Western Health tests SAP Joule on HR system

Western Health, one of Victoria’s largest health services, has enabled SAP’s AI copilot Joule in a test environment with a view to exploring use cases in conjunction with its SuccessFactors HR platform.

(L-R) Nicole Trotter (Deloitte), Sheree O'Connell (Monash Health) and Michael Garrett (Western Health) speak at SAP HR Connect.

Workforce systems and projects senior manager Michael Garrett told a SAP HR Connect conference in Melbourne that the health services provider, which operates three acute public hospitals, has deployed four modules of SuccessFactors so far: employee central, recruiting management, onboarding, and performance & goals.

The first three modules went live in May last year, while performance & goals was implemented in February of this year.

Its previous recruitment system had been retired by the vendor that made it, which was part of the driver for the initial change.

The organisation used that as a catalyst to “start from scratch” on HR support systems. 

“We didn't have a HRIS [human resources information system],” he said. “A lot of our processes were completely disconnected.”

Garrett said that since running SuccessFactors, which it has implemented with assistance from Deloitte, Western Health has greater clarity and visibility into its “organisational structure, reporting lines, and the workforce.”

There is also now integration between HR and identity and access management systems; previously, Garrett said, there were “disconnected processes between payroll and our Active Directory”, meaning staff changes involved a lot of manual effort for the IT service desk and workforce systems team.

“That gap doesn't exist anymore now,” he said.

“Now, we have an integration between SuccessFactors, Okta and Active Directory, and all of that is now seamless.

“That's just one example [of process improvement]. We've made a lot of changes over a very short period of time to improve processes.”

Garrett also said that planning for changes that need to be reflected in HR and payroll systems, such as to enterprise bargaining agreements (EBAs) and awards, is now much improved.

“A business partner came to us a couple of months ago around a new process under [an] EBA change around flexible rostering,” Garrett said.

“We didn't have a process in place, [or] all of the information to be able to roll this out.

“Something that has changed since before go-live [of SuccessFactors] to now is that we can actually workshop something with the relevant SMEs [subject matter experts], develop [and] build something in the test system, and then showcase it and roll it out. 

“We did that in under two weeks [for the EBA change], something that previously would not have been possible to be able to do prior.”

In addition to working with Deloitte, Garrett noted that Royal Melbourne Hospital was also a stakeholder, as the organisations have the same payroll shared service.

Future improvements are anticipated to come from running SAP’s AI copilot Joule across the SuccessFactors environment.

“At this point, we're doing it in a bit of a ‘drip feed’ approach,” Garrett said.

“We've enabled it in our test environment, we’ve enabled some use cases and we're planning to test those and roll those out slowly into production because we obviously see that there's a lot of opportunity for improving [our] processes, but we don't want to do it all at once and we don't want to overwhelm our organisation with changes. 

“We also want to obviously ensure that we can validate and test those scenarios in the system and … that we have support from our executive before making those changes [in production].

“We need to be able to get the balance right between giving the AI tools to our organisation, to our managers, and to our employees, ensuring that they trust it and ensuring that they work every time, and there's no issues, there's no data leakages or processes that don't work the way that we expect them to.”

Garrett also flagged a “significant” rostering-related program of work that will occur in the next 12 to 18 months.