Agfa-Gevaert, which makes imaging and IT systems for healthcare, printing and industrial applications, is investing in cloud IT services to prepare it for restructuring its health IT business.
The €2.4m turnover group, which is based in Morstel, Belgium and operates in more than 40 countries, will separate Agfa Healthcare IT into a self-contained business unit in 2019.
The project has enabled the group’s HR team to win funding from the board to redevelop its HR IT technology, including a group-wide, cloud-based core HR system and a centralised payroll across its healthcare IT business.
Peter Dignef, global head of HR services at Agfa, said that replacing the company’s older on-premise HR IT systems with HR cloud services was essential to creating a healthcare IT business.
“If we were not able to do this, creating an independent organisation would be extremely difficult,” he told Computer Weekly.
The company plans to replace multiple HR tools with a single payroll and cloud-based HR system across 30 countries.
As a standalone business, Agfa Healthcare IT will no longer have access to the economies of scale of being part of the Agfa-Gevaert group.
“We have 30 people supporting HR transactional activities in the 30 countries Agfa Healthcare will continue to operate in,” said Dignef. “Only six of them will join the Agfa Healthcare organisation.
“Integration is very complex. You have to do it right”
Peter Dignef, Agfa-Gevaert
“If you want to continue with limited resources in HR, you need these solutions to get there. Otherwise, you would need many more employees,” he said in an interview at the Unleash World Conference and Expo in Amsterdam.
The company evaluated a range of HR technologies in late 2017, including Workday and Oracle, and SAP’s SuccessFactors software.
Workday was a good system with a solid data model, said Dignef, but the company opted for SAP’s SuccessFactors.
Agfa-Gevaert and its implementation partner, Belgian SAP technology specialist Flexso, already had experience of SAP’s technology from earlier projects.
SuccessFactors also had the advantage of allowing Agfa to deploy HR functions module by module, said Dignef.
Agfa-Gevaert began deploying SAP’s SuccessFactors Employee Central core HR across the company in January 2018.
Agfa Healthcare IT began a parallel project to deploy a payroll system from Neeyamo, PayNComp, in April 2018, which it is integrating into Employee Central.
Employee Central will act as a unique database for all employee data, gradually taking over from a wide range of other HR and payroll systems across the organisation.
The project is complex, said Dignef. “You have SuccessFactors, SAP on-premise and payroll – all the data has to be aligned. There has to be one source of data for everything.”
Agfa Healthcare IT has appointed one dedicated programme manager devoted to the work, and has asked other employees to spend part of their time on the project.
Flexso is teaching Agfa’s staff how to deploy SuccessFactors technology as the project rolls out.
The systems integrator carries out the integration work for the first country in each region, supervises Agfa staff completing the integration work in the second country, while Agfa completes the work unsupervised, said Dignef.
So far, Agfa has rolled out Employee Central to five countries and plans to reach 28 more in 2019. It has deployed Neeyamo’s payroll system in the UK.
The company expects to make savings in IT maintenance costs by moving its HR records from on-premise computers running SAP to the cloud by 2020.
The IT department charges €600,000 a year to support the HR information system and the learning management system that are run on-premise.
Agfa will still need an on-premise SAP system to run finance, access management and other systems, but Dignef expects the maintenance bill to be significantly smaller.
“There is a whole IT department working to keep these systems alive,” said Dignef.
The SuccessFactors recruitment technology has enabled Agfa to appoint recruitment specialists to actively look for candidates to fill posts.
Rather than wait for responses from job ads, they can approach potential candidates, giving Agfa a head start at time when recruiting skilled people is increasingly competitive.
“In the past, we posted an ad and waited for applicants to react,” said Dignef. “Now we post a job and start searching LinkedIn and job sites.”
SuccessFactors will, for the first time, give the company’s managers an overview of when their employees in different countries are on holiday.
The organisation previously had about 50 different systems to manage requests for leave and provide managers with reports from overseas, which did not share data.
“It is incredible how much time in HR we spent managing this,” said Dignef. “The big win is at the transactional level, and its often hidden cost. We are doing this in a more efficient way now.”
Agfa plans to replace the on-premise learning systems in its health IT operations with a SuccessFactors cloud learning platform in 2019, subject to board approval.
Dignef said cloud-based learning will be more user-friendly than the existing on-premise learning system, and will be easier to maintain.
One of the biggest technical challenges in the project was the need to integrate SuccessFactors in the cloud with the company’s SAP software on its own computer systems.
“When you link SuccessFactors with SAP, it is always difficult because you have to customise, so it was more complicated than we had expected,” said Dignef.
The first integration – payroll – took longer than expected because of unexpected difficulties during testing.
Agfa Healthcare IT is expected to separate from the rest of the group in mid-2019, after which the non-medical part of Agfa’s business is expected to decide on its own group-wide payroll software.
“Gradually, SuccessFactors will take over as the number one source of data,” said Dignef.
Dignef advised companies embarking on a similar project to give themselves a realistic timescale for completing the work.
Agfa’s demerger plans meant Dignef had little choice but to meet a predetermined deadline.
“Integration is very complex,” he said. “You have to do it right. If you don’t integrate right, no one can follow any more – you change something three systems later.”
Dignef said he expected the company’s systems in most countries to go live by the project deadline, but there may be delays in some of Agfa’s larger operations, such as Belgium, Germany and the US.
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