in HR, they instinctively get the needs of the HR function.”
Nick Walker, Global HR Director, Paysafe
The Benefits
Find out all about the benefits Paysafe is experiencing by watching our short customer video:
Murata Manufacturing Co., Ltd. is a global leader in the design, manufacture, and supply of advanced electronic materials for the healthcare, automotive, and telecommunications industries.
In the past, five separate companies operated under the umbrella of Murata Manufacturing Co., Ltd. in Europe, each with limited visibility into the activities of its counterparts. Murata wanted to unify all five European companies into one legal entity, and simplify communication and collaboration between its locations.
A collaborative solution to an unconventional deployment
The company worked closely with Jigsaw Cloud’s professional services team, combining their SuccessFactors expertise with its laser-focused strategy to overcome these structural barriers, and successfully deploy the company’s first module in December 2015.
“This is the first time we can see employee data from all our European companies in a single place. We’ve got an up-to-date, single source of data that’s easy to search and simplifies key HR processes like training, development, and team structuring,”
Peter Welford – Systems Manager
Murata and Jigsaw Cloud implemented the company’s SuccessFactors modules individually with six core modules in place today:
- Employee Central brings employee data from its five European companies into one location
- Performance and Goals is used for annual performance evaluations
- Succession and Development is used to identify top internal talent and choose successors for their management team
- Learning provides a central place for Murata’s digital training courses, and is one of the most visible modules to employees.
ByBox is an international supply chain management company providing intelligent field service management software to help field service teams gain end-to-end visibility and control over their entire supply chain. The company also provides facilities including contactless lockers and warehouse distribution for critical service parts.
ByBox is a fast-growing company with ambitions to grow into a global brand, but its previous HR system couldn’t offer the capabilities the company needed for international expansion and performance management.
They turned to Jigsaw Cloud for help
ByBox wanted to use SAP SuccessFactors due to the platform’s reliability, comprehensive set of advanced capabilities, and intuitiveness.
After consulting with Jigsaw Cloud, the company chose Jigsaw’s Smart Start – an out-of-the-box pre-packaged solution based on SAP SuccessFactors, designed for smaller budgets and faster deployments
“Jigsaw showed us SuccessFactors in action, and we knew it was right for our company, but we wanted to start with just the essential modules. Smart Start was the perfect solution–it met immediate needs, but gave us room to scale as our company grows.”
Atif Hasmi, Management Information, Systems & Benefits Administration Manager at ByBox.
ByBox and Jigsaw Cloud implemented Smart Start–with two core modules in place today
- Employee Central is used to manage key HR processes like sickness reports and annual leave booking
- Performance and Goals is used to create a standardised approach towards performance management across every department, from the warehouse to the analyst team.
“Smart Start has some convenient import and export capabilities that made the data migration process easier, and the Jigsaw team was on-hand for support throughout the entire process. Jigsaw’s support meant we were able to continue the migration remotely –even while our Project Manager was furloughed through part of the project.”
Atif Hashmi – Management Information, Systems & Benefits Administration Manager
A new way of working – a new way of managing SAP SuccessFactors implementations
We all know what happened in 2020 and the changes business had to make because of it: To the way in which they worked, how they supported employees and how they managed projects.
As we start a new year – with many of the same challenges still in place – we wanted to take a look at some of the ways that we, as a HR technology business, have adapted the way we manage SAP SuccessFactors implementations. The lessons we’re about to share will be useful for anyone out there struggling to decide if now is the right time to embark on a big (or small) IT project and how they can go about it.
Let’s take a look …
The way it’s always been
First of all, who are we and how do we implement projects? We’re an SAP SuccessFactors implementation partner – that’s what we do; implement software, day-in day-out. And we’ve been doing that for more than 15 years. As with many other businesses, we’d typically work on a client site for all key stages of a project: kick-off, scoping, and training workshops. All managed face to face, and typically done over full days.
So, what’s changed with our SAP SuccessFactors implementation methodology? Well, quite a lot.
Let’s take a look at how we’ve adapted 3 key stages of a typical project …
1. We reduced the time spent in kick-off & configuration workshops
As a business, we’re very familiar with remote working, but this has been a new approach for many of our customers, who are now working from home for the first time and adapting their working practices.
We gave a lot of thought to how customer attention spans would change online Vs face to face. How would decisions be affected? What impact would it have on motivation – and their desire to keep momentum going?
We soon realised that full day workshops (which would traditionally be anywhere from two to six days in duration) just wouldn’t work, so we developed a new online series broken up into two-hour chunks and taking place over a couple of weeks. Participants were focused, found it easier to reflect on the previous session and came to the next session fresh and motivated.
