Kellogg may be best known for its cornflakes, but the global cereal and convenience food giant has ventured to The Cloud for a new talent and success management roll out that's being led from Europe.
The European operations of Kellogg Company have implemented SuccessFactors’ Succession Management module for 1,500 senior and middle managers across eight countries. The project is part of a board level initiative to help facilitate European talent pools within the company, enabling better line of sight, and strategic planning around critical roles as the company continues its expansion in Europe .
Kellogg Company, with 2007 sales of nearly $12 billion, is the world’s leading producer of cereal and a leading producer of convenience foods, including cookies, crackers, toaster pastries, cereal bars, frozen waffles, and meat alternatives. Kellogg Company has already adopted SuccessFactors as its HR platform globally with SuccessFactors Performance Management and Compensation Management modules, which will be deployed later this year.
“Our European management team meets twice a year to discuss top talent and succession,” says Cath Bailey, HR Director, European Organizational Effectiveness. “Last year we created European talent pools to help support our growth. We wanted to find a technology solution that would provide us with a better way of presenting, planning and managing our internal talent and accelerate role fulfillment.”
European-led roll out
Kellogg has deployed the SuccessFactors Succession Management module to senior and middle managers in the UK , Ireland , France , Benelux , Spain , Italy , Nordics, Germanics and Greece . Moving forward, Kellogg will deploy SuccessFactors Performance Management and Compensation Management to 4,500 employees with the company’s US operations with planned go-live in October 2009, and European operations going live in 2010. These additional modules will provide the ability for goals to be rapidly and effectively cascaded throughout the entire organisation.
"Previously, we had to manually gather this data using PowerPoint, which was a long and laborious process resulting in over 100 slides. SuccessFactors Succession Management provides us with a powerful, yet simple tool that enables us to help future proof our strategic expansion and run ‘what if’ planning scenarios. Growing our commercial capability is one of our critical business objectives and SuccessFactors is playing an important part in facilitating this.”
Bailey says it was important to have the capacity and capability to consider 'what if' scenarios, so that when working with the top team about potential moves, they would have visibility on the impact of reassigning skills. Eventually, SuccessFactors emerged as the solution of choice – a decision that has since had a knock-on effect across Kellogg's global operations.
"My colleagues in the US were looking at an integrated solution to roll out to incorporate performance and compensation and I knew SuccessFactors were one of the preferred suppliers as an option for that. We went ahead with the succession piece last year, and this year the US are rolling out their integrated products, so I was delighted when I found out that they selected SuccessFactors because, of course, our managers are already used to the look and feel, and we've been able to share our experiences of using it in Europe to inform the global design."
A global focus
With a focus on expansion, Kellogg's recently acquired a Russian business that almost doubled its size overnight, which poses its own challenges. "At the moment we're going through the integration phase and the company is still running as United Bakers," explains Bailey. "It has got some 4,000 employees across Europe, and we're looking at how we integrate things like our values. We have a global ethics and compliance training programme that all employees go through, and we are just talking about how we will implement this into Russia this year."
A variety of methods are employed to help maintain the Kellogg's ethos. "We have some really well-established programmes in terms of learning and in terms of the culture," she continues. "We have things like the 'K values' programme which is rolled out as part of everybody's induction and on-boarding, and we have local HR teams in each of our countries, so we tend to work with them in order to design programmes and solutions which they then implement."
The brand invests significant time in this process, and Bailey herself has been involved over the past year in building the employer brand and trying to determine what it is about the brand that is 'special'. "Talented people, relationships and integrity, pride and passion in the organisation and our innovative products were all the things that people talked about," she says. "Everybody identified that it's a really special place to work and we developed a strap line, which is 'it's a special feeling'. If you came into the business anywhere in the world, you'd get a real sense that it is a nice and special place to work and I think that's because of the people."
