Sariba is an HR IT consultancy and trusted UKG reseller. Headquartered in Oslo and employing around 100 people in Norway, Sweden and Spain, Sariba delivers products, services and consulting in HR strategy, processes and technology.
Well established in Norway for many years, the company is growing strongly as it expands across Europe. Revenues grew 30% year-on-year over the last 12 months, the business recruiting 35 new employees over the same period. Similar growth is expected in the coming year.
The company has established a central HR department with two HR managers – one for Norway and Sweden, and one for Spain – to allow for the significant regulatory differences between Spain and the Nordic countries. The HR manager for Spain is also responsible for recruiting, onboarding and HR service delivery across all three geographies.
Challenges
Sariba had a large number of centrally stored HR-related documents, accessed by employees through team-specific sites and by request to specific individuals.
This made documents difficult to access, with delays arising if requests were made when responsible individuals were not available. Visibility of missing documents, or those in need of update, was limited, and while compliance was effectively managed, this was achieved by largely manual processes which Sariba wanted to automate and streamline.
Managers had limited ownership of their employees’ information which restricted their ability to understand them and their work activity.
As an HR IT consultancy, Sariba specifically wanted to model good use of the technology they were implementing for their customers – “To apply the medicine we were recommending,” as Lionel Layerle, Managing Director at Sariba, puts it.
Sariba therefore wanted to digitise their existing centrally stored HR documents and make them more easily available to employees and managers, streamlining processes and managing document access and storage by rules, an intelligent system and a portal for users instead of by email requests to managers.
They were keen to make incremental improvements to their HR service delivery rather than attempting to replace their entire system at one go. “I wanted to start simply and then continue growing over time with the solution, instead of creating a huge project on Day One” says Layerle. They therefore decided to begin with document management and compliance processes, with document creation to be addressed later.
Solutions
Sariba chose UKG HR Service Delivery (HRSD) because of the excellent value for money it offers. Layerle explains: “There’s a great business case to be made for UKG HRSD. Compared to other solutions, the capabilities it offers at the price point are really competitive.”
With the necessary skills to handle the implementation in-house, Sariba rolled the solution out to all three countries at the same time, over a ten-week period. “We wanted to get the solution implemented quickly,” says Layerle. “To get it up and running and start seeing the benefits.”
During the implementation, over a thousand documents were digitised. Digitisation is continuing, and Layerle expects to have digitised up to 2,000 documents once the process is complete.
A key challenge during the implementation was to secure consistent adoption of the new system across the business. “We’ve been quite strict about it,” Layerle observes, “responding to errors not by managing them for people, but by asking them to correct their mistakes, using the system correctly. This way we establish the right ways of doing things, changing behaviours.”
The next stage will be to undertake some evaluation work before building new forms to automate processes that currently run on Microsoft SharePoint. The goal is to end up with a single point of access for all requests, accelerating adoption of the new system. Following that, Layerle will turn his attention to document generation.
“There’s a great business case to be made for UKG HRSD. Compared to other solutions, the capabilities it offers at the price point are really competitive.”
Managing Director
Results
Layerle estimates the total number of documents that will have been digitised, to be managed by UKG HRSD, will be between 1,500 and 2,000. He characterises this as a quick win, and the first stage on a longer path that the business will take. “We’re not trying to revolutionise everything at once,” he explains, “but to improve the every-day life of employees and managers as we take each step.”
Further benefits include easier access to essential documents, streamlined compliance processes and a reduction in the reliance on paper documents. These are all basic hygiene requirements, Layerle says, expected by Sariba employees because of the nature of the business. They should be ‘business as usual’ and, thanks to UKG HRSD, they are.
As managers and employees have made increasing use of the system, questions as to where to find documents and how to get things done have become less prevalent.
Layerle cites Sariba’s internal candidate referral scheme as an example of this. “If an employee recommends Sariba as an employer to a friend and their friend is employed here, the employee gets a bonus payment,” he explains. “Previously there was a lot of looking for documentation in this process – who sent what to whom and when – but now it’s all automated with everything available through UKG HRSD. It’s a great example of one of those small wins.”
Despite HRSD being just the first step in Sariba’s longer term plan, the benefits are clear already, with managers and employees alike no longer needing to go searching for HR documents, able to devote more time and effort to higher value, more rewarding activity. “It’s all about process improvement, which we’re heavily focused on,” notes Layerle, “and empowering employees and managers to do their job without having to ask multiple people in order to get a process done.”
Meanwhile the solution requires little technical competence from the customer. “You don’t need a lot of consultant hours – most companies should be able to handle maintenance and making changes in house,”
Layerle says. Layerle is pleased with the support Sariba received from UKG during the implementation, noting the comprehensive information and easy access to UKG technical staff when questions arose.
