As Coles seeks to become Australia’s most trusted retailer, its technology wasn’t aligned with strategic ambitions.
Coles’ retail network of 2,800 sites across five major brands was running approximately 40 different systems – some of which were legacy platforms that were highly customised, unique to each brand, and supported by manual forms with numerous entry points for accessing data.
These systems and processes weren’t just time consuming and prone to errors; but it meant record keeping lacked a central repository, leaving people’s transactions and data vulnerable. The organisation needed a more sustainable and intelligent approach to managing its people, performance, talent, and finances.
In building a more standardised, digitised, and efficient approach to initiating and approving employee transactions and payroll processes, Coles wanted to create a seamless employee experience, from recruitment and onboarding through to performance and succession planning.
Building an intelligent suite of solutions
As Coles was already running HR Core and Payroll on legacy SAP solutions, Accenture were a natural partner choice for implementing SAP SuccessFactors (EC/Talent), moving Payroll (ECP) to the cloud, and deploying Ariba and S/4HANA for finance – creating an end-to-end digitalisation across the retail group’s systems.
This suite of intelligent solutions has consolidated Coles’ disparate systems, functions, and touchpoints into a single source of truth and access. The retailer’s SuccessFactors platform, ‘myhub’ has simplified Coles’ P&C operating model, empowering its people through a centralised point for reviewing and updating employment details, documents, and other important data.
Managers operate more efficiently and autonomously when recruiting, managing, and remunerating their teams. Administrators working on people- and pay-related transactions now have an intelligent, integrated system with one entry point, as well as superior guardrails for minimising error and rework. By adopting best practice and a robust technology suite to support those processes, workflow is more streamlined and compliancy risks reduced across Coles Group.
myhub’s launch was a huge milestone for Coles and a significant investment to improve its systems and processes, transforming the experience for team members. The consolidation of many people and culture (P&C) systems has enabled Coles to unlock pace and improve effectiveness, making it easier to get things done.
Implementing significant change while facing the pandemic outbreak further highlighted the importance of building a robust system that enables Coles’ people, breaks down silos across brands, and sets the digital foundation for futureproofing the business.
Evolving with Coles’ market and needs
Using myhub, Coles has eliminated technical debt, reduced TCO, and transformed various ways of working – providing a cloud platform for the future to enable further innovation and continued evolution of the team member experience.
Feedback has highlighted significant improvement in experiences for line managers, team members, and P&C. An internal engagement survey noted that within the P&C shared-services team, innovation climbed from 78 per cent pre-myhub to 91 per cent post-myhub, with 100 per cent of team members confident to share ideas that enable Coles to work faster and more efficiently.
The implementation of SuccessFactors represented the largest investment and coordinated implementation of a HR platform in Coles’ 100+ year history. The retailer now has a centralised framework that provides insight, leading to continuous process and functionality improvement. With SAP’s solutions, Coles has the technology and resources to further enhance it system landscape, paving the way toward automation and further intelligent enhancements.
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