The objective of the onboarding process is to help new employee feel comfortable and welcome in their role. It is more than a simple welcome plan or a one-day event where the new members are introduced and given business gifts or induction courses. They need to be integrated effectively to gain agility, autonomy, and productivity. Together with Coop, we revolutionized the way the grocery operator handles the onboarding processes. The Buddy project we implemented consisted of several steps.
Buddy is a fully custom SAP Fiori solution supporting the onboarding processes in the organization. The goal of the Buddy was to elimneate delays, employee uncertainty, missing activities, or wasting time on unnecessary and repetitive knowledge transfers, experienced in the onboarding process.
To produce the idea of improving the process, we started with design thinking. We had a chance to interview the most recently onboarded, asking them about their experience with the onboarding procedure. It helped us recognize pain points and real user needs.
After this phase, we started to work on describing personas, user stories, and high-level requirements. Once we understood what we should focus on, we created a data model, describing things we need to implement on the SAP backend side. The last step during the design phase was prototyping the solution using Axure Prototyping Tool. Our team executed a couple of iterations, making sure our design proposal was valid and met the expectations.
We ended up with two SAP Fiori applications: Buddy Onboarding & Info Hub and Buddy Admin. The first one – Buddy Onboarding & Info Hub is designed for people who are being onboarded. It’s also for other employees (onboarded in the past), who use the application as Info Hub, where they can access current guidelines and documentation, and track the updates. The second one – Buddy Admin is for onboarding administrators, who model specific self-onboarding processes. The responsibility of the admin is to recognize the onboarding tasks, which should be executed by employees while joining the organization. It’s to make sure employee has proper accesses, tools, and knowledge to start the work.
In addition, we also extended the onboarding process in Coop’s ServiceNow, so some of the onboarding tasks can be performed by Coop’s internal employees even before an onboarded person joins the organization (organizing a new PC, creating a new user, etc.).
Coop already uses the solution across different departments, modeling onboarding processes for roles like SAP Fiori developer, SAP backend developer, Neptune developer, or UX designer. More departments have also started to use the solution.
Now, the onboarding processes collect important guidelines, routines, or documents from different spaces, enabling employees to learn and understand the company’s standards quickly. Buddy provides everything employees need for a comfortable start during their first days in the organization.
It makes onboarding consistent and quicker, but it doesn’t bring value only to this process. Now, Coop has a great tool to inform people about guidelines updates, so everyone in the department is up to date with current standards and changes.