Q&A – Aviva Europe
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Insurance giant chose Workday over Oracle for its HR refresh
When the European division of the UK’s largest insurer standardised its HR management systems, it chose a software-as-a-service supplier over its enterprise applications partner. HR director Andy Moffat explains why
Aviva, the insurance giant formerly known as Norwich Union, has undergone a radical transformation over the past two years.
Until 2008, the company had a number of brands across the world, including Hibernian in Ireland and Commercial Union in Poland. That year, it decided to converge under the Aviva moniker, partly because it would allow for global marketing and sponsorship campaigns.
Just as Aviva’s many global divisions had been operating under different names, they had also been operating in different ways. But the standardisation of the brand was accompanied by a standardisation of business practices.
Since his appointment in 2007, CEO Andrew Moss has instigated a ‘One Aviva’ strategy, which seeks to assert standard business processes across the group. Perhaps counter-intuitively, this is designed to allow regional divisions greater autonomy by liberating them from the burden of designing and operating their own individual systems.
Aviva’s European division, which does not include its UK business, has been at the forefront of this strategy – comprising 11 separate markets, it has the most pressing need for standardisation. And the HR department, unusually, has driven the technology component of the standardisation project.
As Aviva Europe’s HR director, Andy Moffat, explained as he spoke to Information Age, the search for a new platform for HR processes led the company to depart from its principal applications supplier (Oracle) in favour of an ‘untested’ software-as-a-service vendor (Workday). This decision was not taken lightly, though. Outlined below are the steps that Moffat and his team took to make sure it was the right one.
Information Age: What was the thinking behind the ‘One Aviva’ unification strategy?
Andy Moffat: It started when Andrew Moss came in as CEO in July 2007. His comment at the time was, “I don’t see how the fifth-largest insurance group in the world, operating in 27 different markets, can be run from a centre in London.”
He had two ideas; one was that we were under-leveraging our size because we were not joined up, and the second was to create a regional model for the business, which pushed decision-making closer to the customer.
How did this apply to the European division?
Until then, our European business had been 11 semi-autonomous business units. When Andrea Moneta arrived as our CEO for Europe in 2008, and he asked “Is this the best way to run our business?”, the answer was clearly “no”.
How did One Aviva impact the HR technology strategy?
We wanted our people in local markets to be focused on their customers, not worrying about what technology they use and whether their processes are efficient. Also, HR in Europe was historically just traditional personnel:
if a manager needed something, they would walk down the corridor and ask the HR department to sort it out. We wanted to migrate towards employee and manager self-service.
Your approach to standardising HR processes across Europe was to standardise HR software. Why was that?
There are two ways to do this. One is to say “These are our processes” and then go to technology providers and say “Can you make your system fit?” But because we had 11 different systems and 11 different versions of the truth, we decided that the quickest way to gain consistency was to work with the in-built processes of whichever tool we chose, unless there is a compelling reason not to.
You eventually selected an entirely new system. Why not expand one of your existing tools?
We asked ourselves “Do we have a single solution in a market that is easily scalable and transferable?” and the answer to that was “no”. If you take the instance of Oracle [Human Resources Management System] that we had in Ireland, for example, the way we had built it was bespoke to Ireland, while our instance of Oracle in France was configured very differently. So we would have had to reconfigure either system to deploy it in other markets, which would have meant starting from scratch.
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