Teva Pharmaceutical has more than 40,000 employees spanning 60 different countries. Originally, the America-Israeli pharmaceutical company had seven shared service centers for all those employees—but in 2018, it decided to condense them into just two.
“Teva faces multiple audits every month, often requiring HR to present as many as 60 employee files. This used to take days, now we can do it in one to two hours”
Dapha Gurland
former global HR planning and governance lead
As Teva’s former global HR planning and governance lead, Daphna Gurland had a major task ahead of her. Previously, the HR team had maintained a paper-filled file room, but they didn’t intend to ship decades of physical documents to the new HR shared services centers. To support the transition, Daphna set out to find a system that could take Teva’s employee files online—without sacrificing the high level of service that Teva strives to provide its people.
This quest led Daphna to UKG HR Service Delivery—and a partnership that was built to last.
Watch the video testimonial with Daphna Gurland
Finding a solution for today and tomorrow
Daphna and her team shopped around for an employee file management solution for a while before settling on UKG. Since Teva is a very large company, the decision to work with a (back then) relatively small partner was an unexpected choice—but Daphna knew it was the right one.
“They had a can-do attitude,” she explains. “We were reassured that we would get what we asked for, and not just in the future—what we saw in the demo was already there. And the second thing was that the demo was very clear. It was obvious that they knew what we in HR were looking for and what we needed.”
Hitting the ground running
After Teva decided to move ahead with UKG, the team held a three-day kick-off meeting. To Daphna’s surprise, this consisted mainly of internal conversations, since the design side of things was a breeze.
“The discussions were about how to globalize our needs,” she says. “We started with implementing the system in the U.S., but we knew that we would need to implement it in other European countries. We needed to configure the system in a way that would suit them all.”
Since Teva’s employees are spread all around the world, this presented a significant challenge for the HR team. Which processes could be standardized globally, and which ones should be tailored to suit local needs? This question keeps many HR leaders up at night during software implementations—but Daphna had the peace of mind she needed.
“The first thing UKG said was, ‘Don’t worry,’” she recalls. “‘We just need you to put everything in Excel spreadsheets: we will configure the system, and you can change everything later on.’ I remember that sentence as something that really took all of the stress out of the room.”
This level of flexibility took some of the pressure off Daphna and her team. Rather than wasting time trying to get every detail perfect before implementation—a task that’s virtually impossible—they could see what worked and make adjustments along the way.
“We knew that whatever we decided, we could always find a solution and reconfigure the system later,” Daphna says. “I think it was the easiest project I’ve ever done.”
Taking HR to new heights
Initially, Teva intended to use its new digital solution to recreate the same experience its paper files had offered. But after realizing how easy the solution was to use, Daphna’s team decided to take things to the next level—integrating the system with SAP SuccessFactors.
Compared to the way things were in the paper days, Daphna says this has led to dramatic improvements on two fronts. The first is the ease with which documents can be retrieved. Now, documents are automatically uploaded to the Document Manager the minute an employee is hired and remain there until the person leaves the company. There’s no need for a ticket or any manual labor to organize and make these files accessible, saving HR a lot of time.
The second key improvement is the ease of responding to audits. As a large pharmaceutical company, Teva faces multiple audits every month, often requiring HR to present as many as 60 employee files. When these files were locked away in filing cabinets, audits were incredibly tedious and time consuming, requiring someone to sift through the piles of documents to find, scan, and send the appropriate documents to the auditing team. Now, everything the HR team needs is right at their fingertips, tucked safely and securely inside their digital file management system, ready to be pulled up at a moment’s notice.
“It used to take days,” Daphna says. “Now we can do it in one to two hours.”
Putting people first
Throughout the implementation journey and beyond, Daphna was greatly impressed by how simple UKG was to implement and use—from the intuitive user interface to the flexibility the system affords. But it was the customer support that cemented the partnership for her.
“I like to work with people,” Daphna says. “This is what UKG has—Our Purpose is People is not just a tag line. What I see in UKG is people, and they’ve helped us all the way.”
