Diebold Nixdorf reinvents the employee experience with Oracle Cloud HCM

The global fintech leader used Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM to overcome post-merger HR challenges.

When the COVID-19 pandemic closed brick-and-mortar businesses in 2020, many financial and retail establishments struggled to quickly shift how they conduct business.

Fortunately, there was help for banks and retailers that needed to provide critical services. Diebold Nixdorf was designated as an essential services provider and played a key role in helping banks and retailers—deemed critical infrastructure industries—continue to conduct business safely.

Diebold Nixdorf’s primary mission is to automate, digitize, and transform the way people bank and shop. The company accomplishes this through the sale, manufacture, installation, and maintenance of self-service solutions and software for global financial, retail, and commercial markets. Diebold Nixdorf partners with most the world’s top 100 financial institutions and the top 25 global retailers.

Diebold Nixdorf must operate efficiently internally to keep the wheels of commerce spinning worldwide—during a pandemic or at any time—so it can fully focus on helping its customers.

Committing to change

In 2016, Diebold acquired Germany-based Wincor Nixdorf, a retail banking hardware, software, and services provider. Combining the companies resulted in two core human resources (HR) systems: Oracle E-Business Suite and SAP.

Today, as one entity, Diebold Nixdorf, has a presence in 130 countries and employs approximately 22,000 people. One of the company’s goals is to provide a great employee experience, but to help achieve this, it first needed to address its manual, time-intensive, and inconsistent HR processes.

For example, when the HR department started combining data from the two enterprises, they found a lot of gaps. Tiffanie Lewis, vice president, HR Technology and Service Solutions at Diebold Nixdorf, says that employee records were sometimes incomplete, or employees were missing information about their managers and compensation, which made it difficult to run reports and make decisions.

Tiffanie Lewis, vice president, HR Technology and Service Solutions at Diebold Nixdorf, realized the cost/benefit of an integrated cloud solution was a better investment than trying to resolve the challenges around the company’s legacy systems.

There were also basic questions that could not be answered—some as basic as, How large is our global workforce?

“We were basically unable to measure anything effectively or efficiently,” says Lewis. “We had limited ways to create sustainable linkages between the two systems or between the datasets in the systems. The disparity made it difficult to run any global HR programs or processes.”

In 2017, the company committed to change. Finance and HR leaders agreed to work together to create a core set of unified employee data. At the same time, the company saw an opportunity to transform its HR processes with a move to the cloud.

“We realized the cost/benefit of an integrated cloud solution was a better investment than trying to resolve the challenges around the legacy systems,” says Lewis.

After exploring HR solutions from several organizations, Diebold Nixdorf selected Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM) because it could provide a single, unified, cloud-based system, and it performed most effectively during the company’s proof of concept.

Accelerating the roadmap

Diebold Nixdorf went live with Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Resources (core) in 2019 to standardize its HR data and allow the company to consistently manage its employees’ records. Implementing the core HR module also allowed HR leaders to easily answer basic business questions about workforce headcount, location, employment, status, attrition, and other concerns that they struggled to answer previously.

Based on that success, the company was eager to implement additional modules. But differences in how it performed HR work around the world made it challenging to determine how to use the same technology system globally. In 2020, Diebold Nixdorf extended a strategic relationship with Accenture, doing several months of process mapping to help accelerate the cloud transformation.

“In the end, we had to make some adjustments to our plan,” says Lewis. “But we also asked Oracle to make some adjustments to their product. Not every company can do that, but I believe that as a partner, your voice should be heard. I appreciate that with our relationship with Oracle.”

Working with Accenture, Diebold Nixdorf’s HR team accelerated its Oracle Cloud HCM implementation roadmap, launching 10 additional modules—including Recruiting, Onboarding, Performance Management, HR Help Desk, Knowledge Management, and Oracle University’s Guided Learning—in just 12 months.

“Not only did we accomplish what we planned to do over a three-year period in 12 months, we also added more to it,” says Lewis. “That would not have been possible without Accenture and the resources they brought to accelerate the roadmap.”

Reducing manual processes

Given the company’s focus on the employee experience, Diebold Nixdorf HR leaders had initial concerns about change management and wanted to make user adoption as easy as possible. “We talked to the Oracle team about Guided Learning and that’s ultimately what we decided to go with,” says Lewis. “We found a tremendous benefit in that. It has helped employees adopt the change and utilize the system.”

Making the best use of everyone’s time is another important component of Diebold Nixdorf’s objective to deliver a better experience to its employees and customers. Oracle Cloud HCM allowed the company to introduce employee self-service and reduce manual, time-consuming processes.

Before Diebold Nixdorf implemented Oracle Cloud HCM, if an employee wanted to make a simple change—update their phone number or their email address, for example—they had to send a form to HR. “That was all being done manually every day with thousands of people,” says Lewis. “We want people to focus on their jobs and not get frustrated with HR processes. Implementing employee self-service was therefore a big win for us.”

Using Oracle Cloud HCM, Diebold Nixdorf can also manage employee needs faster. “With the manual environment, we had no visibility into how long it took to resolve an employee request. An employee could ask something via email, and it might be weeks or months before they got an answer,” says Lewis.

The company now uses Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Resources Help Desk to manage employee service requests and measure response time. Then that data is used to develop KPIs and continually improve employee service.

Meanwhile, manager self-service is used to better manage hiring and to quickly alert HR when an employee has decided to leave the company so they can begin the search for a replacement sooner.

Perhaps most critically, Diebold Nixdorf now benefits from easy access to data and a single source of the truth for HR information.

“If the HR partner in Germany and the HR partner in the United States are both asked exactly how many employees they have in each country, they can both respond in less than 10 minutes,” says Lewis. “Before, that might have taken a few weeks. That time to value is mission-critical.”

Looking ahead

Diebold Nixdorf is now focused on optimizing Oracle Cloud HCM and continuing to make improvements that will ultimately transform the way HR delivers service to employees.

“The employee value proposition that allows us to attract and retain talent and the employee experience are both very important to us,” says Lewis. “The technology is key to our success with both of those things. Our HR strategy doesn’t work without technology.”

Moving to a cloud-based solution also makes Diebold Nixdorf more agile and gives the 163-year-old company the freedom to innovate so it can continue working toward its mission to automate, digitize, and transform the way people bank and shop.

“When you are doing things manually it’s difficult to think about possibilities and opportunities,” says Lewis. “But when you have a cohesive technology infrastructure, you can manage multiple activities and take on more complicated projects. What we now have is an HR system that is global, connected, standard, and simpler.”