Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/124894
Partnership "If nothing else during our journey, we've invested a lot in making the partnership work," remarked Schackman. The journey—which goes by the moniker AZengage—was a transformation of business process and human capital resources. The goals were lofty, and it was an extreme undertaking, but one deemed worthwhile in the end. With a sense of humor, Hardy and Schackman summarized the experience, highlighting the most valuable points for future buyers. Take a good look at yourself first. A transformation of this caliber would see no success by leveraging the outdated HR outsourcing The criteria for the engagement that AstraZeneca brought to market included cost reduction, a strong cultural fit, and a technology solution that would enable them to execute on a global scale. "lift and shift" model. Hardy said that the pharmaceutical company had to embrace an internal review before forming a "We did some transformation within our own organization in partnership to execute its business plan. 2007 and 2008, and then went to the marketplace to see who was around to do business with moving forward. We had challenges Assumptions That Were True and False around being an efficient and organized industry," she recalled. "We were clear about our business strategy—there is no point if you think of it as an HR piece only." The criteria for the engagement that Hardy brought to market included cost reduction, a strong cultural fit, and a technology solution that would enable them to execute on a global scale. In order to roll out the programme in one fell swoop—also known as a "big bang"—she said AstraZeneca had to change its structure, roles, and processes. Change is never an easy thing— especially internally—but it turned out to be a critical success factor. Define your business case and get executive buy-in. AZengage had quite the laundry list of goals. Hardy and her team thoroughly outlined the business case in order to have a clear definition of what the engagement was set to achieve. NorthgateArinso's answer was standardisation: aligning How to Go Live in Two Years solutions and process for all countries. The solution backed by SAP technology was intuitively designed to be easy to use with an employee self-service model available in many languages. Integration varied by country, but the look and feel of the portal was the same. "An implementation in a country is only as good as the HR business partner. They can make or break an implementation," said Schackman. "We tried to tackle that with the support and buy-in." One challenge AZengage faced was that each of the 106 countries undergoing the process was at a different stage in relation to outsourcing—some had experience, while others had [10] HRO TODAY GLOBAL | WINTER 2013