You’ve gone live with a new HRIS system – now what? Without the right post go-live strategy, even the best HRIS solution on the market won’t work miracles. While the world has changed and the way of delivering business has evolved, organizations are expanding their teams by partnering with Rizing to enhance their SAP® SuccessFactors solution and improve their user adoption. Rizing’s Application Management Services (AMS) go beyond resolving tickets and supporting releases – it’s an operational and strategic extension of our customers’ teams providing advice and guidance.
Rizing recently spoke with four of our customers on this transformation journey to learn more about what outsourcing services they are using, how they engage with Rizing AMS, how they manage the SuccessFactors release process and more.
This article is compiled from discussions during a LinkedIn Live video event. View a recording of the full conversation or just the highlights on the Rizing HCM YouTube channel.
Table of Contents
- Rizing HCM Customer Panel Profiles
- What Outsourcing Services are you using?
- How do you engage with Rizing AMS? What’s SAP’s involvement?
- How did AMS make a difference for you? How does it help you manage predictability and flexibility? Do you have a fixed number of hours?
- How do you manage the SuccessFactors release process?
- Are the specific services Rizing will perform defined in your contract?
- How do you manage the unexpected?
- How does AMS impact you from a staffing and training perspective?
- What should clients be looking for in an AMS provider? What would you advise someone?
- Next Steps
Rizing HCM Customer Panel Profiles
The Rizing customer panel included:
- Sue Murphy
Sr. Manager, HRIS
JELD-WEN
JELD-WEN produces doors, windows, closet systems, shower enclosures and other components used in residential remodeling and construction projects. The American company has over 120 facilities across 19 countries with over 23,000 employees.
- Andreas Bauerlein
Manager, Global HRIS
Kennametal
Kennametal supplies materials, engineered components and tooling used in the production process to customers in various industries including transportation, aerospace, defense, mining, and energy. The company is headquartered in Pittsburgh, PA and employs over 10,000 people worldwide.
- Suchi Kommi
Director, HR Technology
Hubbell
Hubbel, Inc. manufactures electrical and electronic products for residential, industrial, and utility applications. The company is headquartered in Shelton, CT and employs nearly 20,000 people worldwide.
- Christian Weir
HR Systems Administrator
Huntsworth Healthcare
Huntsworth Healthcare provides communications and marketing to large and mid-sized pharmaceutical and biotech companies. Headquartered in London, the firm works through over 40 agencies in over 30 countries, employing approximately 2,000.
What outsourcing services are you using?
“We have an HR team that does the initial troubleshooting,” says JELD-WEN’s Sue Murphy, “then our HR technology team is the second tier doing deeper dive work. The next tier of support is where we outsource to Rizing, for those issues that require more detailed troubleshooting. It’s a partnership that we’re using to enhance and transfer knowledge to our team.”
“I’m stubborn in how I work and if there’s something wrong with SuccessFactors, I want to figure it out,” says Huntsworth’s Christian Weir. “But I can’t always figure it out, so I’ll come to Rizing and ask for that knowledge. The analogy I use is in the UK in soccer or football the audience is seen as the 12th man. That’s how I see Rizing – as the additional person to our team that is much, much larger than our entire team combined and has infinite resources for us to lean upon.”
“We also use Rizing as third level support,” says Hubbel’s Suchi Kommi. “Our HR support team provides the first level support by handling process queries and data queries. Our HR Technology team is our second-level support, responsible for all the system configuration and administration efforts. What I like about this relationship is that when we have a problem and we reach out, we get options from different experts on how to resolve the issue.”
“Rizing steps in when our internal team is at the end of their knowledge or resources,” says Kennametal’s Andreas Bäuerlein. “But Rizing doesn’t just do troubleshooting for us. Kennametal tends to do very complex things and Rizing helps us with business consulting and finding better approaches with different solutions. Rizing has been very flexible and collaborative.”
How do you engage with Rizing AMS? What’s SAP’s involvement?
“There have been situations where Rizing consultants have been part of our calls with SAP support,” says Suchi Kommi. “Together they come up with a solution. That kind of partnership is much appreciated.”
“We don’t have our own account manager at SAP,” says Christian Weir. “But no matter if I raise a support ticket or our Rizing consultant raises a ticket, we have this natural understanding of how to work together without having to question who should be doing what. It just makes sense.”
How did AMS make a difference for you? How does it help you manage predictability and flexibility? Do you have a fixed number of hours?
“The big thing is flexibility,” says Andreas Bäuerlein. “If a person leaves our team for other opportunities, we can just increase the usage of Rizing. But if we are fully staffed and don’t have big implementation projects, then we just consume less services from Rizing.”
“It’s things like somebody comes to me and says the time off calculation is wrong for an entire country and it’ll take me weeks to fix,” says Christian Weir. “But I’m already busy doing this other project. I’ll say ‘Rizing can you investigate and solve that with my guidance on what those rules should be?’ Having that back up and knowing that I’m never going to be fully swamped is something I really value. Having that safety net of AMS is so useful.”
