How the Piramal group uses Oracle Cloud HCM to manage a global diverse workforce
The Piramal Group is a global business conglomerate with diverse interests in Pharma, Financial Services, Real Estate and Glass Packaging. The Group has offices in over 30 countries, a global brand presence in more than 100 markets and a team of over 10,000 people from 21 diverse nationalities. In the last four decades of its existence, Piramal Group has pursued a twin strategy of both organic and inorganic growth and continues to create long-term value for its stakeholders.
Explaining the challenges of the group, Viral Gandhi, President and Group CIO, Piramal Group,
says, ” A few key challenges that organizations often face while managing large global workforces seamlessly is creating uniformity across geographies to ensure automating processes, maximizing employee experience and generating insights for leaders to make data-based strategic decisions. Given our Group’s vast geographical presence and diversity, we identified the need to leverage technology and innovation driven solutions in HR early on, in order to build a unique set of uniform HR policies and processes whilst adhering to respective business compliance requisites.”
To help the firm achieve this, it required a cloud technology that would enable integration of real-time HR data over a single platform to keep up with its organizational growth across diversified sectors, ensuring streamlined and standardized processes. This would bring in agility, accuracy and transparency in HR processes providing the teams with data-driven actionable insights and highly configurable workflows that offer both scalability and localization, leading to more informed decision-making.
After stringently reviewing many cloud solutions, the Group decided to implement Oracle HCM cloud. Post implementation, the Oracle HCM Cloud has better equipped the firm to manage its diverse workforce effectively and transparently. “By integrating fragmented HR data over a single system of employee records, it provides HR teams with data-driven smart dashboards at the click of a button. Oracle’s Cloud has enabled our HR teams to create an internal job market for our employees across the Group, with easy management and tracking of employment journey whilst ensuring confidentiality. Its HR analytics allows our businesses to gain insights into finding and retaining top talent as well as uncover trends and identify potential problems,” explains Viral Gandhi.
“With our embedded AI and ML capabilities in our HCM cloud application, Oracle applications have enabled the HR function at Piramal to provide data-driven insights to their management team in real time. Given the focus of the Piramal Group on talent, they have created an internal job marketplace powered by Oracle HCM; resulting in almost 80% of recruitment done internally. Similarly, the use of HR analytics is allowing them to gain insights into how to spot and retain talent. Their HR team can uncover trends and identify potential problems before they even happen,” says Prasad Rai- Head & VP, Applications, Oracle India.
Tackling Covid 19
The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly transformed the way we live and work. For the Piramal Group, the HCM Cloud solution has helped in providing the HR function with actionable insights in an intuitive way. “Increasingly, organizations are adopting and adapting to digital workspaces, as most employees continue to work from home. Given this construct, artificial intelligence and machine learning embedded cloud solutions are playing an ever increasingly important role . The pursuit of the ‘new normal’ has put technology in the driver’s seat to steer the organization towards a new paradigm shift.,” explains Viral Gandhi, on the significance of technology in tackling the Covid 19 crisis.
Agrees Prasad Rai from Oracle, “The businesses are compelled to look at the HR function through a digital lens now. HR is in the driving seat today and technology is the glue keeping organizations together, streamlining processes and humanizing work. The current pandemic situation has acted like an accelerant for the digital transformation of the HR function but the Piramal Group embarked on this journey much ahead of others in the industry.”
The importance of creating a solid technology foundation for its HR function is now reaping rich dividends. “Given that remote working is here to stay, it is imperative for organizations to leverage technology solutions in order to provide enhanced employee engagement and enable effective communication. Previously, due to the presence of various other employee engagement platforms in office, the Piramal Group did not feel the need to implement a technology-driven tool for creating a social platform. However, we are now exploring our own Piramal Group internal social platform for all our employees, that will enable various interventions such as virtual coffee table discussions, resulting in increased employee engagement on varied topics ranging from technical advice to taking care of toddlers, while working from home,” states Viral Gandhi.
Given the unprecedented scale of the pandemic, remote working is the norm today, and the technology foundation created with Oracle HCM is helping the group manage its human capital in a better way.
