Moving to Oracle HCM Cloud Eight steps to the future of work

Chapter 2

The benefits of moving to Oracle HCM Cloud

Yesterday’s on-premise HR systems can’t keep pace with the speed of business today and the demands of the modern workforce. Pressure is building for HR to quickly deliver insights that can help the business plug talent gaps and achieve strategic goals. And demand continues to rise for more convenient digital services.

Moving to a cloud HCM solution is the single best way to meet these demands and future-proof your organization. Here are some of the benefits.

• Modern user experiences: The cloud offers modern user experiences not available with on-premise solutions. With consistent, personalized, and intuitive experiences available on any device, users can quickly find the information they need any time and anywhere.

Chapter 3

Eight steps to the cloud

Research shows that 83% of enterprise workloads will run in the cloud by 2020, which means that many migrations are underway now or will begin soon.¹ Oracle has developed an eight-step process to help enterprises migrate to Oracle HCM Cloud applications as quickly and efficiently as possible.

There is one caveat: Communication and collaboration are critical to the success of this effort. Identify all stakeholders early in the process. As you build your team, ensure that each stakeholder is represented so that everyone in the organization is informed and that the team is collaborating to make the decisions that benefit everyone. This team will provide the foundation you need to implement the eight steps to Oracle HCM Cloud.

83%

of enterprise workloads will run in the cloud by 2020

Step 1

Know why you’re moving to the cloud

The first step for the team is to understand—really understand—why you’re migrating HR to the cloud. By digging deeply and collaborating closely, the team can generate actionable answers to several key questions that will guide how you design and prioritize your migration, as well as how you measure success.

Best practice

Get executive sponsors on board as soon as possible. Their buy-in and support will help their teams understand and support the move to Oracle HCM Cloud.

Step 2

Inventory your talent and assets

Most organizations can leverage their existing workforce to support their move to the cloud. Your HR team should have people who understand not only HR processes, but also user roles, responsibilities, and data. You may already have employees with technical skill sets that will be extremely valuable during and after the migration.

Inventory questions may include the following:

• Do you have employees with knowledge or skills in these or related areas?

  REST services or APIs

  JavaScript or HTML

  Data conversion

  Reporting and analytics

• Does your IT team know of artifacts that can be transferred to your cloud implementation, either wholly or in part?
• Does the IT team have documentation on configuration decisions, branding standards, or loosely coupled interface designs?

Step 3

Catalog your customizations

Over the years, you may have customized your HCM software and other technology solutions with the help of the IT department. For HR, the move to HCM Cloud shifts you from customization to configuration, giving you more control and flexibility while reducing your reliance on IT. It’s important that you catalog all the customizations that have been made as well as the requirements that drove those customizations. You will probably find that you won’t need those customizations in the new system. However, the changes to the current system need to be documented.

The information you gather in this step will be used in the project’s next step: Rethink your customization strategy.

Your team’s answers to these questions will help lay the groundwork for your customization strategy and identify any related changes to processes and procedures that will work best for your organization well into the future.

Rather than tying up IT teams to create customizations for specific business requirements, HCM Cloud is easily configurable and adaptable, giving more control to HR teams and freeing up IT resources to focus on other projects. Its user interfaces are intuitive and personalized, making navigation seamless across devices and easy to use.

Video: Learn more about configuring HCM Cloud

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Step 4

Rethink your customization strategy

Moving from legacy systems to cloud applications lightens the workload for IT teams, which no longer need to maintain databases and create complex customizations to accommodate HR reporting needs or requested changes to the user interface. This requires that you rethink your customization strategy around three key principles.

• Configure rather than customize. You’ll find that configuration of HCM Cloud is extremely flexible—much more flexible than legacy systems. When faced with a unique requirement, explore the available configuration options before considering customization. In essence, this capability makes it easier for HR to get what it needs quickly, without relying on IT to create a customization.

Step 5

Prepare a project plan

As with any other business project, it’s critical to develop a comprehensive project plan with major milestones. This plan is a living document; it will change many times. But building out that initial plan is crucial to your success.

