Sanitarium, maker of Weet-Bix, Up&Go and So Good non-dairy milks, is in the testing phase for a new integrated human resources platform.
Anna Meale (left) speaks at the Daybreak conference.
The fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) maker, which is wholly owned by the Seventh Day Adventist church, will use Dayforce as an integrated HR system, eventually replacing several software systems, many of which are now out-of-support.
People technology leader Anna Meale told the Dayforce Daybreak conference last month that Sanitarium had “a lot of old systems that we needed updating”, particularly as the broader business undergoes a significant growth phase.
“Sanitarium is in a period of high growth at the moment – we’re expanding into other countries, we opened a new distribution centre, our beverages lines are growing at an immense rate, so we’re putting in extra lines throughout our factories,” Meale said.
The decision to re-platform its people systems was made several years ago, and the company is now at the point of being able to test the new Dayforce system with staff.
“We are in our testing phase at the moment, so our business is getting their hands dirty, getting to experiment within the system, look at all the functionality and see how it’s working,” Meale said.
“We’ve [also] got a very big piece coming up with our training.
“We’ve probably got over 1000 employees that are going to be high users and ‘high touch’ with this product.”
Given the company’s existing environment on-point solutions, Meale said there was some internal expectation that the path could be “a little bit bumpy”, though some larger “potholes” were also encountered.
One of these was a disconnect between workforce planning and payroll, which ran on different cycles and had to be corrected in the current system first.
“During our discovery phase, we spent a lot of time with the business, working with them to understand what they do,” Meale said.
“In our rostering space, we were coming across the same things over and over again. There was a lot of manual manipulation of pay codes going into timesheets and we were trying to work out why.”
Meale said the problem came to light when production volumes of Weet-Bix were analysed.
“We look at how much Weet-Bix we need to produce, and from that, we work out how many [manufacturing] lines we need to have open and how many machines we have to have operating, and then they roster employees from there,” Meale said.
“That production cycle was done from a Saturday through to a Friday… [but] what we found was our pay week ran from Thursday to Wednesday, so when you start rotating staff through shifts, there was a lot of manual manipulation to make sure people were working their 38 hours in the pay week.
“So, we took a pause in the [HR transformation] project and decided to change the pay week in our current system. We paused it and did that piece of work, but that has set us up for success.”
To aid system design, the company created “personas” for all employee types that will interact with the future integrated HR system.
“From there, we mapped their journeys and what it would look like from a change management point of view to get them from the beginning to the end,” Meale said.
The company is factoring in access to devices in its rollout to ensure that all employees have access to the HR system.
Meale said Sanitarium, for example, has “looked at putting kiosks into each of our lunchrooms and things like that for our staff to be able to use the platform when we go live.”
She added that the implementation is a collaborative effort between HR, IT and other business areas and stakeholders.
The partnership with IT had been helpful in understanding other systems that would also be needed as part of the transformation.
“In terms of our IT area, they identified very early on that we needed an identity management system as well, so they’ve headed off on their own path to make sure we’re supported with that single sign-on platform at the same time,” Meale said.
The company is also using Dayforce partner Pinpoint HRM as part of the implementation program.
Ry Crozier attended the Dayforce Daybreak conference in Sydney as a guest of Dayforce.