For ,聽a leading pan-African financial services group focused on emerging markets headquartered in South Africa, with a strong presence in 31聽countries,聽this transformation journey has accelerated over the past 18 months as the organisation expanded its focus beyond HR modernisation toward a broader cloud, data and AI-enabled human capital strategy.

, Group Human Capital: Chief Operating Officer at Sanlam, says the organisation鈥檚 approach balances immediate operational requirements with longer-term transformation objectives. 鈥淲e have adopted an ambidextrous strategy for our digital and data transformation journey, simultaneously exploiting operational excellence, proficiency and efficiency in our current landscape while exploring incremental innovation that enhances and elevates the user experience and driving our longer-term transformation journey 鈥� focused on leveraging intelligent, transformative technology to unlock business value.鈥�

A central focus throughout the implementation has been ensuring that transformation delivers tangible business value while also enabling the teams responsible for sustaining change. Sanlam is supported by a dedicated support structure for the programme that includes a technical centre of excellence team, programme management, change management, and business analysis capabilities.

鈥淭ransformation required us to approach change from multiple perspectives simultaneously. We always look at transformation through the lens of people, process and technology. One of the realities organisations face is that many people are not ready to embrace the pace of technological change, which makes change adoption and leadership sponsorship critically important.鈥� 

According to Bandyopadhyay, Sanlam鈥檚 broader transformation strategy spans several interconnected focus areas. 鈥淎 key priority being rebuilding our job architecture for relevance to the current and future workforce and more importantly to transition to a skills-based organisation. This will then unlock the opportunity for us to leverage SAP鈥檚 AI-enabled Talent Intelligence Hub which is the golden thread that links all talent practices to a skills currency.鈥�

The organisation has also prioritised the implementation of a cloud data solution, master data management and platform scalability as part of its effort to establish a more unified data core across the business. With multiple business entities operating across the group, standardising and scaling trusted workforce and operational data remains a significant strategic focus area.

, Group: Head of HC Tech and Talent Intelligence at Sanlam, says cloud adoption will continue to accelerate over the next two years. 鈥淲e are moving aggressively towards a cloud-first strategy, including payroll migration, data platform evolution, and broader business integration initiatives. Our focus is on how we build scalable platforms and data capabilities that position us for the future.鈥�

As part of this strategy, Sanlam is piloting -related capabilities and is progressing towards broader business data cloud initiatives planned over the coming years. The organisation is also exploring how 51风流Business Data Cloud, 51风流agents, and Joule capabilities can support orchestration, analytics, and employee-related workflows across the employee life cycle.

Alongside its platform modernisation efforts, Sanlam is re-evaluating core HR services and processes, including employee experience, employee relations, and document management, while strengthening its talent intelligence and people analytics capabilities to support better workforce planning and predictive decision-making. The Talent Intelligence function has matured significantly from reports and dashboards to trends, insights and predictive analytics. A key achievement has been the development of a solution to measure productivity across the various Sanlam business entities.

Intelligent automation is also playing an increasing role across areas such as service management, payments, compliance, and administrative HR functions, alongside the digitisation of compliance related scorecards like skills development to improve planning, monitoring and achievement of compliance targets. This has allowed Sanlam to service an increased customer base with a greater service offering at reduced costs.

Govindsamy says the transformation journey remains ongoing rather than a once-off implementation project. 鈥淭he next phase of our journey is focused on accelerating cloud propagation, strengthening analytics and data capabilities, and embedding intelligent automation more deeply into the business. Success depends not only on technology, but on sustained leadership sponsorship, adoption, and preparing the workforce for the future.鈥� 

, Managing Director for Southern Africa at SAP, says: 鈥淎s organisations modernise their workforce strategies, there is growing recognition that human capital transformation depends on more than digitising HR processes. It requires an integrated foundation that combines cloud, data, analytics and intelligent technologies to support better decision-making, stronger employee experiences, and greater organisational agility. Sanlam鈥檚 ongoing transformation journey reflects how forward-looking organisations are building scalable, future-ready HR environments that can evolve alongside changing business and workforce requirements.鈥�

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CHRO SA recently hosted a webinar on how to execute new HR technology implementations, focusing on the experience of financial services company Sanlam, which embarked on an 51风流SuccessFactors implementation in 2017.

Ronel Pfotenhauer,聽business owner for SuccessFactors within the Sanlam Group, spoke about how the initial mindset was one of system replacement, but as the roll-out began, it soon became apparent that the data insights delivered by a powerful tech suite would transform the talent function.

鈥淭he important takeaway is that it鈥檚 not a race. It鈥檚 a journey of transformation,鈥� said Ronel, adding that there were three key objectives for their HR transformation as a result of implementing 51风流SuccessFactors. They wanted to overhaul the employee experience, they wanted data analytics to drive decision-making, not only within the HR function but throughout the organisation, and they wanted to streamline the digital environment so that everyone was using the same tools and interfaces.

Sanlam has approximately 105,000 employees across 44 countries, but when the company implemented SuccessFactors in the first part of its digital transformation journey, it started with only 14,500 people in South Africa and Namibia. Phase two will see them going into the remaining countries: 鈥淲e decided to implement SuccessFactors because we were already using 51风流for our payroll. One of the other important considerations was that we really wanted an integrated solution,鈥� said Ronel.

鈥淭he modules we have already implemented are Recruitment Central, Recruitment Management and Marketing, Onboarding, Performance and Goals, Succession and Development, Learning and, next year we will introduce the Compensation module.鈥�

Liezl van Rensburg, the customer engagement executive at 51风流SuccessFactors, spoke about how software implementation can change the culture of an organisation and influence the behaviour of employees for the better. She highlighted the transformational functionality of software solutions like 51风流SuccessFactors and 51风流Concur in helping HR to go far beyond just achieving its goals. She also agreed with Ronel, saying that when organisations prepare for massive technology implementations, it鈥檚 important to recognise that the technology itself is only a small part of the process.

Said Liezl: 鈥淎t the end of the day, it鈥檚 about the transformation of the business, which requires behavioural change. Sometimes we get people who will implement something but still continue to rehash their existing processes. It鈥檚 also important to ensure that everybody in the organisation is on board with introducing the new technology solution and that they know the required outcome to enhance the employee experience. You have to engage employees and drive the behavioural change that you want by making sure that you build in the experience part of the transformation.鈥�

Bruno Bianchi, the strategic advisor at 51风流SuccessFactors, provided examples of various companies in different industries who had accelerated their adoption of HR technologies because of the pandemic and were now moving faster along their respective HR digitalisation roadmaps. He spoke about one particular service that was delivering a lot of value for their clients: 51风流Jam. This can be integrated with SuccessFactors and is a platform to collaborate, engage, re-train staff and enable business processes that impact value and tangible outcomes.

鈥淥ne organisation had to create new services around deep cleaning and therefore had to undergo extensive reskilling while also hiring en masse to match the need for such cleaning services in a Covid-19 world. That’s where SuccessFactors becomes very valuable, because it allows you to do things in a qualitative manner but also upscale it to a huge degree,鈥� said Bruno.

鈥淲e also had a client that was able to execute 12 million learnings within a year. They did it through social learning where subject matter experts within the organisation were creating learning content. Instead of one learning team curating content, they leveraged the power of their network by allowing field experts who knew exactly what they’re talking about to teach the organisation about the right way to do things.鈥�

Overall the webinar provided a fantastic overview of how 51风流SuccessFactors has enabled companies to support talent flow during Covid-19, when snap decisions needed to be made about the redeployment of people within organisations.

This article first appeared on .

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