Unilever Hr

Solutions in Action Unilever Delivers Worldwide Human Resource System with Business Objects “The implementation of BUSINESSOBJECTS and PeopleSoft is about improving our decision making and putting the relevant information in the right place throughout the business.”

Company Overview: Unilever is a leading supplier of fast moving consumer goods in foods, household care and personal product categories. Challenge: Unilever continuously seeks to improve staff recruitment, retention and motivation via global staff development. Solution: Unilever use the BUSINESSOBJECTS™ information access, analysis and reporting tool, implemented by Comset, to deliver strategic information across the business worldwide from a PeopleSoft HR application. Benefits: Unilever now has access to an up to date global database of 20,000 employees and is providing improved decision making information to the business.

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ersonnel motivation and development are increasingly important for global organisations looking to recruit and retain staff. Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch consumer goods company, is implementing an integrated Human Resource system worldwide based on PeopleSoft, using a BUSINESSOBJECTS application developed by Comset to deliver key information to managers throughout the company.

An increased understanding of the complexity of employee development has prompted the implementation of integrated, global Human Resources (HR) implementations by multi-national organisations. As Nick Kitchen, Senior Project Leader, Unilever, explains, “A business is only as good as the people in it. Unilever must make decisions about people based on the best possible information. The implementation of PeopleSoft and BUSINESSOBJECTS is about improving our decision making and putting the relevant information in the right place throughout the business.” Unilever is one of the world’s leading suppliers of fast moving consumer goods in foods, household care and personal product categories. The company operates in over 90 countries, employs over 230,000 people and had total sales in 1999 of £27 billion.

Integrated HR As a global but largely decentralised organisation, Unilever had approximately 120 different HR systems around the world. The company decided to adopt a common platform across the company that delivered both transactional functionality and management information. The company opted for a distributed implementation of PeopleSoft with each region having its own local data. A key component of Unilever’s people development strategy is a global database Unilever UK Headquarters holding information on the top 20,000 people across the country. “We have a strong internal belief in management development, assessing on a global, regional and country basis the strength of our resources,” says Kitchen. In the past, the global database was updated haphazardly from the numerous HR systems via electronic gateways, paper copies or limited direct access. However, as Kitchen explains, “The data had to be provided locally but was then not often available for local use. As a result, information was not updated regularly.” Now the global database is automatically updated from the local PeopleSoft implementations around the world, ensuring data is input once and available rapidly to Unilever HR and management.

Excellent Information Delivery Kitchen explains, “A key element of the implementation of the integrated HR solution is opening up information outside the HR department. We wanted to provide users with a reporting tool that enabled them to do their own querying without needing to be experts in HR. We selected BUSINESSOBJECTS because it provides end users with the ability to build their own ad hoc queries.” He expands, “BUSINESSOBJECTS user friendliness combined with its great flexibility makes it a very good tool for Unilever. Additionally, we are looking to move towards web based technology in the future and Business Objects web capabilities and strategy played an important part in our decision making process.” The system was developed by Unilever with Comset and empowers Unilever management with the ability to improve staff placement and selection via extensive staff profiling features. Managers are able to access key personnel information both whilst connected to the corporate network and remotely via mobile dial-up access. Information is analysed using a custom built BUSINESSOBJECTS application. Further flexibility is provided to ’Power’ users who may also perform their own ad-hoc analyses by building their own reports using BUSINESSOBJECTS. Philip O'Brien, Director at Comset says “Comset has worked with Unilever to deliver a powerful business intelligence solution that allows Unilever to accurately meet the needs of the business. Unilever required the chosen technology to be flexible, scaleable and web-enabled. Working with BUSINESSOBJECTS meant that we did not need to compromise the user or corporate requirements to deliver a high quality and robust solution”

Delivering Corporate Benefits Currently Unilever has around 250 users of BUSINESSOBJECTS, with plans to increase that significantly over the next couple of years by extending its use beyond the global database to provide access to the local PeopleSoft implementations. “The global database only holds ten percent of the total staff population. By providing access to the local databases, Unilever management will be able to report and analyse on the complete staff population,” Kitchen says. This rolling out of HR information to, ultimately, several thousand users provides the company with significant benefits. “This PeopleSoft and BUSINESSOBJECTS development gives us the opportunity to do HR differently,” he says. “We have removed the black box that was HR and are making the information available to people across the business so that they can do their own searching and decision making. It puts decision making in the right place and speeds up the process.” In the future, Unilever will look to use web technology to move towards employee self service and to automate many day to day HR activities by adopting HR shared service centres etc. “This development is the first element of a total web based global HR solution,” says Kitchen.

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Future developments on the system include developing a Personal Development Planning “Business Objects web capabilities and module in PeopleSoft that will add new data in strategy played an important part in the form of role, skill and people profiles to that our decision making process.” currently held, accessing and exploiting historical information for analysis for the first time and feeding external training and demographic information into the global database. Kitchen adds, “We will increasingly use BUSINESSOBJECTS to integrate different sources of data – such as combining information from financial planning with people planning – which will be very useful.” Kitchen concludes, “The key to improving our recruitment, retention and motivation of people is better information – and even a small increase in staff retention delivers huge benefits. We have to make sure we have the right information to make the best decisions. With this global implementation of PeopleSoft and BUSINESSOBJECTS we will be able to deliver that information.”

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