Arla Foods improves SuccessFactors® engagement, reduces errors with WalkMe Digital Adoption Platform

Arla Foods, a global dairy powerhouse with 18,000 employees, adopted SuccessFactors® to ensure consistent HR processes. Early use of the software, however, resulted in employee frustration, errors, and poor user experience. The company turned to WalkMe Digital Adoption Platform to address these challenges. As a result, Arla Foods reports:

• Fewer data entry errors in SuccessFactors®
• Improved employee engagement and productivity
• Reduction in support burden and time spent performing back-office tasks

Cooperatively owned by over 9,700 farmers, Arla Foods is the fourth largest dairy company in the world, with more than 18,000 employees. With such a large, dispersed workforce, standardizing HR processes has been a key focus for the company’s leadership team.
Nikolaj Petersen, Global Head of Business Change Management, Communication, and Performance at Arla Foods, embarked on a journey to implement a more standardized, self-service global recruitment process using SuccessFactors®. The goal of the self-service implementation was to create scalable processes while easing reliance on support and ensuring GDPR compliance. “This new change was about standardizing internally while trying to humanize externally,” Petersen says.

The shift to a self-service recruitment process had its challenges, taking hiring managers away from key initiatives. “When you’re leading a group of eight dairy workers on a site somewhere in a forest in Germany, you want to be focused on the right measurements of quality and that the dairy products taste like they’re supposed to,” says Petersen. HR staff were instead drawn into back-office tasks and required to fix numerous errors.

With SuccessFactors®, user frustration was at an all-time high, Arla Foods began searching for a digital adoption solution. “If we wanted to keep self-service as a tool, we had to find a way to alleviate the frustration and shorten the time users were spending in the system,” says Petersen.

Before discovering WalkMe, Arla Foods implemented an alternative digital adoption solution, which did not meet their needs. After that unsuccessful experience, they hit reset and turned to the WalkMe to help improve the employee SuccessFactors® experience.

“Our main goal when implementing WalkMe was to make it so easy that any team lead could go into the system and complete the process, even if they had not done so in a year,” says Petersen. Thanks to custom WalkMe Smart Walk-Thrus (in-app step-by-step guidance), busy plant managers can now quickly and easily navigate the SuccessFactors® system and complete their tasks with minimal confusion or disruption.

Arla also implemented WalkMe solutions to ensure that data being entered into SuccessFactors® is of the highest accuracy. Through the use of SmartTips (tip balloons), tailored content, and directives, users are prompted to input the correct data every step of the way.
Arla now uses WalkMe surveys to gather insights on user behavior, improve process flows, and ensure that any help content is timely and relevant.

One of the biggest impacts of implementing WalkMe has been in time saved, by both hiring managers and the support team.

With fewer errors and more self-service options, hiring managers spend less time performing back-office tasks. And the back-office support team has enjoyed a consistent decrease in incoming support calls—freeing them up to focus on more complex issues. When calls do come in to the support team regarding the self-service process, Arla’s team directs the user to start up WalkMe and follow the guide. “It’s just so intuitive,” says Petersen.

“We want our employees to focus on our core business activities and not multiple HR processes and procedures,” says Petersen. “And WalkMe helps us do just that.”

Because SuccessFactors® is now dramatically easier to use, user frustration has all but dissipated. “Our hiring managers no longer struggle when starting up a hiring process,” Petersen says. ”Once users identify the process they need to start up, WalkMe takes them through it quickly and easily.”

Arla Foods plans to expand the use of WalkMe on SuccessFactors® to its employees beyond HR and administrative departments. Arla’s employees use SuccessFactors® on a less frequent basis. “The goal now with employees is to improve the ease of use when completing back-office activities just like we did for hiring managers,” says Peterson.