Businesses are transforming and the role of technology in enabling and accelerating this change has been evidenced by an increase in the rate of adoption of HR technology. According to our latest study 98 percent of the organizations have some kind of HR technology system in place today. The significant advantages that new age technologies provide over traditional methods have created a global appeal for business to undergo transformation processes. In this context, Vimal Dev, VP-IT, Genpact shared the company’s 30 month long journey of executing and implementing a technology driven end to end transformation process at Cornerstone’s Converge India 2016 conference. 

Explaining the need of self assessments he shared how Genpact began by asking key important questions on ‘how, what and why’ to transform. “By leveraging key technologies,” he said, “we were to substantially evolve. We were the early adopters into lot of upcoming technologies within the various aspects of business. We had been doing a lot of extensive work with HR software like Cornerstone and that benefitted to drive the transformation process.” 

Business Context

Primarily being an offshoot of GE, Genpact soon went public and currently is one of the leaders in the BPM space. Starting off initially within the BPM sector, it diversified by entering the sectors like IT and consulting with analytics being the latest area. The business operates out of almost 20 different countries with strength of more than 70,000 plus employees and the average age of employees with the company is mid 20s. The two core objectives of the undergoing technological adoption and digitization process were 1) Provision of strong data security and compliance options to companies and 2) Creating better channels of collaboration with their client companies. With these objectives the company hoped to implement customer and employee centric technology to help increase business performance. 

“With the front end of the business growing exponentially in the initial years, the need to upgrade the backend technology used to deliver our services became an important factor. This eventually became a reason for Genpact to undertake transformation,” Vimal added. 

Upgrading the entire hire-to retire cycle 

Within the HR space, Genpact focused on transforming its talent.  “We identified the areas within our talent cycle that would benefit the most by undertaking transformation processes” Vimal noted.  By starting from scratch, Genpact sought to redefine the parameters of its talent acquisition and retention processes. This was driven by the need to understand the changing skills demand of the business and identify the right talent pools. Similarly, in the case of employee motivation and engagement, the company wanted to create a holistic employee experience which covered payroll to retirement management. And technology was used to enable various such processes. This process also involved in making the company more lean and agile in nature by relooking at the redundant technologies in place. The aim was to also create one uniform policy and process that can be executed organization wide. 

Step 1: Define core design principles 

“The entire process for us began by articulating what to do and how do we do it” said Vimal, “It helped us clearly layout some design principles for us.”  For the policies that Genpact eventually brought in sought to cater to the following considerations:

• Should be customer and people centric 
• Should simplify and make processes leaner
• Quality and speed to be priority
• System of records – Compliance and control 
• Should have a global appeal
• Focused Employee engagement
• Creation of an on demand information ecosystem 
• Anywhere, any device

Step 2: Creating a suitable environment

Having laid out these principles in place the company then looked creating a suitable environment for these technological changes. This was done by enabling the following:

• Bringing the global organization into play. The company hoped to reduce the anticipated resistance to change by bringing together the various stakeholders of the transformation at a global level. By defining the global roles and duties of the change agents across the boards, Genpact was able to build a unanimous consensus. This also involved creating a business buy in at the global level to undertake the transformation processes within a 24 month period. 
  
  
• Information security and compliance-related frameworks brought upfront  Laws around data privacy and security have evolved globally. “In order to avoid surprises in the future all such compliances had to brought in from day one, rather than doing it later,” explained Vimal 

By creating such an environment Genpact ensured a seamless application of technology across it business processes. 

Implementation

The first litmus test that Genpact faced was when they aimed to upgrade their LMS and make it more business relevant in a matter of 90 days. “The first test of our hypothesis with cloud and a SaaS based system we realized that the time to market is faster. We chose to begin with our LMS. Cornerstone became a vital tool for this” shared Vimal “The focus here again was not to create a huge bulky system but rather a lean efficient system that could be updated with the changing needs of the company.” This was an effort aimed to make the system more agile. This was complemented by creating better user experience driven programs and apps for employee motivation and engagement.  Performance management was revamped with the creation of an instant feedback app with the entire platform running on the cloud. A new employee intranet platform was also created by Genpact.  

While earlier business transformation journeys involved working with a number of legacy systems across different parts of the business and usually took a number of years, the rise of the cloud as a key enabler has ensured that such transformations are faster and managed with an incredible ease.