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Elizabeth Hackenson, CIO at the global energy management giant, shares the experience of addressing major business and customer challenges with digital innovation.
“We want to be the digital partner for sustainability and efficiency, across the industries we serve.”
That is the bold ambition simply articulated by Elizabeth Hackenson, CIO and SVP at Schneider Electric. For the leader of enterprise IT and digital technology strategy at the €25 billion ($30bn) Paris-headquartered electricity management and industrial automation business, that translates into a packed digital agenda of priorities.
One such priority that has risen high in recent years — and has been elevated further by the global pandemic — involves enhancing the employee experience for the company’s 135,000-plus people, across 115 countries. Hackenson and her team have explored how digital technologies can be used to support colleagues better and empower them to better serve the company’s customers.
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Elizabeth Hackenson, CIO of Schneider Electric |
A prime example of this is Schneider’s AI-powered Open Talent Market. Launched in 2019, the SaaS-based HR platform addresses the challenges of a business with a large and distributed workforce, specifically: building the best teams, supporting employees’ career development and facilitating internal talent spotting. The game-changing technology — whose global roll-out was accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic — performs three functions: matching people to open positions, helping them find a mentor within the organization, and connecting them to short-term projects that help gain new experiences.
The result is that employees have more control of their own careers, while Schneider — and its customers — benefit from a more dynamic, empowered workforce. The system’s algorithms align individuals’ skills and interests to the business’s needs, regardless of geography, personal connections, subconscious bias or any other aspects that might have previously been limiting factors.
Although it’s too soon to measure the impact on employee turnover, Open Talent Market is already delivering early wins in terms of employee engagement and time-saving: around 38,000 of the company’s 75,000 traditionally office-based workers have signed up, while managers sourcing internal talent can now access the talent pool faster and easier than ever, helping the company optimally re-deploy talent and skills.
“We’re truly empowering employees,” says Hackenson, adding the caveat that the challenges associated with launching the project go way beyond the IT. “It’s not just about putting in place a new technology — in some ways, that’s the easy part,” she says. “The hard part is getting people excited about the change and making them comfortable with doing things differently. We can talk about digital transformation in general terms, but there’s a huge people and process component to it all,” Hackenson highlights.
Driving rapid transformation
Like almost every other organization, Schneider had to act fast and boldly as the Covid-19 pandemic struck, to enable as many employees as possible to operate remotely — while providing a seamless continuity of service to its customers.
To enable working from home, Hackenson’s team quickly increased VPN access from 30,000 users in January 2020 to 113,000 users in June that year and upgraded data centers to enable communications demand. Video-call minutes per month rose by two-thirds to 60 million.
But the digital pivot was not just focused on employees.
Hackenson gives the example of how the business has transformed its acceptance testing in factories. Pre-pandemic, it would be normal for customers to visit the Schneider plant where a product had been manufactured, to ensure everything was as designed, and then approve it prior to shipping.
Schneider Electric’s Horizon Building, a net zero energy R&D and manufacturing facility, in Carros near Nice, France
Schneider Electric electric vehicle charging unit, EVlink Parking
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