BeOne: ensuring growth and smooth customer experience go hand in hand
As businesses grow, so does their need for efficient processes and powerful tools. More built-in reporting possibilities, for example, are capabilities that companies with large talent pools can’t go without. Manually creating monthly or quarterly absence reports for hundreds of employees isn’t simply time consuming; it also comes with a high risk of human error.
At SD Worx, we have tools that respond to all the HR needs of a company, no matter their size. Digital capabilities and automation are necessary if we want to realise our mission to spark success at the hearts of organisations so they and their people can thrive.
“There’s a tool (or three) for that”
In this age of digital transformation, businesses and their employees are struggling with an enormous abundance of available tools, often leading to lower productivity and growth. Not only is it difficult to juggle multiple tools to perform daily tasks, tools are regularly replaced because they no longer meet the company’s needs, creating a never-ending learning curve. As a result, companies end up making huge investments every time they introduce a new tool.
At work and in life
In our private lives, we’re used to digital luxury. We can find a tool or an app for just about anything: checking the weather, booking a flight, storing our pictures – even tuning instruments and planning meals. What’s more, multiple tools for all of these activities exist, each with a slightly different mix of functionalities. As users, we can easily choose whichever app suits our needs or preferences best.
At work, that’s rarely the case. Many tools come in standard packages and leave little room for customisation or personalisation – without significant investments in software development, of course.
Rethinking the basics
“In our current portfolio, we offer a payroll package specifically for SMEs as well as one for larger companies”, Dominique Tassent, portfolio director at SD Worx People Solutions, explains. “They are completely different solutions. As a result, when a customer grows and wants other functionalities, he has to switch tools.”
Over the last few years, SD Worx has received an increasing number of questions from companies interested in combining the functionalities of different payroll tools. “We’re so used to being able to tailor tools and apps to our liking that we expect the same flexibility in the software we use at work”, Dominique Tassent goes on to say.
“As a people solutions provider, we saw it as our duty to improve our customers’ experiences. On the one hand by keeping the need to switch between tools low and offering them easier customization. We launched the BeOne project to respond to this challenge.”
– Dominique Tassent , portfolio director at SD Worx People Solutions
Program managers Patrick Maes and Tom Van Buggenhout lead the 5 teams working on this project. “Our goal is to make our current SME Payroll tool completely modular so that when a company needs extra functionalities, they can simply be added to the package at the click of a mouse”, Patrick Maes explains. “We took three important steps in 2019 toward achieving this goal.”
A new, more agile approach
Tom Van Buggenhout continues: “The very first step of the project was to start from scratch. We had already defined a project roadmap at the end of 2018. But since our Digital Transformation Office trained us to work in a more agile way at the start of 2019, we immediately applied our new knowledge to the BeOne roadmap.”
One of the main drivers of agile development is the continuous processing of customer feedback. “In the past, we would have never offered a customer a product with features that were only finished at a basic level – but that’s exactly the approach we used with BeOne. We rapidly introduced basic versions and prototypes to collect feedback about what met customers’ needs and what needed to be changed.”
Getting the back end ready
The second big achievement was the revamp of the SME payroll tool. Patrick Maes: “Not only did we give the solution a completely new look, but we also made sure that certain changes could be applied to specific customers. Doing so was necessary to approach the third hurdle: a pilot test with a first user.”
The next step was to identify a customer interested in piloting the solution. “We found the ideal candidate within the SD Worx family”, Patrick Maes continues. “Protime, which is part of SD Worx People Solutions, started out as a small SME and has grown rapidly over the past several years. Despite this growth, they continue to prefer the SME payroll tool because of its simpler workflows. At the same time, the Protime team appreciated the automation functionalities offered by the tool for bigger companies, as they reduce manual workloads and have more reporting functionalities. So, when we pitched our project to Protime and invited them to be our first test user, they immediately got on board. In this case, the biggest challenge was to get everything ready in the new version of the SME payroll tool in time for Protime’s January 2020 payroll.”
Sneak peek for 2020
Spoiler alert: everything went smoothly and all Protime employees were paid correctly and on time. The project teams are now working hard to make more functionalities available in the new solution and to prepare for the next test with more pilot users.
Putting learnings into practice
In today’s digitally enabled environment, a key competitive differentiator is an organisation’s ability to effectively integrate new or evolving business processes into the working methods of its people. The BeOne project proves that SD Worx has every resource needed – the right talent, skillsets and ways of working – to achieve great results.
“For us, learning and innovating are like breathing, inspiring us to always go beyond.” – Cathy Geerts, chief HR officer at SD Worx People Solutions
Become an expert and never stop learning
“As an HR company, we know how important it is to invest in our people and their continuous development. For us, learning and innovating are like breathing, inspiring us to always go beyond”, chief HR officer at SD Worx People Solutions Cathy Geerts explains. “Throughout the year, we organise multiple training courses on diverse topics, from languages and soft skills like effective team communication to change management and mindfulness. That’s no coincidence: with our complete learning and development offer, our employees and SD Worx continuously invest to stay relevant in the digital world. I’m very proud of the BeOne teams’ achievements and inspired by their hunger to drive innovation. It shows that our human capital is ready for the future!”
“Both employees and customers benefit from our transformation”
Although the project wasn’t initiated by the Transformation Office, SD Worx People Solutions chief transformation officer Tom Saeys and his team indirectly contributed to its success. “I’m pleased to see SD Worx colleagues implement what they learned during our transformation wave”,Tom Saeys says. “It’s great that the BeOne team has fully embraced the agile way of working. While the Transformation Office focuses on making our internal processes more efficient and rethinking our enterprise tooling stack, BeOne proves that our customers also reap the benefits of internal evolutions. The project is a nice example of how the Transformation Office works together with project teams to take our company to new heights in digitalisation and customer centricity.”
