Scottish Water transforms its HR system

Client: Scottish Water

Region: Energy and Utilities

Sector: United Kingdom

Client Challenge: Scottish Water wanted to extend its vision of a digital future to HR processes, but needed to wrestle with the challenge of the COVID-19 global pandemic in the latter stages of the project.

Solution: The organisation worked with Capgemini to introduce Workday and Cornerstone and implement cloud-based HR systems while collaborating remotely.

Benefits :

• Improved efficiency and productivity
• Reduced number of process errors and risk
• Enhanced customer experience and employee engagement
• Lower operating costs
• Operational resilience through a mobile first capability
• Sustained continuous improvement through cloud- based platform
• Leveraging early Cornerstone deployment to support Workday roll-out

Digital transformation within a disrupted environment

When Scottish Water, one of the leading providers of water and wastewater services in the United Kingdom, decided that it wanted to transform its HR processes by introducing a cloud-based system to replace a variety of legacy systems and better engage with both employees and customers, it had substantial challenges to face. First was the obvious need for substantial expertise when performing a digital transformation of the sort the organisation envisioned while executing a smooth transition. However, Scottish Water also needed to contend with the uniquely disruptive COVID-19 global pandemic, which had brought new restrictions into play and placed a new emphasis on remote working.

To address these potential issues, the organisation decided to extend its partnership with Capgemini. The organisations had complimented each other as longstanding partners for over a decade, with Scottish Water providing business and industry expertise while Capgemini leveraged its history of successful digital transformation projects and technical expertise. Together, the partners reviewed Scottish Water’s expectations and objectives and ultimately decided to implement the Workday and Cornerstone systems in addition to mobile-enabled functionality in order to standardise the organisation’s HR processes while also delivering greater speed, flexibility, business agility, and efficiency.

Making HR processes digital

This early stage of review took the form of an iterative discovery phase meant to establish a plan for how to develop and roll out the solution. Working collaboratively, Scottish Water and Capgemini established a core design principle to configure and leverage a solution using out-of-the-box processes, exploiting native leading practice disciplines, and ensuring supportability and agility in the ongoing adoption of new functionality. Combined with Capgemini’s HR Water template, this would offer a future-focused solution to cover the validated project scope. With this outline established, the partners then set up a series of detailed architecture workshops that addressed specific process gaps and ensured a well-rounded delivery that fulfilled the agreed upon objectives.

The overall programme plan was defined to allowed Scottish Water to leverage the rapid deployment methodology of Cornerstone to replace their Learning Management System early in the programme. Critically, this new technology was used to support the Workday deployment by cascading new and updated training to the business and helping embed the process changes.

Following the discovery phase and the workshops, Scottish Water and Capgemini assembled a delivery team made up of experts from both organisations to further define a deployment plan for the solution. The partners decided upon a single Big Bang release of the new processes across all the targeted business areas simultaneously. To facilitate what would be a rapid and sudden change to the business’ ways of working, Scottish Water and Capgemini jointly set up a Change Management program that educated employees about the new processes. This leveraged digital virtual tooling and playbooks to accommodate COVID restrictions and support a planned go-live under lockdown conditions.

While coordinating the project collaboratively and remotely with team members distributed across both the UK and offshore in India, the partners managed to roll out the Workday and Cornerstone systems across a variety of areas, including core HR and compensation, recruiting and onboarding, advanced compensation, talent and performance, absence management, and expenses. Through their close and open partnership, Scottish Water and Capgemini managed to adapt a typical delivery approach to fit both the demands of the project and the challenges of service introduction for a new major business system under COVID-19.

HR processes for the future

Once Workday and Cornerstone were both successfully implemented, Scottish Water was able to realise its original project goals, most notably providing a standardised and streamlined set of HR processes that improved efficiency and the speed of operations. This brought together employees, contingent workers, and contractors onto a common system that further empowered them while also managing to reduce costs and risk. Additionally, the solution represented a significant improvement to both employee engagement and the customer experience, as employees were provided with a new range of self-service options that offered better control over their own data.

By removing manual processes, the solution ensured that data quality and reporting were improved whilst mitigating any data risks across all of Scottish Water’s systems. In addition, Workday now offers a more user-friendly interface that has encouraged adoption and made it simpler for employees to manage sensitive information. Finally, the solution’s embrace of mobile capabilities has enabled field-based workers to more easily engage with the system through an application that reached devices as part of the roll out. Through their collaboration, Scottish Water and Capgemini have overcome the substantial obstacle of the COVID-19 global pandemic to deliver an impactful HR solution that continues the organisation’s efforts to become more digitally enabled while improving the day-to-day experience of its employees.

“The launch of Workday across Scottish Water has been an incredible success, particularly when we consider that it was delivered entirely remotely due to Covid-19. The uptake by end users was immediate and the feedback from day one has been very positive. We have a world class system that is already serving us well and, in addition, we have the skills to take it to the next level. It has been a massive team effort across both the Scottish Water and partner teams, and I am immensely proud of what we have achieved together.”

Graham Gregg,
People & Workplace Services Lead,
Scottish Water