Väderstad Global HCM Project: Fuelling Strategic Growth
Summary
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Global Expansion and Innovation in Agriculture: Väderstad, a Swedish family-owned business, has evolved into a global leader in agriculture, with a presence across continents including Europe, North America, and Australia.
The Väderstad Global HCM Project: As part of its digital transformation, Väderstad initiated the Global Human Capital Management (HCM) Project, aiming to support strategic growth by improving global HR processes, enhancing data quality, and advancing digital capabilities. This project is a step towards streamlining operations, reducing manual work, and fostering a data-driven and agile organisational culture.
Workday and Kainos as partners: The project involved a detailed procurement process, resulting in the selection of Workday as the HCM system partner and Kainos as the implementation partner. Phase 1, focusing on core HCM functions and integration across 20 countries, was completed on time successfully and within budget by March 2023.
Continued Improvement in Phase 2: Phase 2, initiated in Spring 2023, concentrates on Talent & Performance, Advanced Compensation, emphasising increased change and process focus. This phase involves extensive process workshops and design activities to ensure alignment and efficient future process implementation.
Recognition and Project Success: The Global HCM Project received acclaim as one of the top three HR projects in Sweden in 2023. Its success is attributed to thorough preparation, strategic project anchoring, effective change management, adaptability, and a strong partnership between Väderstad and Kainos. This recognition highlights Väderstad's dedication to long-term improvement and innovation in its operational and strategic endeavors.
Väderstad: Redefining Global Agriculture Standards
Väderstad, a paradigm of Swedish ingenuity, is more than just a family-owned business; it's a global agricultural leader. Originating in the charming town of Väderstad, Sweden, this company has spread its wings far and wide, marking its presence on every continent. Driven by a fervent passion to revolutionise modern agriculture, Väderstad combines deep-seated knowledge with a goal to innovate and evolve constantly.
With a team of about 2,000 dedicated professionals, Väderstad specialises in manufacturing top-notch farm machinery. Their expertise covers crucial agricultural activities, including cultivation, seedbed preparation, and precise seed placement. What sets Väderstad apart is their vision: to guarantee perfect crop emergence, thus maximising yields and bolstering the prosperity of farmers across the globe.
Väderstad's influence stretches across international borders, with significant operations in key agricultural regions. They have a robust presence in countries like Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, and the USA.
In each of these countries, Väderstad brings its innovative approach and high-quality machinery, tailored to meet local farming needs and conditions.
Their diverse product portfolio includes state-of-the-art tillage, seeding, and planting equipment. Renowned for their exceptional quality and service, Väderstad's components set global benchmarks, especially in wear parts.
Since its inception in 1962, Väderstad has grown from a local entity into an international powerhouse, constantly evolving yet remaining true to its mission of enhancing agricultural productivity and sustainability worldwide.
Fuelling Strategic Growth with a Global HCM System
The Global HCM Project is part of a broader digital roadmap for Väderstad.
A pre-study was concluded in 2020 and preparation phase in 2021.
The overall issue addressed was how HCM can support strategic growth in Väderstad. The blockers identified included a lack of consistent global HR processes, poor data quality and a lack of digital support.
A future state was defined as:
- Establish and develop global HR processes
- Streamline and simplify HR for managers
- Support the organisation's globalisation, growth and digitalisation goals
- Decrease administration and manual work within HR
- Become more data-driven, agile and proactive to enable analysis of employee data
- Move towards a good digital employee experience
- Increase employee engagement and offer employees more growth opportunities within Väderstad
Several scenarios to deliver the above were investigated in detail. Finally, Väderstad decided to implement a modern global HCM system.
A thorough procurement process was initiated to select a system and implementation partner. In 2022, a contract was signed with Workday as the HCM system partner and Kainos as the implementation partner. The procurement process was successful and included:
- Well defined project goals and effects communicated to vendors.
- Thorough work with RFP including requirements, evaluations, onsite demos and reference customer calls.
- Involvement of IT and HR from the start.
Phase 1 Success: On-Time and within Budget
In April 2022 Phase 1 of the Workday implementation started.
The scope of Phase 1 included Core HCM, Core Compensation, Recruiting, Learning (including Extended Enterprise), Workday Journeys and integrations to be implemented in 20 countries across Europe, North America and Canada.
The timeline of the project was 12 months from start of plan phase to end of hyper care.
The project was integrated on executive level with CIO and CHRO in the steering committee. The project covered 3 streams: Process, IT and Change.
Process covered all functional areas and included process responsible for core, compensation, on/offboarding, recruitment and learning as well as SME’s and reference groups. The stream was led by HR.
The IT stream managed data conversion, integrations and QA and was led by IT.
The Change stream managed communications and training and was led by the project manager from Väderstad.
Clear roles and responsibilities and a well-defined governance model were important, but even more important was working as one team across teams and geographies.
“I think the key to the success of the project is that we have been working together as one team across HR, IT and Change Management”.
During Phase 1, Väderstad decided to add Payroll, Absence and Time Tracking (PATT) for USA and Canada to the scope. This project stream was coordinated tightly to the global project, but delivered by local teams in mainly Canada from both Väderstad and Kainos.
Phase 1 went live on time and on budget in March 2023.
Phase 2: Elevating Process Design and Change Management
Phase 2 was initiated in Spring 2023. Väderstad went live with Talent & Performance and Advanced Compensation with global scope, and with Expenses for Sweden in October 2023.
Another procurement cycle on the implementation partner was conducted and Kainos were reselected. Phase 1 was evaluated thoroughly as part of the selection process, and one outcome was a mutual decision to increase the Change and Process focus in Phase 2.
As a result, the Kainos Change Management team supported Väderstad in several upfront process workshops at the beginning of the project during the Planning phase for key Talent & Performance and Advanced Compensation.
These workshops ensured alignment between the various HR stakeholders and processes linked to Workday, and allowed Väderstad to understand and define their future E2E process ahead of technical design workshops. This saved a lot of time and effort from a functional perspective and reduced the risk of rework on processes post go-live.
The process design work covered four main activities:
- Defining vision and desired outcomes – understanding key pain points and principles for the future design of the processes.
- Process Design workshops – development of a Mural Board (digital whiteboard) specific to Väderstad’s key Talent & Performance and Advanced Compensation processes, covering both on and off system steps.
- Creation of process visual outputs – The outputs of the workshops were presented back in an easy to read, intuitive visual clearly outlining the key tasks of each process, including who will carry them out as well as whether the steps are on or off system.
- Playback and handover of deliverables.
This work led to Väderstad being able to make sound design decisions on a solid foundation, while having included the business needs early on in the project.
“The Change approach on this phase of the project was invaluable as we were able to fully understand the key processes and their impact on our business stakeholders, which enabled us to make key business decisions early on in the project. The direction provided by Kainos was clear and concise, and we were able to use best practice recommendations from the team to inform our decisions”
Award-Winning Global HCM Success
In Fall 2023 the Global HCM Project was nominated as one of the three best HR projects in Sweden in 2023.
As part of the nomination, the project was evaluated among the partners and the following factors was deemed central to the success of the project:
- Thorough preparation and selection phase
- Strategic anchoring of project
- Reference group involvement
- Dedicated team from IT and HR
- Clear governance model including mandate for decisions in project group
- Perseverance and long-term horizon (a key ingredient of Väderstad in general)
- Change Management as part of the project from day one
- Ability to adapt (examples: adding PATT for Americas to the scope and changing approach for phase 2)
- Honest and tight dialogue between Väderstad and Kainos
- Well-executed project plan managed by Väderstad and Kainos project managers