“Yes, it’s a fixed number of hours,” says Andreas Bäuerlein. “The services are described in a statement of work that defines what is Rizing responsible for, like monitoring integrations and system processes.”
“We have quarterly reviews to see what we’re using AMS for with our given modules,” says Sue Murphy. “We’re always asking ourselves what we can do differently on our team or where can we learn to do more in-house. We’ve been live with EC and Recruiting globally for one year now and can already see the change in that.”
“When we went live with our solution, we had no knowledge in-house so there were many tickets for small things like how-to questions,” says Andreas Bäuerlein. “As the team matured and learned the number of tickets decreased, but the complexity of the tickets increased. So, we might consume the same or even more hours but on fewer tickets because the tickets which go to Rizing are the things where the internal team is out of knowledge. You need a partner who can scale while growing the internal support team.”
How do you manage the SuccessFactors release process?
“Rizing prepares release notes based on our implementation and the services or modules we are using,” says Andreas Bäuerlein. “That’s a very helpful service.”
“We didn’t follow the trend and decided to do compensation differently,” says Christian Weir. “Rizing knows our setup intimately so can come in and say, ‘Remember this thing we did for you back in this project? It’s going to be affected by this upcoming change.’ Having that intimate knowledge of our setup and how it’s going to be affected by future releases is really useful.”
“We manage the release process internally,” says Suchi Kommi. “But if there are any interesting features we want to implement, we take those up with Rizing. The Rizing team then guides our internal team in terms of execution. It’s very common for the implementing consultant from Rizing to tell us ‘This feature will be retired after the next couple of releases, so do you want to wait and possibly implement the new feature?’ One recent example is onboarding – we have been partnering closely with Rizing and looking at the upcoming features in Onboarding 2.0.”
“We also get the release notes customized to the organization,” says Sue Murphy. “We appreciate the consultative best practice side of it, helping us with what we are struggling with and letting us know of possibilities that we hadn’t thought of yet.”
Are the specific services Rizing will perform defined in your contract?
“We have a statement of work and Rizing will consult with us to understand what it does and doesn’t cover,” says Sue Murphy. “For example, if we decided to implement Onboarding 2.0 that’s a whole big implementation so we’d be looking at a separate contract for that.”
“We have an AMS statement of work agreement that covers all the regular day to day support and any enhancements,” says Suchi Kommi. “If there is a specific project that goes beyond the threshold of hours and is large enough to require a dedicated project manager, we will handle that as a separate project with its own agreement.”
How do you manage the unexpected?
“We do annual HR technology roadmaps where we identify all the initiatives planned for the next year,” says Suchi Kommi. “We share those with Rizing so they can also plan for resources ahead of time.”
“The unexpected piece that gets managed is turnover in the organization,” says Sue Murphy. “The team is able to reach out to Rizing and work with them to solve the problem even if we don’t have the internal subject matter expert available at the time.”
“During the pandemic it was very helpful to have Rizing as a backup for our team in case of unavailability of our team members,” says Andreas Bäuerlein. “We even did two module implementations remotely during the pandemic and it worked well. We always thought we needed to have people in a location together to have a successful implementation, but we learned it’s not needed.”
“Our entire implementation has been remote because it started mid-coronavirus,” says Christian Weir. “I’ve never even seen the Huntsworth office. We’ve just been able to carry on as if nothing changed.”
How does AMS impact you from a staffing and training perspective?
“Having AMS as our backup has actually expanded our candidate pool for new hires for HRIS positions,” says Christian Weir. “We don’t need someone to be the best compensation analyst that there is. They can be more of a generalist, because we will always have that specialist backup at Rizing if we need it.”
“We’re expected to make sure our internal staffing is upskilled,” says Suchi Kommi. “This partnership with Rizing also has a training aspect to it. It’s not just outsourcing – it’s upskilling your internal staffing while also providing the required support.”
What should clients be looking for in an AMS provider? What would you advise someone?
“Flexibility and patience.” says Christian Weir. “We may take a year and a half to make a decision, but we want to make the decision correctly and do things the right way the first time. We appreciate support that waits us rather than pushing us to make a decision.”
“You have to look at the makeup of your organization and find a partner that has a similar makeup,” says Sue Murphy. “If you are in 25 different countries, you want to make sure the AMS provider also has global experience.”
“We have a true global system,” says Andreas Bäuerlein. “Rizing does implementations and support for companies with a global footprint. Their basic understanding of different regions, different languages, and different currencies helps a lot.”
“I would look at the internal team structure and identify any gaps against the things your team needs to support in the next two to three years,” says Suchi Kommi. “Then you can find a provider that complements your team by filling in the gaps. I’d also recommend looking at geography and time zones to make sure they’ll be available where and when you need the help.”
Next Steps
We hope these customer comments help your own progress down the HRIS transformation path. If you have questions, Rizing’s Application Management Services are always ready to help – contact us.
