Life Care Services (LCS) is the third largest senior living company in the United States. Made up of 600 corporate employees, 140 senior living communities, and 18,000 total employees, LCS requires specific, integrated systems to properly maintain human resources.

When Lisa Ryan accepted her position as Vice President and Director of HR for Life Care Services, she inherited a variety of disparate systems. These systems failed to communicate with one another, which led to redundancies, errors, and headaches for every user.

Lisa was determined to find an integrated solution to simplify processes across the entire company.

Desiring improved efficiency and effectiveness, she sought out a unified, scalable system with the following characteristics:

• Cloud-based format to allow for employee and manager self-service.
• Modern HR to accommodate an age of digital users.
• The pace of Innovation to decrease the need for another system overhaul in the future.
• Social Collaboration for ease in sharing knowledge and gaining job-specific training.
• Flexible licensing
• User experience to make the transition and ongoing engagement easy for every employee, manager, executive, and HR team member.

To ensure the chosen system met needs across the entire organization, Lisa enlisted a project team made up of two HR leaders, an IT exec, finance controller and payroll manager. The responsibility of selecting and implementing the new system fell on these team members.

Eventually, the search ended with HCM Cloud, a suite capable of meeting every requirement expressed.

Now, following the expedited implementation with the support of Drivestream, the project team has identified 12 positive outcomes for using HCM Cloud:

1. Expanded manager access to data
2. Paperless processes
3. Ease of auditing
4. Improved policies
5. Better quality data
6. Employee self-service capability
7. Compliance
8. Segregation of duties
9. Better user experience
10. Time savings
11. Consistency
12. Accurate org charts

As Lisa challenged managers to complete annual performance reviews, work with employees to approve 2018 goals, figure out bonus allocations, and recommend compensation changes, she received a surprising response from one of her managers: “Wow, this is just so elegant. I can’t even believe I can do all of this so easily.”

Today, the optimistic statements made across the organization continue to affirm the product team’s decisions. Seasoned HR leader Lisa jokes, “The word elegant was something I’d never heard about HR systems.”

Making HCM Cloud work effectively in LCS required careful consideration over a variety of subjects including: data conversion; roles & responsibilities divided between HR and payroll; new, paperless workflows including appropriate approvals; reducing customization to adapt for future updates; segregation of duties for employees, managers, and HR; and the timing of training for the entire organization.

The challenges of the transition included: a lack of knowledge about HCM Cloud; a limited understanding of resources needed; difficulty in simplifying complicated workflows; changing mindsets for every user; assigning specific security roles to every user; reduced access to old data; and the high number of entities under the LCS umbrella.

To assist other companies hoping to transition to HCM Cloud, the leaders of LCS express the following five key lessons.

1. Recognize that your biggest resource is time, not money.
2. Develop a project team from a variety of departments.
3. Know that even positive change can be confronting.
4. Don’t try to replicate the past. (Don’t take an old system and make it new. Instead, move forward.)
5. Dedicate a team to stay on top of reporting.

The satisfaction expressed from LCS is a compelling reason to consider HCM Cloud. To hear about the LCS transition to HCM Cloud in greater detail, watch the full presentation here.

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