Achieving a Single System Vision Post-Merger

The current changes within the technology industry are palpable, as companies continually announce acquisitions, mergers, restructurings and re-brandings. While analysts and investors worry most about how the general public views finances and merchandise portfolio compatibility, human resources (HR) is that the organizational department that's most affected internally. In reference to mergers and acquisitions specifically, the new organization will likely be left with multiple HR management solutions to figure with and multiple HR policies to sort through; having unnecessary duplicates are often costly, inefficient and downright confusing.

With the completion last year of the merger between Cypress Semiconductor Corp. and Spansion Inc., the new company’s HR team faced this very challenge of trying to manage three HR systems (with the third getting used by Spansion in Japan as a remnant from a previous merger), dozens of payroll systems and two data warehouse systems. This meant employee data was being tracked across different programs with varying rules supported the country and prior company of the precise employee. As a result, trying to supply a holistic, consistent and accurate analysis and report of employee data became increasingly difficult.

To remedy this and streamline HR data management, analysis and reporting, Cypress set a goal to maneuver to one , core Human Resources Information System (HRIS);. Additionally to managing information on a worldwide scale, Cypress needed an answer that would be utilized throughout the complete lifecycle of the worker relationship: from the time a manager cares hiring for a replacement position, to the time the worker decides to exit the organization.

“While analysts and investors worry most about how the general public views finances and merchandise portfolio compatibility, human resources is that the organizational department that's most affected internally"

Cypress put together a three-phased plan, which began last year to realize its single-system vision: Phase one-merge the localized Cypress Japan HR system into the worldwide HRIS; Phase two-merge all legacy Cypress employees into the worldwide HRIS; Phase three-migrate the independent recruiting system into the worldwide recruiting/ on boarding system. The plan involves all three phases to be worked on concurrently to attenuate total project time.

To ensure a successful transition to a core HRIS, each phase is being executed through a four step process:

1. Discovery

Audit which special features we like about our current solutions to work out if and the way they're going to be supported within the new global system. Change management is critical during this step, as poor communication and documentation can cause significant rework in future stages. In our case, we decided that—with the exception of country-specific rules—common global processes are going to be adhered to by all Cypress locations. By doing so, we are ready to simplify the method , while removing all the features that require significant time and energy.

2. Define / Test

Defining and testing the system changes is the most technical challenge of the whole process. a big amount of your time is required to urge it right. Although it's going to appear to be a simple task on the surface, this step can become an involved project requiring many weeks of additional work. For instance , what we considered an easy change of cloning (copying) from one system to a different eventually became a multi-month effort that nearly required an entire redeployment of our systems and a retest of everything. Taking an iterative development approach of breaking the project into smaller chunks, however, makes this less challenging than processes within the past when all requirements had to be defined upfront.

3. Data Migration

Single system is effective as long as it's all the historic data from the previous systems. Migrating the info from the old systems into the new one requires the conversion of all of the prevailing data into the new format, fixing inconsistencies, uploading it and verifying the new data. they assert that a system is merely nearly as good because the data in it, namely the info accuracy (or lack thereof). During this third step, having inaccurate data can ruin the success of the whole project.

4. System Roll Out

Once the primary three steps are completed, the larger team must be trained through a proper roll out of the new system. Again, while this step sounds deceptively simple, if special attention isn't paid to providing training and allotting bandwidth to support the initial on-boarding of the team, all the diligence from prior steps could also be lost.

Conceptually, the utilization of one system will lead a manager to utilize it to manage requisitions and their candidate pipeline. Additionally, the integrated recruiting, onboarding and core HR system allow all candidate information to electronically transfer to the downstream systems (or core HRIS) where it is often managed throughout the employee’s tenure with the corporation . This architecture ensures data accuracy, because the owner of the knowledge provides the info , eliminates data duplication and, when globally deployed, ensures that the info is managed consistently for all locations.

To date, Cypress has started the “Discovery” step of merging the Cypress Japan HR and integrating recruiting systems into the core HRIS. The team in Japan is identifying the special features to make a decision if and the way they're going to be supported within the new global system. We also are well into the “Define / Test” step for merging legacy PeopleSoft system employees into the worldwide system.

Though refining our HRIS is going to be a continuing process, we are excited about the progress Cypress has made so far within the transition toward our single-system vision. Once the transition is complete, we expect to be ready to cut HRIS costs by 40 percent, which amounts to a savings of $325,000 per annum . Soon, our team are going to be ready to cash in of the key benefits of employing a single system: global visibility into our workforce, consistent and accurate data, employee and manager self-service options, elimination of duplicate data and a discount within the total cost of ownership.