Standard Media Group empowers high-performing culture with SAP technology

 

If people are company's greatest asset, how do you support growth and create a high-performance culture without full visibility of employee's strengths and capabilities?

 Kenya's leading multi-media houses, are mainly reliant on manual processes, paper-based processes and poor visibility over individual staff performance has undermined the company's competitiveness.

The Standard Group Plc a multi-media with investments in newspaper print operations, television, radio broadcasting, digital and online services, as well as outdoor advertising.

Standard Group publishes the country's oldest newspaper, The Standard. It has a range of media platforms including television station KTN, Radio Maisha, The Nairobian weekly newspaper as well as outdoor and digital platform.

"Due to escalating war for talent, we made a strategic decision to implement a high-performance culture that would enable us to identify, nurture top-performing staff, gives us the opportunity to augment the skills and capacity of underperforming employees," said Mr. Nicholas Siwatom, Human Resources Director at Standard Group Plc.

 "We faced a major challenge in that we were relying on manual spreadsheet processes. Through this process, we have consolidated all performance data in a single place. It has helped us automate manual processes and equip us with real-time insight into the performance of our most valuable asset: our people."

Standard Group chose SAP Success Factors to help improve performance and goals monitoring with easy integration into the existing ERP system.

Core to their requirements was a performance management platform that would enable the business to set and communicate performance expectations.

 This was done in the form of competencies and goals; creating development plans; conducting interim reviews and adjust goals and development plans based on changes in expectations; ease the process of annual performance appraisals; and give the business the flexibility to review yearly organisational performance to identify trends and improvement areas.

Experienced East African SAP partner Altura was chosen to drive the implementation of the SAP SuccessFactors human capital management solution.

 According to Sandeep Vanga, CEO at Altura, the project was completed in rapid time thanks to strong buy-in from the customer's executive team.

 "Standard Group Plc CEO Mr. Orlando Lyomu was the project sponsor who ensured each phase of the implementation enjoyed the full support of the broader Standard Group team. We also appointed a program director to ensure overall project alignment with customer goals, while our well-earned market knowledge meant that we were able to utilise pre-packaged and preconfigured modules which contributed greatly to the speedy implementation time."

More than 650 staff members are now on the new SuccessFactors platform. This enable the business to complete all performance management activities on time and giving the leadership invaluable insight into the overall performance of the teams.

 "With the support of our partners, we are now on a journey of continuous improvement that bodes well for our competitiveness," says Mr. Siwatom.

"Our new solution has greatly improved our performance management activities through an easy-to-use interface that gives us an accurate view of each individual team members' performance. We look forward to building on the success of this project with future technology deployments that further enhances our ability to serve our customers."

Mehmood Khan, Chief Operating Officer at SAP Africa, said: "Realising the benefits of the intelligent enterprise through the deployment of powerful technology solutions is now within reach of smaller and mid-size companies. By establishing a strong platform for improving management of teams, Standard Group has taken a bold step toward establishing itself as an intelligent enterprise capable of navigating the rapidly changing complexities of the African media sector."

Standard Group Plc shared their digital transformation journey at "The Transform the Workplace Experience" event held on October 17 at Kempinski Hotel hosted by Altura.