Supernova Award Category

The Problem

- Prior to FinancialForce HCM, Summa managed a handful of disparate systems and applications that inevitably forced their HR team to rely on Excel in order to consolidate basic employee data. The company was expanding very quickly, doubling headcount every two years, and were outgrowing the basic processes they had in place to manage their people.
- When the team was tasked to gauge the health of the business from a people perspective, they had little to no visibility into company data. They were unable to provide strategic guidance or analytics to leaders, which became a problem area that needed to be addressed through technology.
- Even pulling the simplest of data, like performance tracking or attendance summaries, was painful and time consuming. The HR team lacked a single source of data where employee records could be easily accessed. Summa HR wasted hours trying to consolidate and extract info, which further led to potential error-ridden reports. Employees struggled with basic insurance enrollment programs, as the applications were manual, paper-based, and hard to keep track of. There was no digital trail for employees to work with and company HR operations were generally “old-school” practices, which left employees feeling disengaged and disconnected both culturally and systematically.
- Summa is in the people business and people are ultimately their product. Yet internally, the team didn’t have insight into their workforce to help their own organization scale.

The Solution

Previously, Summa used 8 legacy, disparate systems including Success Factors for goals and performance, OpenHire for an applicant tracking, Excel for core HR and People Manager in the maintenance of core HR data.
To address the issues that arose from the disconnected manual solutions, Summa selected FinancialForce Human Capital Management to replace all other solutions. FinancialForce offered all major HR functions required by Summa including applicant tracking, core HR, performance management and others.
Summa had used FinancialForce Professional Services Automation (PSA) for several years to help manage their workforce, time tracking and project management, in addition to FinancialForce’s Financial Management application for accounting. Having also used Salesforce CRM, the company knew a back-office solution tied to one platform would be beneficial. With PSA and Financial Management, Summa had a 360-view of the customer. Next, they needed more insight into employees with HCM.

The results

Overall, FinancialForce HCM delivers the Summa team:
- more accurate employee data
- reduced time spent on data entry
- increased operational efficiencies
- hard and soft cost savings - hard costs associated with reducing multiple systems and soft costs associated with reduction of administrative staff time

Summa now has data at their fingertips to answer previously difficult questions such as: “How many senior technical or distinguished consultants do we have?” or “Do we need to accelerate entry level hiring?” are non-existent.

The speed of people analytics and insight has dramatically improved. FinancialForce HCM dashboards give Summa’s management team a real-time view of the workforce makeup. This leads to better, long-term hiring decisions.

With FinancialForce, candidate to employee transitions are painless and personalized, even when multiple new hires are brought on at once. Through the app, a candidate’s data instantly becomes employee data eliminating data entry and processing time.

Role-specific dashboards are updated daily and the ability to access through mobile has positively impacted the high number of remote employees. Employees value data/information on the go, leading to time savings while not tied to a computer.

Developers now use Chatter as real-time technical support forum. If they hit a snag at a customer site, Chatter enables an immediate response.

Metrics

- Summa previously had eight legacy systems in place for performance management, people management, compensation tracking, vacation (PTO) request tracking, compensation packages and recruiting. With FinancialForce, Summa aggregates all HR systems into a single cloud and focuses efforts instead on implementing an agile feedback and talent management process.
- Prior to HCM implementation, PTO tracking required five employees to move the request through email. Now, processes done via automated HCM workflows have freed staff to focus on other activities. Employees have real-time vacation balances available rather than having to wait for pay statements (which was often inaccurate due to time lag).
- Corporate compensation plan redesign was made easy with HCM and centralized employee data (plan vs. actual reports)
- HCM easily configured to reflect Summa’s specific business model. The team can now analyze which staff are cost of sales and which are overhead (a process that took several hours before). Now this information is delivered instantly in a dashboard. The team no longer has to spend hours analyzing data, this information is instant.
- Before the FinancialForce system was in place, recruiting was a time consuming challenge for the delivery team. FinancialForce streamlines the process of tracking candidates and gathering feedback quickly from the billable delivery team.

The Technology

Founded in 2009, FinancialForce is the leading Cloud ERP vendor with apps built entirely on the Salesforce Platform. The company’s Financial Management, Professional Services Automation (PSA), and Human Capital Management(HCM) offerings provide services-centric businesses with a platform that organizes sales, services, finance and HR entirely around their customers.

Disruptive Factor

- Outside of the task of figuring out how to get all of their data into one system, one of the biggest challenges Summa faced in their implementation of FinancialForce HCM was truly achieving an understanding of what was capable on a brand new system. The canvas was blank, which at first seemed overwhelming.
- Because they weren’t coming from one single system to HCM, they didn’t have a history of how they wanted to set up certain HR processes and workflows. For example, Summa’s hiring process needed to be re-designed because their recruitment solution had never been connected to their HR data. The team needed to figure out how to restructure the overall experience and set up a new process flow.
- Another challenge was being able to make the right data connections between FinancialForce HCM, PSA and Financial Management. The team knew that having PSA and HCM linked on the same platform would be a benefit but they needed to be sure the right data was flowing between the two apps. Summa had made some basic connections between the two systems at first but the main one they wanted to roll out occurred about a year later – vacation tracking.

Shining Moment

Summa needed CRM, PSA, Financials and HR. What they could have done was go and buy best of breed in each category or go off-platform with just their HCM, but the result would have been data that was siloed and risky reporting. Summa knew the benefit of being on one platform was obvious but they didn’t anticipate how much was possible when setting out to implement HCM.