BATSA transforms HR department through Datacentrix

Major fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) company, British American Tobacco South Africa (BATSA), an employer of more than 2 000 people countrywide, has implemented OpenText Archive and Storage Solutions for SAP, supplied and installed by IT solution provider Datacentrix.

"The solution is an integral part of BATSA's objective to select, retain and develop employees, build relationships of trust with consumers, suppliers, distributors and partners, and manage high-quality brands," explains Derek Weatherall, strategic account manager at Datacentrix.

The challenge for Datacentrix was to develop a solution to enhance the existing SAP digital employee folder environment soon to be deployed across Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

"BATSA's HR department required a solution capable of capturing and digitising employee records remotely into a central, secure repository," says Weatherall. "From this repository, the BATSA centralised regional shared services team is able to access content for transactional execution in SAP, as well as link the content to the relevant SAP HCM employee record. Employee content can also be searched for and retrieved efficiently."

The OpenText Archive and Storage solutions for SAP transformed the BATSA HR department into a strategic business and also aligned document-centric business processes with the ERP transaction.

"Organisations can turn their enterprise information into corporate intelligence that provides a platform for improved customer service and streamlining of the HR department," he adds. "Benefits include the capability to digitise existing employee HR content and greatly enhanced capability to digitise and capture new employee information."

Additional advantages include enhanced productivity in document-centric processes, improved knowledge sharing, co-ordinated employee service, reduced compliance risk, complete management of employee documents, immediate availability of digital personnel files, effective HR shared service centres, reduction of paper and storage costs, consistent and reliable employee filing, complete and seamless integration into SAP HCM and compliance, reporting and auditing.

"A new dawn has arrived using learnings from the past on which to build the future," says Wimpie Stapelberg, regional head HR business architecture - EEMEA, British American Tobacco. "From a single country solution to a global solution, impacting the way we work, reducing our carbon footprint and contributing to a greener environment."