Overview

Our mission in Schneider is to be the Digital Partner for Sustainability and Efficiency. We strive to constantly innovate, delivering energy and automation digital solutions for our customers and the communities we serve. To meet this mission, we prepare our Workforce of the Future built on Organizational Agility, Future Ready Talent and Inclusive Leadership. Within HR; the need is to do more with less, adopt new ways of working that unites analytics technology and data literacy, and ultimately deliver data insights that impact business outcomes and enable our mission and cultural transformation.

Supernova Award Category

Future of Work: Human Capital Management

The Problem

At the beginning of our journey, HR Professionals were supplementing global products with localized reports and solving problems in Excel raising challenges in three areas: speed of information, global alignment and technology-enabled insights. Users did not have flexibility around self-service reporting capabilities and a lot of time was wasted in waiting for new reports, measures, drill-down functionalities, filters and more added to the dashboards. The need for fast insights continued to grow, but our analytics technology landscape could not meet the unique needs of the HR community at the speed desired. 

The Solution

As part of its HR Digital Transformation, Schneider invested in a complementary technology stack including enterprise Big Data Platform powered by Intel, Oracle Analytics Cloud as the core (HR) BI Engine and ThoughtSpot for ‘data search and discovery’ whilst developing Web Apps through our internal Innovation team which concentrates on prescriptive strategic simulations. All products are accessible via a central People Analytics Hub that serves as a central homepage that is technology agnostic and directs Users to their needed product.  From a User experience perspective, the integration is seamless.  At the same time, this centralization allows us to maintain a more agile development environment, as well as facilitate enhancement transitions in our existing product offer.  

The results

Schneider introduced OAC 2 years ago as our core BI platform to enable managers to accelerate the identification and development of top talent and leadership potential.  This solution was the first time to consolidate data sources providing familiar reporting outputs with added functionality which led to educating the HR community on the power of data as a service. OAC has enabled HR and Talent Management to change the conversation from “Talent assessment” to pursuing actionable and strategic insights.  OAC has also shifted the dynamic from an enterprise overview to an individual level by identifying and nurturing Talent globally. 

ThoughtSpot was launched in 2020 as an additional visualization layer on top of OAC. It maximizes flexibility for Users to meet their critical business needs, creates visualizations, and filter data with an enhanced User experience.  Global solutions are not always the best fit for a company that identifies itself as “the most local of global companies.”  ThoughtSpot's search and AI-driven analytics platform allow for easier customization and consumption of data above and beyond the data views available in OAC which enables regional HR to gain relevant analytics insights. After a highly successful pilot deployment to 350 HR Users in North America, ThoughtSpot will soon live at the heart of all Schneider's analytics-enabled business processes for Schneider's 2,000 employee HR community.

Metrics

It was time to embrace the digital age and translate data-driven decision making from a concept to action.  Our investment in these tools has allowed us to eliminate manual administrative tasks, increase speed and transparency of data, and provide both global and local solutions to deliver data insights and power us towards the Workforce of the Future.

Between the 1st and 2nd year of the OAC launch, adoption tripled to 500 unique users and saved an average of 8 hours per User during the Talent Review campaign. Holistically, in the first two years, OAC saved 167 days across our user base! Our effort shifted away from low value tasks and refocused on more strategic activities like developing our Future Ready Talent through over 5,000 mentorship relationships, 1M learning hours accumulated, and 8,000 talents taking on new and enhanced roles globally. OAC has ensured consistent, efficient, data based and development focused Talent conversations with the aid of a digital platform.

Across the 350 ThoughtSpot (TS) users in the pilot, 78% adopted the tool and rated their end User experience at 4.4 out of 5 on average for its flexibility and ease of customization. Aligning with Schneider's core value to Free Up Your Energy, TS has saved 5.5 hours per week across all User types for basic data gathering, summarizing and visualization. Time saved is reallocated to generating valuable insights and accelerating strategic decision-making with data.

The Technology

The platforms have complementary strengths we will optimize by properly positioning products and driving adoption focusing on user personas.

• Oracle Analytics Cloud is our core analytics platform for global pre-built dashboards, standardizing the complexity of KPI calculation
• ThoughtSpot: is positioned to support data-discovery through search and AI driven analytics readily available to our HR community with user friendly interface.

Disruptive Factor

Our investment in digital tools & platforms supports transforming HR into a more strategic, and value add part of the business by freeing us from manual tasks and demystifying complex calculations.  In Schneider’s case, consistency was the first major form of disruption, as they improved the company’s management of our global talent through OAC with a standardized, consistent approach on a global scale that ensures all agents are managed and measured in a uniform way. The second area of disruption is putting the power of data and analytics directly in the hands of the HR Users. Democratizing data through ThoughtSpot’s search driven analytics promotes our data-driven culture that allows for maximized customization and data exploration with a stellar user experience.

Utilizing OAC and ThoughtSpot as complementary tools has elevated HR partners, leaders, and analysts alike to lead our People Strategy and sustainability commitments focused on Inclusion and Organizational Effectiveness with clear actionable insights. It´s time to let the machines to do what they do best and return the focus on the “human” in HR.

Shining Moment

In 2021, Schneider was named the most sustainable company in the world by Corporate Knights for our commitment to sustainability, corporate social responsibility, diversity and inclusion, and innovation. OAC and ThoughtSpot created a clearer view into our talent helping to align our commitment to diversity and inclusion, where by 2025, we plan to have 50% female executives, 40% female managers, and 30% female frontline managers. We continue our journey with actionable insights leading the way!