Gearing up for global accessibility

Plan has experts around the world in various functions such as education, health, and water and sanitation to support its mission of helping vulnerable children worldwide. However, it was having trouble deploying the right people to the right locations at the right time, and this was delaying its response to disaster situations.

One of Plan’s key challenges was managing paper-based processes for its field employees. Heavy reliance on spreadsheets resulted in inefficient HR processes and risked non-compliance with many countries’ regulations.

Operating in challenging geographies, Plan needed a global view of its available people and the skills they possessed at any given moment, so that they could be deployed rapidly. And staff needed access to a more comprehensive HR solution on any device, anywhere in the world.

Every humanitarian organization is challenged to do more with less, so efficiency is at a premium. Without a single view dashboard to determine headcount and labor costs, Plan had limited capabilities to develop and grow its workforce to meet the specialist requirements of projects around the world.

The organization set out to implement a new digital strategy to better — and more efficiently — achieve its goals. Central to the strategy was a complete transition of its HR services to the cloud.

Unlocking the secret to success

Plan looked for a standardized HR and talent management platform, so it could efficiently recruit, develop and mobilize appropriately skilled staff in response to any regional infrastructure challenges and disaster demands. The organization chose to implement a suite of proven solutions from SAP SuccessFactors and selected Atos to manage and implement the solution.

To provide Plan’s workforce with easy access to the HR solution anytime, anywhere, Atos proposed a world-class set of processes in an innovative hybrid on-premises-cloud data model. This would be implemented in close collaboration between the partners, with SuccessFactors’ agile deployment approach following Atos’s delivery methodology.

Plan is now set to cover 60 countries and 9,000 workers with a comprehensive and accessible HR and talent management system. The new solution supports eight different languages through the entire employee journey including recruitment, onboarding, performance management, compensation, learning, development and succession planning.

Focus on the future

The robust new platform has reduced Plan’s overall total cost of ownership (TCO) by eliminating costly hosting, infrastructure and technical patching services that the original hybrid solution required. The new SAP-based solution requires less maintenance due to automatic system patching, and IT staff receive 60% fewer calls for technical support issues.

Plan’s HR team now has a single global HR system for all 70 of its legal entities worldwide — available anytime, anywhere, on any device. It can more easily record the time its 9,000 employees spend on their projects and assignments, with improved visibility across the global workforce for succession and compensation planning.

Through better integration between recruitment and onboarding, it has accelerated the process of recruiting or transferring key staff, decreased the amount of data entry, and reduced the cost of external hires. Plan is also able to leverage the system’s new reporting capability to quickly identify emergency disaster response teams to staff its programs across the globe.

With the new HR solution from SAP and Atos, Plan can now dedicate more resources to its programs. Its employees spend less time filling out paperwork and more time working to create brighter futures for children worldwide.