Federal agency transitions to Oracle Cloud with Baker Tilly

Client background

A large federal agency supporting over 900,000 employees looking to transition more than 25 disparate on-premise legacy HR systems to the cloud chose Baker Tilly to partner with in their cloud journey. The products in scope included Oracle HCM Cloud Core HR, Talent Profile and Talent Management (Performance Management, Goal Management).

The business challenge

One of the challenges this client faced over the years was consolidating and standardizing redundant legacy systems and unique processes across multiple agencies. In attempting to streamline their current systems, their effort was very customized and technical, without modernization of HR processes. As a result, they had little to show for their years of hard work, and the employee population still suffered from a poor user experience and disparate and manual processes.

Strategy and solution

First, Baker Tilly partnered with the client to build a road map to the cloud, ensuring the prioritization of the most critical capabilities and helping to think through a phased deployment by population in order to collect feedback and lessons learned by phase and reduce maintenance and support risks associated with deploying new applications across such a large employee base.

Next, Baker Tilly conducted the Harmonize phase to define future state processes and refine requirements for Core HR, Talent Profile, Performance Management and Goal Management. A highly collaborative agile method was used to involve the client early and often in the design and future state definition of their cloud system. Baker Tilly met with subject matter experts and key stakeholders daily, showing progress made on configurations iteration to iteration to gather feedback and continuously improve upon the global design. This led to efficiencies gained, such as reducing the number of data fields used by over 1,000 fields, thus avoiding duplicate entry and poor data quality, so that the client could effectively report data and send it to downstream systems in real time. Additionally, the enterprise-wide system design set them up for higher system adoption and ease of use for their employees.

After partnering with Baker Tilly on a successful Harmonize phase, they transitioned into the Cloud Migration phase. The approach was tailored to requirements gathering, solution design, development, and unit testing to meet a collaborative, agile delivery model. Baker Tilly iteratively designed and built the system, continuously adopting new features and enhancing the solution from previous development increments, as well as adapting to the client’s evolving needs along the way. Frequent scrum demonstrations, feedback cycles and continuous testing ensured that there were no surprises when transitioning into design freeze and User Acceptance Testing event. Baker Tilly worked closely with the Oracle team to ensure business needs were transformed into critical product enhancements and incorporated into the road-map to meet key federal requirements.

Baker Tilly was able to deliver on the following accomplishments through the Cloud Migration and ultimately help the client consolidate business processes, improve user experience, reduce inefficiencies and manual burden on HR.

• Designed, built, and tested 100+ unique Nature of Actions for processing personnel actions
• Applied 500+ business rules and CPDF edits leveraging native capabilities
• Enabled manager and employee self-service for personnel management and performance management
• Reduced 67% of custom data fields from on-premise to the cloud (from 2,585 to 849)
• Embedded dynamic, standard reports and forms such as SF50 and SF52
• Streamlined business processes, such as automated workflow and guest input for performance appraisals, while also meeting legal and regulatory requirements

The collaborative, agile environment during cloud migration prepares the workforce for a continuous innovation model with the cloud. Their Core HR and Talent Management foundation, aligned with a global enterprise design, sets them up for success to incorporate additional populations and cloud modules in the future.