Ryder System, the truck and van rental company, had a unique HR challenge: The business needed an effective and up-to-date employee portal to serve its 40,000 white, gray and blue-collar employees in the US and Canada .
This HR technology project is more than just building a replacement for the late 1990s and early 2000s employee intranets, according to Galyna Kruglov, senior group director of HR Employee Services Operations for Ryder System. The company also had to upgrade its decades-old SAP HR system, migrate all data and HR solutions to the cloud, and offer HR support that modern employees expect from a name-brand employer.
“We had a very outdated HRIS system and we didn’t have a lot of consistency in our processes,” Kruglov admits. “Our employees, including HR, believe it or not, don’t have direct access to employee information. We have very antiquated processes to do the simplest things like change an employee’s address, promote a people, changing compensation and more.”
Kruglov and his team began looking at solution providers in 2018 in what he called “a long-awaited project” and after receiving support from executive leadership, Ryder began evaluating new HR solutions in earnest. after a year. Even at the beginning of the selection process, Kruglov and his colleagues knew the company needed to move away from a fleet of back-office servers and employee workstations to uploading all of people’s data and software to cloud. Offering HR applications and support for smartphones is also a must.
“That’s one of the conditions where the project has to move forward. Everything has to be in the cloud,” he said, adding that he and his team are also looking into a suite of employee engagement and HCM tools which supports the entire employee life cycle.
Ryder selected ServiceNow HR Service Delivery, IT Service Management and its unified employee portal Employee Center Pro to create MyRyder, the first hiring company employee portal. The goal is to improve employee experiences and boost productivity for employees working at desks and in the field.
The implementation encountered some challenges early in the pandemic when Ryder went into lockdown and had to pause some elements of the transition for several weeks before the HR solutions went live on July 1, 2020.
AAs part of the transition, Ryder created an HR service call center and planned to train its HR employees onsite for two weeks using mock phone calls and HR requests. The “dress rehearsal,” as Kruglov calls it, needs to be moved to a remote environment for the HR team working from home.
“It was a big hit because the teams were suddenly so far apart but the last bits of implementing the system weren’t that hard because you were still on the computer,” he recalls. “But where it really hit home for us and called for some very creative solutions was our service dress rehearsal.”
“We have partners in the implementation but even they are not there [much] experience because no one has ever lived remotely,” he said. “We had to figure it all out on the fly.”
According to Sancho Pinto, senior director of product management and employee experience for ServiceNow, Ryder executives understood that they needed easy-to-use technology that could be accessed from anywhere—whether on a mobile device, desktop or laptop. “We also understood that Ryder employees had difficulty finding information such as Benefits or Payroll and often did not know who to ask or where to go for help,” he said.
“As a result, employees rely heavily on their local HR organization, which then gets bogged down with simple requests and can’t focus on high-impact work,” says Pinto.
MyRyder currently allows employees to access most HR services a single sign-on credential from most mobile devices. Starting next week, it will also support all HR applications on mobile devices. This will be provided to employees in Ryder’s offices and in the field access to all HR information, such as inquiry request forms and other useful resources.
Working with Ryder’s IT team is a key part of the HR department’s success at ServiceNow. “It was truly a transformation project that crossed through HR, IT and finance,” he recalls Kruglov. But because the ServiceNow migration was a joint project, he said the HR, IT and finance teams took responsibility for their respective parts of the migration.
Kruglov added, “Everyone supported their own work stream and collaborated well, I would say, towards the common goal.”
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