You’ve implemented Oracle HCM Cloud in your organization. Recruiters and HR professionals alike are reporting an increase in efficiency and employees seem happier with an improved user experience. Happy, you sit back in your desk, as your promotion is virtually guaranteed. Your work after all, is done, right?
Wrong.
While implementation and adoption are a lion’s share of achieving digital transformation, companies must constantly keep up in order to stay competitive. To learn more, Frank Cowell sat down with Laurie Jacobson, VP Development and Customer Success to learn more about Project Elevate.
Project Elevate sounds very intriguing, Laurie. Can you start us off today by explaining what Project Elevate is all about?
LJ: Project Elevate is a program that we’ve been working on with HCM Cloud Development with a group of our most strategic partners. Basically, it’s a collection of packaged services that really was designed to help our customers take their HCM Cloud experience to the next level.
This project came about really looking at our customer base and noticing that there are many customers who may or may not know about all the innovation that’s coming out from the HCM Cloud all the time. Every quarter, we announce new features and functions, and customers don’t always know what’s available.
Project Elevate is all about working with our customers in really several areas. One would be helping them learn about and take advantage of new features. Two might be for those customers who maybe started with an initial footprint in one area, like perhaps core HR, and then later down the road they try to implement something else.
So Project Elevate is a collection of these packaged services where partners who have specific expertise in HCM Cloud will work hand in hand with our customers to help them really take advantage of the latest and greatest capabilities in HCM Cloud to maximize their experience with our products.
It sounds like a very interesting project. Can you talk a little bit about what your focus is?
LJ: There are really three big areas of focus here. First is new feature adoption and that includes the new newsfeed user experience, or the responsive UI. Customers are adopting it right now and have a couple more quarters until everybody has access to the functionality by default.
The second big area is around HCM optimization. We have found that customers get into an area where they’re running into issues, whether it’s day-to-day operations or adoption. An HCM optimization will help the customer really take a step back, understand not only what the capabilities are, but allow a partner to understand what they’re trying to do. Between those working sessions, customers find out how to get really on track to be as efficient as possible.
Finally, the third area is around performance. Often, when a company goes live, their data volumes will be at an introductory level. Over time, those volumes increase with company growth and so this optimization exercise is beneficial to streamlining performance as they grow and change with the HCM Cloud service.
Great. So how is Oracle involved in this?
LJ: I’m part of this group at Oracle and we’re a part of the development organization, called the Center of Excellence. I like to think of us as this collection of experts where we have product specialists and technology specialists, but they’re all about the mission and helping our customers be wildly successful with HCM Cloud products.
Our team often gets many of the more complex problems and implementation to solve where we work with customers to get through hurdles. We also see some escalations and so, we have a juxtaposition where we’re seeing really the areas that customers need more support.
A part of this program is really to expand the expertise we’ve learned from these tricky situations and strategic involvement with very complex implementations into the partner ecosystem, so customers have more ability to take advantage of the expertise that we’re learning every day with how customers are using our products.
The collaboration has been really tight, and I think it’s a way for us to amplify and scale the learnings that we’ve come across in our work through the Center of Excellence out into the wider ecosystem for HCM Cloud.
Learn More
To learn more about how Oracle executes on Project Elevate and some of the customer success stories, listen to the entire podcast here.
If you’re an existing Oracle HCM Cloud customer and think that participating in Project Elevate would be beneficial to your company, get in touch here.