Interview, with, JeanMarie, Simon, HR, Service, Manager, Schlumberger

Interview with Jean-Marie Simon, HR Service Manager, Schlumberger

02 Sep 2003 | (Interview)

Centralizing and harmonizing Human Resources Management at Schlumberger puts BW at the heart of managing HR. Key words are harmony, simplification, coherence & continuity.

Let's start by going back to the year 1998 when Schlumberger starts its standardization process. "At the time every entity had its own system for managing employees. This resulted in a loss of efficiency and productivity when researching and transferring information from one system to another", says Jean-Marie Simon. The new policy aims thus at centralizing.

Therefore, the company starts redefining the processes and terms associated with the different categories of personnel: ranks, advantages, transfer methods, etc. This action affects all entities, jobs, etc. at Schlumberger and deserves a few nuances: "This is not a standardization as we try to keep as much flexibility as possible. Whenever possible, we make sure to keep management peculiarities. However, whatever country you are in, the standardization policy prevails when no factor linked to the activity or the legislation is there to prevent it".

Another reason for opting for standardization is to be able to optimize the integration of new structures in case of a merge or an acquisition.

Finally, the human resources management at Schlumberger has to take many peculiarities into account (due to the many various jobs). "We did not wait for that project to take them into account. But thanks to this project we made a big leap forward. Before the project management processes existed but were not supported by a good infrastructure", continues Jean-Marie Simon.

Harmony partition
The standardization policy manifests itself in the management system. Knowing that all human resources information is centralized in the SAP HR module, the choice of storing data puts BW at the heart of the system.

But as far as returning the data is concerned, the choice is more difficult as it has to be web-enabled. Many propositions and solutions were offered in that respect before going towards a full SAP solution. "It wasn't quite easy. The basic tool proposed by SAP did not offer a real solution and appeared to be too complicated. We then made up our mind for a solution offered by ARINSO International, Argus Query, that covered both data return and reporting. A few other applications developed internally and externally added on to that solution. Finally, we also copied data providing us with efficient reporting tools via our intranet", explains Jean-Marie Simon.

Change of course
The project started a year ago with a new attempt and the decision to extend the role of BW to returning data. Schlumberger's intranet-specific reporting and query tools are gradually replaced in order to "provide our operational and human resources managers with a real reporting tool". The web version was chosen to facilitate end users' work among other things. "We wanted a simple and user-friendly tool with which managers wouldn't have to lose time getting familiar. For continuity reasons we absolutely wanted to keep a formal and organizational coherence with the previous tools. On the other hand, it was also important for us to be able to be able to go down to the individual records", follows Jean-Marie Simon.

The project started in September 2001 with the oil sector as pilot sector (this sector represents three quarters of Schlumberger). The system went into production in February 2002. The internal project team consisted of three or four people supported by the historical integration teams: ARINSO. "From the start we worked with them on all SAP HR projects. Besides their technical competence, they acquired a very good knowledge of our company, its methods and the way it works. We had no reason not to continue working with ARINSO, quite on the contrary, as this project was part of our continuity" says Jean-Marie Simon. Four to six people from ARINSO worked on the project transferring competence to the internal teams.

Results and consequences
"We have access to data on all Schlumberger workforce and we can also go down to individual records. All Schlumberger employees were entered in the system, which presently counts 85,000 records, each of which contains about 50 pieces of information. Managers and people in charge of human resources can find out how many employees belong to a certain category, in which area or access individual records in no time. It is also possible to sort people by nationality, by sex, etc., to establish statistics on resignations for instance, on the reasons for which people left the company, on the rates by sector or geography, etc". More generally, the system contains the statistics the managers need to manage their activity and answer any question. The absence of statistics on the risk of losing competence is explained by the recruitment and career policy applied at Schlumberger: "except when a new activity is created for example, we do not recruit people based on their experience. We hire from the bottom and push the new recruits to the top. The system enables us to see their evolution, and more particularly who's got a high potential". In that context, visibility and quality of analyses are based on the database history. All data was taken from September 1999 onwards. That data is updated every month.

Providing data to the Data Warehouse raises one question for the project team. Not from a technical viewpoint (as data are extracted from the central information system) but in the choice of what to provide. As Schlumberger is present worldwide, BW is used continuously (schedules and work days vary according to the countries). We thus had to install a monthly unavailability slot. At this stage, 500 people use the system. But the aim is to get 2,000 to 4,000 people to have access to the human resources reports and analyses.

Unequivocal conclusion As very good reactions came from the people who use the system, Jean-Marie Simon can only conclude that "the marginal number of negative feedback compared to the high number of positive comments confirms the fact that the project fulfilled its objectives successfully. I think that the good result mainly comes from the continuity and the system enrichment. Thanks to this tool we will be able to put more reports at the managers' disposal. They will gain autonomy from reporting specialists. Moreover, the former solutions also had their wrong sides: operational reporting tools needed a high confidence and knowledge rate whereas the tools developed internally cost a lot in maintenance. The fact that we opted for the BW decisional tool and kept a functional continuity gives us a pertinent solution that can evolve more quickly and provide our managers with increasingly important tools when creating reports. All those elements facilitate the acceptation of the project but also - and perhaps more importantly - the life of all people involved in reporting".

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