Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/227268
First-Hand Account Unleash the Value of HR Insight from a practitioner that led a major global transformation. By Debbie Bolla Norman Ross has an interesting view of HR operations from his side of the desk. The global vice president of HR shared services for Motorola Solutions Inc. recently led the HR part of the separation of Motorola's Mobile Phone business from Motorola Solutions when both organizations became independent companies in January 2011. Since then, he has helped drive the transformation of the global HR function through a two-year project in more than 63 countries and 23,000 employees—details below. How did you vet Aon Hewitt? What was the process around that selection? We spent the early part of 2011 looking closely at our HR service delivery model, being clear on what we would outsource, what we would retain inside, and agreeing how we wanted to deliver services to our employees around the world. Once we were clear on that, we ran a very rigorous request for proposal (RFP) process where we invited five of the major global HR BPO providers to discuss what they could do. We were coming to the end of a 10year arrangement with ACS Xerox and we knew the HR BPO market had changed significantly during that time—as had our business model. So it was important that we took a fresh look at everything we were doing and make sure that we found an organization that we could develop a strong partnership with and drive a much more standard approach to our "back office" administration and frontline services we offer employees. We involved the broader HR organization in the RFP process ensuring we had a good representation from around the world. We [60] HRO TODAY MAGAZINE | NOVEMBER 2013 found that Aon Hewitt was able to meet our requirements in terms of quality, cost, and service. In addition, as we'd gone through the RFP and contracting processes we found that Aon Hewitt fit very well with our culture and values, making them a good fit for us as a long-term partner that we could work with to continuously improve the way we deliver HR services. The partnership aimed to improve your organization's HR portal, payroll system, and performance management processes. Why was this the case? We had separated the company into two independent companies in January 2011 so Motorola Solutions was going through a rapid cultural change and these were all part of that change. Some of our payroll systems were outdated and had been put in place when we were an organization of more than 100,000 employees. So in some countries we had a payroll system designed and managed for a much larger and diverse population. Our largest payroll—which was in the United States—was running on an older version of ADP, and we took the opportunity to upgrade that system at the same time we were changing from SAP to Workday as our HR transaction system. In many ways it made sense to make these changes concurrently, although at the time it definitely added complexity. We had to stay very focused in order to make sure everything went as planned. In Europe, we took the opportunity to move to a single payroll vendor—Ceridian—where previously we had a series of local vendors providing payroll services at the country level. It's fair to say we still have a lot to do on the payroll front but we've