National Instruments has a complex business. So it is quite expected that even National Instrument’s HR systems can be very complex, too. In fact, its HR used to be very inefficient and slow. As the company grew from its humble beginnings, it soon became apparent that HR needed a system that would speed up reporting. Scalability is also important, in that they need a system that could adjust easily as the organization grew.

Imagine this: the company’s HR department even had problems getting the total headcount. HR was not able to provide the total number of employees, interns, or contractors working for the company. And this proved counter-productive because a business needs to be sure about the number of employees they have in order to make critical decisions. HR did not want to overhire or understaff. In the old days, the data for the accurate headcount was stored in two separate systems. One system was used for employees in the United States and the other was for employees abroad.   Simply getting a headcount meant that they would have to query through both systems and creating or changing a report would mean weeks of work. In the past, they could remedy the situation by getting the IT guys on the job, and it would mean faster reports. But it also meant that the IT guys were doing something that were outside their usual scope of work and their own projects suffered.

And because getting something as basic as a headcount report was tedious and time-consuming, all the other projects that HR was working on, or wanted to work on, become a challenge as well.

And of course it was not just the headcount. They needed to have a better way of doing things, including managing compensation, recruitment, benefits, and payroll.

Oracle Human Capital Management Cloud to the rescue

And this is why HR opted to use Oracle Human Capital Management Cloud solutions to help simplify their infrastructure. With top management’s quick blessings, the HR department worked with the IT department to make it happen.

The move meant a lot of big changes and it included a move into the cloud. Thankfully for them, getting into the cloud meant that they could implement the changes in phases and this was entirely possible, easy even, because of the cloud. As they become ready for the next phase, they could just add new cloud features as they need it. This helped them deliver value to NI even when the project was still not yet completed.

Another benefit of the cloud-based platform was that it helped HR be more independent of IT. If they had done it as an IT project on premises, it would mean that there are sticky questions that they would need to answer, such as would it own or even access HR data? Or how should IT go about updates and patches?

But because they went on the cloud, HR was able to get a new platform, own it and work it, without relying too much on their own IT teams and on other departments. This also helps quicken things along.

The result

By 2015, all employees no matter where they are in the world would have access to HR’s self service platform. They would be able to log into a portal and see different kinds of information that should be available to them and in a language that they could understand. They can even personalize the layout of the interface they are seeing, allowing them to organize it according to their commonly used features and functions. Giving employees top experience with the new platform meant higher adoption rates and less resistance to the change. The system also offered more functionality.

Oracle HCM provided the company and its employees with a centralized source for their HR data records. NI has a custom integration that makes all HR data available to all business functions that uses Oracle Business Suite, which the company has been using for quite some time now. This means that HR data is now readily available for research and development, enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management and others.

In short, getting a headcount, which used to take 6 weeks, now takes only a matter of hours. And if you contact Four Cornerstone and avail of our Oracle consulting in Dallas, you could also have that kind of change in your business.