Not only will the plan provide direction for your journey, it will also allow you to track your progress as you move to the cloud. Your plan should cover every aspect of your migration, including identifying responsible parties and providing a timeline for every step. Make sure that all stakeholders are involved in developing the plan and that they sign off on the completed plan. You’ll need their buy-in and support.

As you develop the plan that’s right for your business, be sure to take advantage of the resources available from other HCM Cloud customers and Oracle experts. See the Additional resources section.

Step 6

Start with the foundation and build incrementally

Migrating to the cloud is a significant undertaking that can be overwhelming if it’s not divided into incremental steps. Although some organizations opt to move all of their modules to the cloud at once, it’s common to perform the migration in phases.

We recommend that you move foundational elements in the first phase—core HR functions in particular. Phase two can include talent management modules such as recruiting, learning, and performance. Once a foundation is in place, beginning with small, easily achievable projects that provide early wins can build momentum for larger changes that will come later.

Step 7

Embrace services-based integration

HCM processes involve many diverse tasks, so it’s critical to have a system that integrates all the data sources and functionality you need to support your mission. When your people data is derived from accurate, real-time information and unified across your enterprise, you have the information you need at your fingertips to align your people strategy with your business priorities.

HCM Cloud provides a consistent and satisfying user experience and ease of reporting. A consolidated talent profile brings new agility that supports the organization and fosters a culture of innovation.

For your IT teams, this services-based integration addresses the challenges of integrating legacy systems by enabling IT to offer the functionality locked into existing applications as reusable services. Oracle Cloud applications use industry-standard APIs and REST services for system integrations and interfaces.

Step 8

Start change management and user acceptance early

To ensure the success of your move to HCM Cloud applications, your process must include significant consideration of organizational change management and user acceptance. This move changes the way people work, and those people will need both accurate information about each change request and time to process those changes.

Video: NSF International scales and expands with HCM Cloud

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Chapter 4

Oracle HCM Cloud: Work made human

All HCM clouds are not created equal. To gain the benefits outlined in these eight steps, you need a robust solution that provides a streamlined experience on a proven cloud platform. HCM Cloud is a complete, natively built solution on one simple—yet powerful—platform that spans all HR processes, including recruiting, global HR, compensation, benefits, talent management, learning, workforce planning, work–life solutions, time tracking, and payroll.

Why HCM Cloud?

On-premise customers of all sizes, across every industry, are upgrading from their legacy HR systems to HCM Cloud. Here’s why.

• More agility. Instead of customizing, you can configure to meet business requirements, which means less reliance on IT and easier navigation of business changes.

Chapter 5

Real stories, real solutions

Emerson moves to Oracle HCM Cloud for best-in-class security

Emerson, a manufacturing leader with 130,000 employees, had a variety of disparate systems, including Oracle E-Business Suite.

The security that Oracle has in place with the cloud was far superior to what we had, and Oracle has a vested interest to stay ahead of the bad actors out there. Oracle will be 10,000 times better (than us) at keeping our environment secure.”

—Vice President of HR and Information Services, Emerson

Kotak, India’s fourth-largest financial institution, boosts productivity by 90%

Kotak Mahindra Bank had an outdated legacy system that created many inefficiencies.

Instead of 95% of my resources being focused on HR operations, I can now have around 56% working toward organizational effectiveness. They work on areas of building competencies of people around selection, performance management, human leadership, and more. Today, our productivity is up 90%.”

—Executive Vice President of HR, Kotak

Chapter 6

Oracle@Oracle

Oracle HR’s business transformation—powered by HCM Cloud

Oracle successfully transitioned our HR function to HCM Cloud. In reimagining our HR experience, we learned several things that can be of use to any enterprise moving to the cloud.

Oracle CHRO Joyce Westerdahl shares how Oracle is leveraging HCM Cloud to enable exceptional employee experiences by streamlining and automating processes and empowering and delighting users.

Reimagining HR at Oracle: The Employee Experience

Watch the video

Learn more about Oracle’s cloud transformation at:
oracle.com/cloud/oracle-at-oracle.