The other thing we did was adjust our working hours to accommodate different time zones. Not only did this this ensure more attendees could join kick-off meetings and training workshops from more locations, but because delegates didn’t have to travel (many of which would fly from across Europe or even the US) the customer was saving huge sums of money. A win-win all round.
2. We introduced a new step: system familiarisation
During a traditional implementation, we would typically move from scoping and configuration, straight into user acceptance testing (UAT). This round of testing was often hampered because the customer would have to learn the system as well as begin testing their HR processes at the same time. This approach was already under review but COVID accelerated us changing our methodology.
Therefore, we introduced a new step prior to the implementation phase – familiarisation. This meant providing users with access to the pre-configured system, so they had the opportunity to familiarise themselves with the new software before attending configuration workshops and making decisions on how the new solution should be set up to accommodate their processes.
The new step included ‘surgery’ sessions, allowing customers to ask questions about their system’s basic configuration, so they could get a better understanding of the fundamentals of the software they were going to be using and therefore be better prepared for the next stage of the implementation journey.
3. We developed a blended learning programme
Most of our SAP SuccessFactors training is done in one full-day session but given the challenges this would pose if we simply swapped it to online learning (no-one can stay focused online for 6 – 8 hours!), we introduced a blended approach: training was delivered in more agile, bite-size sessions of 2-3 hours.
Our new SAP SuccessFactors online training programme was divided into four sessions: system theory and use cases, homework (where customers would access and test the new software environment), and Q&A (where we would be available to answer all their questions on the solution).
In summary
We hope this has provided a valuable insight into how we’ve adapted our ways of working during lockdown and useful tips for your own system implementations.
We really have seen how just a few small and simple changes can make a big difference to project engagement and adoption, as well as time and cost savings.
For us, we’ll continue to adopt this approach post-lockdown, as it really is the way forward and a win-win for everyone involved.
Four key points we want to leave with you:
- Think in agile, bite-size stages
- Introduce blended learning
- Keep in touch
- Be flexible to save time and money
If you need help with a new HR platform – or if you have an existing one and the implementation isn’t going well – get in touch to see how we can help.
Jigsaw Cloud celebrated Murata Electronics Europe’s launch of going live with our SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central module. (And of course, there was plenty of cake involved!)
Launched in 1944, Murata is a global leader in the design, manufacture and supply of advanced electronic materials and leading edge electronic components. Murata innovations can be found in a wide range of applications from mobile phones to home appliances, and automotive applications to energy management systems and healthcare devices.
The company today now has over 80,000 employees worldwide, with its headquarters situated in Kyoto, Japan.
‘We selected SAP SuccessFactors as we identified it as one of the leading HR Software providers in the market. Since implementing the various modules, we have seen our processes handled in a much more efficient and manageable way.’– Rene Spitteler, Vice President, Finance & Accounting, Human Resources, General Administration, Murata Europe.
This was the first event of its kind held by Jigsaw Cloud. ‘We feel that to get a live solution is something to be celebrated, so this is our very first Go Live celebration.’ Dan Straw, CCO of Jigsaw Cloud, ‘we feel it is often a ‘once in a career moment’, for our Customer teams to change an entire business through deploying a leading HR platform. It is easy to celebrate winning the business, but for us the Go Live is the real proof point.’
Murata have since revealed interest in adding further modules to their HR department and have expressed that they wish to continue a long relationship with Jigsaw Cloud and SuccessFactors.
Click below to book a FREE consultation and discover how SAP SuccessFactors can benefit your companies HR goals:
At Jigsaw Cloud, we love celebrating our customers success. We held a Go Live Event with Dale Farm to celebrate the launch of their new SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Module.
Dale Farm is Northern Ireland’s leading dairy company owned by a cooperative of 1,300 dairy farmers and employing over 1,000 people. “We are proud of our heritage and our extensive range of products including milk, cream, cheese, yogurt and spreads, available worldwide.’”– Dale Farm Website.
Today, Dale Farm supplies the retail, foodservice and ingredients markets with a broad selection of dairy products. The company deliver to the UK and an additional 45 countries internationally.
During the Go Live celebration, it was announced “implementing Employee Central has been transformational for our business, it makes us feel like we are actually in the 21st Century with HR, we cannot wait to see where this journey takes us next.” Mike Dawson, Group HR and Corporate Services Director, claimed, “it isn’t just an HR system, it is a system that helps the company function.”
Dan Straw, Chief Customer Officer (CCO), of Jigsaw Cloud stated “it is really important that we recognise this achievement. I know the place Dale Farm were trying to move from and to and this implementation will absolutely support that.”
Since the launch, Dale Farm have expressed that they wish to continue a long relationship with Jigsaw Cloud and SAP SuccessFactors.
Click below to discover how SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central can help your company achieve it’s long term business goals: