When Campari Group, the sixth largest premium spirits player worldwide, set out to modernize its business operations, it put its people first. It provided its diverse workforce with a modern HR solution that facilitates development and growth throughout the company.
“The primary strategic goals of HR are to attract, develop, and engage our people to support the development of the organization,” said Giorgio Pivetta, head of Group HR at Campari Group.
Campari’s high growth business model focuses on both organic internal growth and external growth through acquisition. In fact, it has acquired 24 companies in the last 22 years and since 2004 has expanded operations from five in-market companies to 20.
“The growth has been dramatic of course in terms of business size, portfolio of brands, and so on, but also in terms of diversity and complexity of our workforce,” said Pivetta.
Transforming HR for Growth
“Toasting Life Together” is Campari Group’s mantra. And being the ambassadors of that culture is embedded in the DNA of the HR organization. “It is important that we nurture our culture around the world and at the same time build a pipeline of internal leaders and managers that can lead and sustain the evolution of the culture in a growth mode,” explained Pivetta.
Accelerating and easing the onboarding of new employees and contractors is essential to the growth strategy and requires HR to have a broad set of business support skills. “HR has to change the way it used to work and expand the portfolio and scope of activities. It must act like a business partner first, then as a functional expert. It used to be the other way around,” said Pivetta.
To function as a business partner, HR needed a modern and flexible HR solution that was integrated with the rest of the company. “From a systems perspective, we need an environment that supports harmonized and synchronized global processes and practices. Because it doesn’t make any sense to reinvent the wheel each time we bring in a new company,” explained Pivetta.
It also needed a system that would bring efficiency, effectiveness, and speed to the HR organization so it could better support line management. “Rather than crunching numbers and spending 80% of our time on collecting and forwarding information, HR needs a system that provides the right support for decision making,” said Pivetta.
Building a Solution for Success
To meet its requirements, Campari Group turned to SAP Success Factors solutions. “SAP Success Factors gives us the integration, global standards, high speed, and user friendliness that we need moving forward,” said Pivetta.
Campari Group is implementing SAP Success Factors in phases. “We want to build up the global infrastructure. We started with performance management and will continue with talent development, recruitment, and compensation,” explained Pivetta.
“SAP Success Factors is a cloud-based solution, which means it’s an agile, user friendly system that is automatically updated with standard best practices. The opportunity to get new functionality and features without spending time designing and redesigning is a paradigm shift,” said Pivetta.
Integration between the different HR functions within the suite also gives Campari a common template for its global business processes. “We used to have different HR systems and processes across the business, so SAP Success Factors is a big step forward for us. It is going to become the global standard for Campari’s HR practices,” explained Pivetta.
Satisfying Diverse Needs
Standardization will bring a lot of efficiency to the company. Many processes will be faster and more simple. For example, managing recruitment and staffing will be less complex. “The integrated system will make it much easier to manage the complexity we have with internal job postings and staffing movements,” said Pivetta. And line managers who are already using the new performance management functionality said the system is quick and easy to use.
Campari Group has a diverse and complex workforce. It spans 65 nationalities, multiple generations, and everyone from manufacturing workers in the plants to the people in sales and marketing. The new solution will enable both HR and other line management to focus on value added activities and strategic decision-making, rather than managing transactions.
“When the full SAP Success Factors suite is implemented we will have a system centered around the needs of our diverse employees, not just a tool for HR,” concluded Pivetta.
Top image via Campari Group http://bit.ly/2DZtTZJ #SAP #SAPCloud #AI
