The Promise of the Cloud

The Indian Pharmaceutical industry is one of the world’s fastest growing sectors, ranking third in terms of volume and thirteenth in terms of value. The industry employs a workforce of nearly 30 million people and contributes 2% to India’s GDP and 12% to manufacturing sector GDP. In such a sector, where employees are the intangible assets, it is very important that this workforce is managed effectively to meet the dynamic business objectives of organizations and boost their productivity. Consequently, the Pharma industry leaders, whether entrepreneur giants or minnows that are bouncing up, have something in common – they are reconsidering their operational game plans, introducing new territory to address Human Resource objectives.

In this extremely competitive industry where employees play a key role in the success of the organization, traditional HR management approaches are no longer sufficient to align activities and line up resources for those efforts. Pharma enterprises need a more systematic approach that marks the difference between a status quo or standout performance, and they can now achieve it with the new operational paradigm for HR that is the SaaS HR software. With the developments in mobility, data analytics and the practice of Big Data, the degree of advancement is fast-tracking.

As a result, the Pharma entrepreneurs are taking the initiative to move a step ahead by bringing automation and HR on cloud across Industry that could develop management, competency model, offer better hiring techniques, enhance work culture, manage employee performance, and compensation, etc. In such a scenario, India’s own Pharmaceutical Giant, Cipla, decided to tread the untouched path and take their employee experience to the next level by implementing HR SaaS solutions.

Cipla Limited is an Indian Multinational Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology Company with 25000 + employees and 9 entities with the presence in more than 2300 locations at Pin code level across India. With such a large multinational business, managing and executing up to the mark HR strategy for its distributed workforce is an ultimatum to Cipla. Whether the workforce is at the plant location, on the field or at the corporate office giving one Cipla experience to all the employees was the priority.

The major challenges encountered by Cipla in handling its workforce include:

• Different set of workforce such as researchers, field employees, corporate employees etc. whose experience needs to be managed centrally.
• Multiple locations, multiple HR processes & procedures
• A sole dedicated helpdesk practice for global workforce to manage their experience was not possible
• Driving change at the organizational level as technology landscape not ready for change.

This undeniably called up for a cutting edge HR technology solution integrated with cloud platform to handle all HR associated operations from onboarding to exit. In the quest to set an example for the pharma industry, Cipla partnered with PeopleStrong’s SaaS based HR technology (PeopleStrong ALT) along with India’s first HR mobile App for creating this impact. PeopleStrong introduced an effective mitigation strategy to Cipla which took around 3 months to understand the entire HR processes and complexity, redefine and propose the best of HR processes that reduce the risk of the challenges and deliver smooth implementation of a shared service model. The approach has resulted in ensuring that HR is playing the actual role it is supposed to play rather than getting lost in transactions.

It also produced significant benefits that include:

• Adoption of Mobile app: Moving from manual to entire cloud hr software filled lot of excitement in the employees.
• Better flexibility options with anytime, anywhere access to employee’s information.
• Better employee experience as queries are resolved using email and app directly, better policies like Birthday leave introduced.
• Better governance & compliance as policies are more stringent now.
• Fixed the gaps in the existing technology landscape and resolved the technology issues.
• Plugging the gap using innovative interventions for better adoption, controlled process transition, hand-off points to be established in process design.

Getting on the HRMS cloud solutions is just a beginning, there is still a lot to implement and adopt. But interestingly, the HR SaaS phenomenon has not only confined to smaller companies, but, enterprise-class functionality organizations such as Cipla are also getting the cloud HR flavour. The Pharma entrepreneurs agree that SaaS can play a vital role in their software portfolio and is capable to deliver quicker deployment times, has the ability to address vanilla business processes so that they can emphasis their resources on custom processes that make an actual difference. Most organizations are happy with their decision to move HR to the cloud, why not you? Organizations that take the benefit of these improvements in technology can lay a base designed to unlock finance talent, time, and resources.

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