Melding “iron and tech” – that’s how world-class equipment and services company CNH is advancing the time-honored vocations of agriculture and construction workers. To improve business agility and increase productivity, the company is embarking on an HR transformation journey with the goal of fostering a culture of continuous improvement and engagement, supported by an enhanced employee experience.
With a passion for innovation and technology, CNH supplies a full range of agricultural and construction products, including smart, connected machinery and precision farming tools that maximize productivity by using seamless digital technologies such as automation, connectivity, and data analytics. CNH’s brand portfolio comprises highly respected names: Case IH, New Holland, CASE, and New Holland Construction.
A commercial presence in 180 countries, underpinned by its 42 manufacturing plants and 49 R&D centers, enables CNH to optimally collaborate with its customers to deliver technological advancements for the agricultural and construction equipment sectors. By integrating leading technologies into its products, CNH delivers on its purpose of “breaking new ground.”
“We go back a long way. All the way back to 1842, in fact,” says Giovanni Gregorutti, group lead for HRIS Digital Transformation at CNH. “That’s over 180 years of developing pioneering equipment and services for farmers and builders. And everything we do is with those farmers and builders in mind. We are striving to provide the very best machinery and technology to make their lives easier – and their businesses more efficient and profitable.”
An Efficient and Dedicated Team
Representing CNH’s commitment to developing new solutions and ideas are its 40,000 talented employees, spread over 34 countries, who work together in seamless collaboration to deliver specialized products and services for the agriculture and construction industries.
“Our employees are our most valuable asset,” says Roberto Lanzavecchia, head of Global Talent Management at CNH. “A satisfied customer reflects an efficient and dedicated team that shares the same values, holds each other accountable, and strives to deliver the best for our customers.”
The company prides itself on offering a broad range of opportunities for career development, mentorships, leadership development, and training programs. To support employees as they bring their whole selves to work, the company advances a diverse and inclusive workplace and offers work-life balance solutions to fit employees’ needs. In the marketplace for skills and talent, CNH’s reputation for providing a responsive, fair, and industrious workplace culture has earned it recognition as an employer of choice.
Empowering Employees and HR for Increased Productivity
Having used SAP’s on-premise human capital management (HCM) solution since 2009, CNH began to encounter challenges with its legacy software, which struggled to keep up with the dynamic needs of a modern workforce. This resulted in outdated goal setting, performance management, succession planning, and employee feedback. It became clear that CNH needed to move to the cloud for a comprehensive transformation of its HR system.
CNH chose SAP SuccessFactors HCM as the foundation for its cloud-based HR transformation as it offers comprehensive, scalable, and user-friendly solutions that can integrate seamlessly, as well as robust analytics capabilities. This change was necessary, according to Gregorutti, who says, “We knew it was time to make a shift in the terms of improving the employee experience and to leverage the new capabilities, including AI, and moving to SAP SuccessFactors was an obvious choice.”
CNH outlined its goals for the HR evolution, which included identifying critical factors and eliminating non-value-adding activities; improving the overall employee experience to empower employees and the business to deliver more value, better outcomes, and increased productivity; and exploring ways to empower HR to own and solve enterprise-wide issues affecting the business, the workforce, and work-related processes.
Elevating Employee Experience with Streamlined HR Processes
Expediting its vision of empowering its workforce and HR team, CNH started by implementing the SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central solution as its core HR platform for 40,000 employees in 34 countries and integrating it with 10 new payroll platforms within 11 months.
To ring in the new year in January 2024, CNH introduced the SAP SuccessFactors Performance & Goals solution to support all employees for goal setting. The solution can connect to SAP Integration Suite to help enable seamless analytics capabilities that can lead to better data visibility and data-driven decision-making. “We are about to conclude the first year of the performance management cycle using the new module,” Lanzavecchia says, highlighting the value of SAP SuccessFactors Performance & Goals in streamlining processes for HR and employees. “We then went live with the succession module in September 2024, and we’ve just used it for the first time to present to our senior leadership the succession plan and the main talent indicators of our employees, allowing each manager to work on their talent pipeline creation and development.”
As CNH’s transformation journey enters a new phase, it plans to implement the SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting solution by the end of 2024 and the SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding solution by the middle of 2025. In September, it implemented the SAP Archiving and Document Access application by OpenText to make capabilities for archiving documents available. Early next year, it plans to improve integration of this application with SAP SuccessFactors solutions.
Building an Agile, Efficient, and Employee-Centric Workplace
With the first steps in its transformation journey complete, CNH is already experiencing the benefits of cloud-based HR solutions, which are bringing improved efficiency, better data visibility, and greater agility. As a result of streamlining HR processes, CNH has achieved new levels of process optimization, so that HR tasks are managed more efficiently. By reducing administrative burdens, HR teams can increase their focus on higher-level strategic initiatives and time spent with employees.
Thanks to improved data visibility, CNH is able to advance its people strategy and plan long term. Talent management, for example, has improved because succession planning based on talent data enables more effective identification and development of future leaders.
“The transformation has created a more agile, efficient, and employee-centric environment at CNH, enhancing the overall employee experience and fostering a culture of continuous improvement and engagement,” Lanzavecchia says.
Employees now have the benefits of an elevated experience – one of the primary goals of CNH’s HR transformation. With support for continuous feedback and goal setting, employees are engaged and motivated, in part because they are more connected to their goals and receive regular feedback from managers, who are now more accountable for their teams’ development and performance through timely and constructive feedback.
Making Every Employee a Success Story
With modern cloud-based HR solutions in place, CNH now has the capabilities for HR to gain efficiency and achieve greater productivity – plus deliver data-driven insights to the business for improved decision-making. An improved employee experience is leading to better engagement and career development, opening opportunities for each employee to further their success story.
As both Gregorutti and Lanzavecchia see it, this is a promising beginning in CNH’s ongoing HR evolution. Next year brings new possibilities to introduce AI capabilities for HR, as the company evaluates the benefits of implementing the talent intelligence hub in SAP SuccessFactors HCM to help power employee growth and skills development. “CNH has undergone significant and successful transformation over the last three years,” they say. “Keeping this momentum up in a tougher market scenario is imperative. The continued transformation of CNH involves embracing employees’ professional passion, achieving personal fulfilment, and simply having fun.”
Learn more about SAP SuccessFactors HCM.
