EDF Renewables embraces digital adoption strategy, ensuring compliance, streamlining processes, and driving positive employee experience

EDF Renewables North America is a renewable energy producer committed to providing responsible power to future generations. With employees, offices, and projects spanning the U.S., Canada, and Mexico in both large cities and very remote locales, systems and process training, support, and communications posed a challenge. Without guidance readily available, employees would file tickets asking for assistance and training. To help them complete the processes accurately, the digital learning team built e-learning tools – but those took weeks to make, which made it tricky to stay up to date with ever-changing industry policies. EDF turned to WalkMe for more efficient, just-in-time guidance to proactively mitigate risk and save time for employees in the field, the IT team, and instructional designers.

EDF implemented WalkMe as a pilot for a mission-critical application and saw an over 90% reduction in support tickets – from 104 to just four in one quarter – in addition to improving policy adherence and overall employee experience. Subsequently, EDF expanded its implementation of WalkMe to ten applications that touch all employees, resulting in a significant decrease in support tickets and an estimated cost avoidance of $1.5 million in 2022 alone. With a targeted digital adoption strategy, EDF identifies the greatest employee needs and provides timely assistance to help employees succeed. EDF plans to further expand its use of WalkMe to tailor the experience for its employees across North America, enabling team members to focus on what’s truly important: their renewable energy mission.

EDF Renewables’ technicians and employees in the field were using the SAP ECC6 desktop application to complete essential day-to-day processes, such as creating maintenance notifications and service orders. Because the application has multiple elements, employees would often experience errors and have to submit tickets to get help. When the team started looking for a digital adoption solution, it was not uncommon to see over 100 help requests per quarter.

To meet educational needs, the digital learning team built SAP simulations within their e-learning training tools, which could take weeks to create – and then employees needed to complete the in-classroom trainings or e-learning modules. The team needed an efficient way to create guidance for employees and get them up-to-speed quickly to ensure compliance, avoid risk, and enable team members to focus on high-impact work. “Some of the processes are based on regulatory requirements for reporting,” said Alexa Cordell, Digital Learning Manager at EDF Renewables North America. “It’s critical that they’re completed correctly, and our employees needed some support to do that.”

Cordell set out to find a digital adoption platform to proactively minimize risks, save on training time and troubleshooting expenses, speed up processes, and continuously improve employees’ experience.

Cordell advocated for WalkMe to support EDF with just-in-time learning, accurate process adherence, and targeted change management tactics. “I was on a mission to improve compliance, process speed, and employee experience,” Cordell said. “I wanted people to be empowered to do their work without intervention, because they have guardrails in place.”

She presented her case to EDF, including her finding that the cost of delay was $21,000 per week, for just one key service order process. EDF approved a pilot within SAP ECC6 – a critical application with the highest number of support tickets and help requests. Support tickets dropped by 90%, and newsletter views increased by more than 80% with the use of ShoutOuts, proving that the guardrails worked.

Historically, it took up to 25 days to create an SAP-related e-learning – and with WalkMe, it took only five days to create the equivalent guidance. Cordell calculated that 725 hours were saved for employees and instructional designers just during the pilot.

In December 2020, EDF officially launched WalkMe, using a research-based approach to strategically decide where and how to build out WalkMe content. “I found out how users in the field – area managers, technicians, business coordinators, and site managers – felt about the current way of doing things. Then I monitored how their satisfaction increased over time after we implemented WalkMe.”

EDF went on to expand digital adoption to all users. The digital learning team combined WalkMe with initial e-learning methods and practices, using WalkMe to showcase procedures in SAP.

“People were completing SAP processes in different ways,” Cordell said. “But we needed employees to complete the steps in a certain way to avoid a snowball effect on other teams and ensure proper reporting. So, we put guardrails on that to mitigate risk and reduce downstream work.”

EDF takes advantage of many WalkMe tools, including in-app guidance and Auto Play rules. With great results at the get-go, the team quickly expanded to more systems. “We’d initially signed a one-year agreement with WalkMe for desktop,” Cordell said. “At six months, the results were so great that we decided to scale sooner to a full enterprise license agreement.”

