Recently, Perficient digitally transformed for success by migrating to Oracle Cloud HCM. To share our story, we invited key stakeholders Andrea Lampert, Michael Zucker, Cathie Meyers, and Mike Grennier to join a panel discussion moderated by Stuart Massey, principal of our Oracle ERP practice.
As Vice President of People, Andrea is responsible for working across the company to support business goals by driving the implementation of strategic people objectives reflecting Perficient’s commitment to our people and our culture. Michael Zucker, Vice President of IT, is responsible for internally facing technology solutions and infrastructure. Cathie Meyers is Director of HR and Mike Grennier is Director of Talent Acquisition.
In the first blog post of this four-part series, Andrea and Michael discuss Challenges of Legacy Systems, Guiding Principles, and Roadmap. In this second blog post in the series, learn about the wins for HR and IT.
To view the entire panel discussion, click here.
What have been the greatest wins achieved via migration to Oracle Cloud HCM from HR perspective?
[Andrea Lampert] I am pretty passionate about the user experience. Back to our guiding principles, if it’s simple, if it’s intuitive, if it helps our colleagues get the things done that they need to get done and focus on the real work that they’re doing every day, it’s a win. And Oracle Cloud was definitely a win for user experience.
It’s a more modern experience for our users, whether that’s our candidates, our employees, our managers, it’s intuitive and clean. You almost don’t need training. Having come from multiple systems to one from recruiting to hiring to onboarding and managing daily tasks, it’s light years ahead of where we were. It’s fabulous, but to do that globally becomes outstanding. We are taking some of our countries from using Excel and Word to a connected system that’s not only connected within their own country and organizational unit, but also around the globe all throughout Perficient. It’s a huge win for our users.
[Mike Grennier] My primary focus is the external candidate experience. When a candidate applies for a job, the system itself should be out of the way. It should feel very normal to a candidate to apply. Let your employment brand, your candidate experience, your marketing materials sell the candidate on the experience and don’t let the application process and the interview process get in the way of a good experience.
Perficient’s HCM experts really helped us to understand what’s possible with Oracle. A lot of our recruiters didn’t necessarily believe it at first. It’s hard to understand going from a legacy system to a very modern cloud-based solution. The experience is dramatically different. Using a system like Oracle, which is by definition best in class, always updated, very current, very modern interface was surprising. We were surprised at how easy it was to use. We were surprised the candidate experience was that much better. We were surprised a hiring manager could post a job without having to call us first and ask us for advice. It’s very intuitive. And I think the fact that we were able to learn from our in-house Oracle HCM experts to get exposed to the system and then start using it early on really made a big difference from a user experience standpoint.
What have been the greatest wins achieved via migration to Oracle Cloud HCM from IT perspective?
[Michael Zucker] My team picked up and learned the cloud platform much faster than I ever thought they would. This encouraged them to grow their careers in a new direction.
From a technical perspective, we gained the scalability and performance of being on a cloud platform. Spinning up new training environments and spinning them down when needed was way simpler than trying to conduct the same on the on-premises environments. We also carried out a large-scale system training plan which was quite successful. Featuring the right materials for the right users, was simpler via cloud during the training period. The users were able to leverage the system in an intuitive way, streamlining the different components and making our jobs easier.
We’ve had several upgrades already that have been relatively straightforward and seamless. It’s been great working with the cloud platform to date and we’re excited to keep that moving on a go-forward basis.
Want to know more about the wins we mentioned and how we executed them? Look for the third blog post of our four-part blog series ‘Our Digital Transformation to Oracle Cloud HCM’ which will contain a deeper viewpoint.
