Good products for every budget. That is the goal of supermarket group ALDI, and the company has been achieving it for more than a hundred years. ALDI originated in Germany, but has also been active in the Netherlands for more than forty years.
Retail
11,500 employees
Culemborg
24 April 2019
HRM & Payroll
Interview with:
Sander van Schie (Director National HR Projects)
Walter Hoogenbosch (Senior IT Projectmanager)
Sander van Schie is Director National HR Projects at ALDI in the Netherlands. He explains: ‘ALDI currently has around 500 locations in the Netherlands. That success did not happen overnight, but is the result of consistently working according to three core values: simplicity, responsibility and reliability.’
Walter Hoogenbosch, Senior IT Project Manager: ‘We base everything on those core values. For our customers, but also for our employees and suppliers. And efficiency is reflected in almost everything: from processes to staffing, and from the assortment to the placement of barcodes.’
Consistently efficient, that is how you could describe ALDI. It is therefore no surprise that, for a long time, all processes within the company were the same everywhere, whether at ALDI in Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal or Poland. In recent years, there has been increasing room to shape matters at a national level. Van Schie describes it as “internationalising and professionalising”. It’s an efficiency drive. It enables us to respond better to, for example, local collective labour agreements. But of course, you do need a software system that allows you to do that easily.’
Hoogenbosch: ‘For years, we worked with the same system throughout ALDI. That was not a problem at all in Germany, but in the Netherlands we were one of the few customers of that system’s supplier. That is not ideal for the level of support you can expect. Even more challenging was the fact that we had to implement all changes ourselves.’
Van Schie: ‘Moreover, a great deal was still paper-based. From leave requests to payslips and annual statements. That is costly and not sustainable, but above all it took an enormous amount of time. Even if we had optimised this inefficient process, it would not have been very future-proof.'
Once the decision had been made that ALDI in the Netherlands would start looking for a new software partner, things moved quickly. Although at ALDI, they feel ‘quickly’ is relative. As Van Schie explains: ‘We felt we had quite a long tender process. Two or three months, at least. Later, I understood that other organisations sometimes need almost a year to make such a decision. I don’t think that’s in our DNA.’
The programme of requirements used by ALDI was clear. Van Schie: ‘We really wanted to work with a party that is familiar with Dutch legislation and the collective labour agreements that apply to us. That naturally leads you fairly quickly to Dutch providers. And above all, we wanted our processes to become much more efficient, because employees and managers would be able to arrange much more themselves.’
Hoogenbosch: ‘In addition, it was important that maintenance would not have to be carried out at ten different locations. ALDI in the Netherlands is divided into nine different sales companies plus a supporting service organisation, all with their own administration. And we wanted a system that was reliable and easy to integrate with our other systems, such as those of the Arbodienst, the Belastingdienst and the UWV,” says Van Schie. “AFAS was really the only one that offered that, so the choice wasn’t very complicated.’
Hoogenbosch: ‘The implementation of AFAS software was more or less our first project that was focused solely on the Netherlands and affected everyone within ALDI in the Netherlands.’ More than enough reason to approach it broadly and thoroughly.
Van Schie: ‘We gave the starting signal for the transition in May 2019, with the goal of going live with payroll for employees on 1 January 2020. We worked with a steering committee made up of representatives from all operating companies. The project management team and five working groups were positioned beneath that, each in charge of a specific part of the transition. One working group focused on everything related to payroll and salary components. The second focused on setting up all processes, including creating documents. The third dealt with setting up structures and roles, and the fourth with change management.’
The fifth working group focused on conversion and migration. Hoogenbosch was responsible for this: ‘All the data we wanted to use in AFAS software first had to be extracted from the old systems. That was quite a task. To gain insight into this, AFAS partner Salure carried out a conversion scan for us. Ultimately, together with Salure, we found ways to manage this properly, but it still involved a lot of manual work. And thinking work, because some changes have long-lasting effects. One example: because each company had its own payroll administration, we ended up with as many as ten employees with personnel number 1. That simply doesn’t work if you want to operate from a single database. You can change personnel numbers, but then you also have to ensure that, for example, the time registration system is aware of this as well. Together with AFAS and Salure, we ultimately managed to tackle all of these issues successfully.’
Van Schie: ‘We certainly did not lack challenges. For example, we wanted to create support in advance, but how do you bring employees along in such a change? Of course, we organised training sessions and kick-offs for managers, but we couldn’t train all 11,500 employees in how to use the AFAS Pocket App, just to name one example. So we dedicated newsletters to it.’
Throughout the entire implementation, ALDI worked closely with AFAS.
Van Schie: ‘We were very pleased about that, because AFAS’s expertise is evident. When it comes to their product and when it comes to projects like this. They also provided many training sessions for us. And two of our employees attended a training programme with them for several months, so that we now have as much of that expertise in-house as possible.’
Looking back, the implementation went quite smoothly. Hoogenbosch: ‘We didn't feel any stress. And there were no cases that really gave us a headache. It was a lot of work, though.’ The latter was also because the implementation was already ahead of schedule. Van Schie: ‘Initially, we only wanted to go live with payroll. Later, we raised our ambitions because there was room to do so.’
Van Schie: ‘We immediately set up various additional processes as well, such as employee onboarding registration. And we launched the AFAS Pocket App right away. Even with those additional ambitions, the transition went smoothly. Even in the final week, we felt no stress.’
The go-live itself was well prepared. Van Schie: ‘We had no doubts about what we had set up ourselves, although of course something can always go wrong. What we found much more exciting was how the transition would be received by all those people we had mainly informed by letter. It was very difficult to estimate how many questions we would receive about the new systems, and especially about the AFAS Pocket App for employees. That is why we also engaged an external party for support in that area. If questions were going to pour in, we wanted to have enough capacity to answer them all. But it remained almost completely quiet. Mission accomplished.’
Hoogenbosch: ‘At this point, we are hearing almost exclusively positive feedback. And that makes sense. Employees can arrange much more themselves via their phones than before. And the same largely applies to managers. Beforehand, we did hear concerns that people were afraid they would end up with more work now that they had to handle more themselves. And it is true that actions and responsibilities related to onboarding, expense claims, leave and absence have shifted more towards managers. But the number of steps has been drastically reduced. There are no more forms that need to be stamped and passed around, which makes a huge difference. Also in reducing the risk of errors.’
Van Schie: ‘We were also a little concerned that people would continue to insist on receiving their paper payslip. They are entitled to it, and if someone wants it, they will get it. In the end, that concern turned out to be minimal: only two people requested it. People apparently adapt easily when they notice that a new system is genuinely an improvement. And the efficiency gains we achieve with this system are enormous. We already noticed that during the coronavirus crisis, when payroll employees were able to work from home in emergency situations. This transition has truly been a fantastic step in every respect.’