EDF next added WalkMe to its HR software, Ceridian Dayforce, starting with performance reviews. “In previous years we created so many trainings, open sessions, and emails – and the message still wasn’t clear,” Cordell said.

For a more targeted approach to promoting performance reviews, the team used WalkMe to share important workplace information, and even highlight some wins. For example, when the HR team simplified the performance review process of self-appraisals from thirteen text boxes to just three, EDF amplified the HR team’s work. “Once we added WalkMe to draw attention to these awesome updates, the HR and HRS teams got a lot of kudos for that,” Cordell said.

Additionally, the team takes advantage of WalkMe’s segmentation, integrating their IDP to create personalized menus and content in Dayforce – including different views for managers and employees – so each individual can be hyper-focused when they access the system.
“Using advanced digital adoption capabilities like IDP integration is a key component in improving our employee experience and our business outcomes. We personalize content to specific individuals’ needs and roles, so we ensure the right people get the right information at the right time.”

When EDF started using iCIMS for its career portal and talent acquisition, the digital learning team looked for a way to make the transition seamless for employees accustomed to using Dayforce for these tasks. They added a WalkMe Shuttle within Dayforce that directs employees to the iCIMS talent marketplace, so employees could easily access the new application, proactively removing any confusion or time spent searching for the updated system.

EDF’s digital adoption strategy enables them to respond creatively to specific needs, such as the Great Shakeout, the earthquake preparedness drill held every year in California. The company segmented California employees and sent a WalkMe notification with drill instructions to their desktops at the exact moment the drill was to take place.

WalkMe is now live on ten systems and in three languages – English, Spanish, and French – to provide just-in-time guidance to all 1500 EDF employees, who are spread across the United States and Canada. “WalkMe makes it easy to push information really quickly to the right people when and how they need it, regardless of their language, location, or role,” Cordell said.

EDF’s digital adoption strategy provides the most up-to-date information and guardrails to employees to ensure their success. “It may be as small as approving an expense report in Concur, or as complicated as creating a sales order in SAP, or as sensitive as completing their performance appraisals in our HRIS,” Cordell said. “With WalkMe, employees are empowered to move fluidly between processes and applications, and are able to do these things quickly, efficiently, and – most importantly – accurately.”

Since implementing WalkMe, EDF has decreased support tickets by over 90%. In 2022, EDF’s first year using WalkMe on multiple applications, the company saw an estimated $1.5 million in cost avoidance from deflected support costs, improved process compliance, and hours saved.

Insights and Digital Experience Analytics have become Cordell’s favorite capabilities, because they enable her and her team to understand the current user experience and state of application engagement. “We can see how people are moving through systems, or when they’re looking for something in the wrong app. With those insights, we’re able to build cross-application support based on how people actually use the system,” Cordell said.

As the team constantly improves the user experience, they have taken advantage of the Digital Adoption Institute to hone their skills. Cordell has completed the Program Management, Project Management, and Builder certifications. “The Digital Adoption Institute is setting the standard for recognizing DAP professionals,” Cordell said.

In addition to formal certifications, EDF finds value in the peer-based community of DAP Professionals who use WalkMe. “Anytime I need to create content or learn how to do something, the WalkMe community has resources and examples,” Cordell said. “A lot of communities see each other as competition, but the WalkMe community is different: everyone wants to help each other.”

EDF has plans to continue enhancing its digital adoption program with WalkMe, from onboarding new hires to helping current employees navigate new processes and applications. Digital adoption has become an essential element of the company’s ongoing change management strategy.

The digital learning team is excited to be an early adopter part of WalkMe Discovery, which collects data processed by AI-based algorithms to map how applications are used across departments. This next level of data will inform EDF’s future decisions about when and how to implement digital adoption solutions, as well as manage overall application spend.

“Discovery is going to relieve the burden for our digital and IT leadership, and those who are analyzing license costs for all of our departments,” Cordell said.

“We see WalkMe as a fantastic resource for building agile practices and helping project teams receive feedback through Insights and other features,” Cordell added. “WalkMe enables us to meet our users where they are and create the best user experience possible – continuing this infinite loop of improvement.”