Mars, Incorporated Digital Transformation Initiatives

About the Customer

Mars, Incorporated is an American global manufacturer of confectionery, pet food, and other food products with US$ 33 billion in annual sales in 2015, and is ranked as the 6th largest privately held company in the United States by Forbes.

Scope and Challenges

Mars is integrating its existing SAP on-premise system with a variety of cloud platforms, including Salesforce Service Cloud, SuccessFactors, and Avaya for telecommunications to help promote self-service within the company. This is being created in the form of an in-region shared service center, which has currently gone live in China. North America will go live in November.

This vision was focused on providing technology that enables associates to do more of what they wanted to be doing, growing careers and developing themselves. Mars didn’t want employees to worry about who to talk to if they had a question. Instead, they should be able to simply ask an HR portal that delivers results that are personalized. The transformation plan was originally set at five years, but the business is trying to reduce this to three, given the competitive pressures faced in the consumer goods market – Mars sees the HR transformation as critical to growing the business going forward.

Outcome and Implications

Along with talent acquisition, the HR shared service center has also made huge improvements to performance management, associate relations, as well as standardized processes across the organization.

One of the big improvements has been single sign-on and the ability to deliver content that is personalized to the person asking the question.

Quotes

"As you might with changing and transforming HR there are some big shifts that we would be making. Having all sorts of different technologies and different processes that were not standardized, that’s changing. We have more associates self-service and line managers self-service then we’ve ever had using the Salesforce Employee Community and our new SuccessFactors HR portal." - said Jonathan Meyers Senior Manager at Mars Inc.