I recently attended Neeyamo’s analyst event in Atlanta, where I discussed the company’s cloud transformation practice with its leaders, and specifically the announcement of UnBox HR for SuccessFactors.

Over the past 10 years, Neeyamo has developed its HR offering with the goal of “addressing the white spaces” in HR technology and services and focusing on supporting clients through their global HR transformation journey. With this focus, Neeyamo offers a consult-to-operate model capable of providing front-end consulting (including change management), application deployment, and post-deployment services for both cloud applications (including SuccessFactors and Oracle HCM) and HR and payroll service delivery.

Neeyamo’s SuccessFactors practice

Neeyamo is a longstanding SAP/SuccessFactors partner, and itself an early adopter of SuccessFactors, which it deploys to manage HR for its own employees. Key facts about the practice include:

• A SuccessFactors COE in India has ~100 consultants with a mix of certifications across all modules
• There are >50 clients to date, with 60 cloud projects completed
• The practice deployed Employee Central + Performance Management for payments firm Ezetap in <21 days
• It provides several levels of SuccessFactors application support, including pre-deployment consulting, deployment, post-deployment optimization, and post-deployment AMS
• It deploys the payroll cloud platform PayNComp, with the ability to provide native payroll to ~30 countries (and growing) with certified integration to SuccessFactors.

While a key challenge for organizations is overcoming and successfully navigating the impact of change to operations from a cloud-based HR transformation initiative, the lack of a successful business case that shows ROI is often a roadblock that many such initiatives do not easily overcome.

An additional ROI-related roadblock to cloud conversion is that, with subscription-based cloud platforms, the client is paying for the software from day one of the contract. This means that until the client is live on the application, the ROI is unrealized. However, UnBox HR takes an alternative approach, enabling incremental change, phased transformation, and quicker ROI realization.

How UnBox HR works

With a traditional system implementation, requirements are gathered, configured, tested, and then go live, meaning all the modules being deployed need to be ready prior to go live (depending on the scope and roll-out approach). By contrast, UnBox leverages Sprint iterations (Agile development methodology) to break the platform modules into portions, virtually unpacking the platform to make the move incremental rather than all at once.

This incremental approach is much easier to digest from a change perspective, enabling a ramp-up based on the client’s specific needs and tolerance to change. Further, by making a business case for incremental installments, ROI achievement is less challenging and realized in line with each installment. 

The UnBox HR offering includes four core packages which progressively ramp up the SuccessFactors modules and capability in scope, as shown here:

Looking ahead

Neeyamo will continue to build on both its SuccessFactors capability but also its extended payroll and multi-process HR services offering. It is investing in more SuccessFactors certified consultants to support demand and expects to reach ~140 this year. Additionally, it will expand its set of tools and enablers to reduce deployment times, as well as extending its global payroll capability and integration to include more countries (it is targeting ~70 native in PayNComp over the next 3 years).

Neeyamo recently announced it had completed a cloud deployment for Sony Pictures Networks India Pvt. Ltd. (SPN), including Employee Central, plus the Performance and Goal Management modules of SuccessFactors for Sony’s 2k employees across five APAC countries. And Neeyamo and SPN are inflight with the deployment of recruiting and onboarding, and will add benefits administration in the longer term.

Neeyamo is already seeing strong interest in its SuccessFactors offering, and I expect UnBox HR to be an attractive option for prospective clients struggling to make the move to the cloud.

For further insight into Neeyamo’s broader HR services capability, see Neeyamo Addressing the White Spaces in HR by Gary Bragar.