We turned a legacy SAP HR estate into a search-led employee experience for 60,000 people — without waiting for the SuccessFactors migration.
The challenge
A global financial services organisation was running an ageing SAP HR landscape while preparing for a future move to SuccessFactors. Waiting for the full platform migration would have delayed value for employees and HR teams, leaving the business with complex navigation, inconsistent presentation of people data, and processes that still required specialist SAP knowledge.
The opportunity was to improve the employee experience immediately while protecting the longer-term SuccessFactors investment. The solution needed to work with the existing SAP HR backend, serve a global employee population, and make HR interactions feel intuitive enough that users could complete everyday tasks without training or HR support.
What we did
We led the design and delivery of a custom web-enabled HR experience, working closely with HR leadership, technology teams, and representative employee groups. We began with structured research and design sessions to understand how people actually searched for policies, found colleagues, and completed HR tasks across regions and roles.
We then designed a responsive application layer over SAP HR, exposing core people data through well-defined service interfaces while reimagining the user experience around how employees expect modern applications to work. A central feature was Google-style search, allowing users to find people, policies, and HR information through natural language-style discovery rather than deep menu structures.
Delivery ran iteratively, with each design and build cycle tested against real HR scenarios. This kept the solution grounded in genuine user needs while ensuring the architecture remained compatible with the planned SuccessFactors migration path.
What it delivered
The result was a tailored HR experience for 60,000 employees worldwide: easier to navigate, faster to use, and designed to reduce dependency on HR support teams. Employees gained a self-explanatory interface for everyday HR interactions, while the business gained a future-ready frontend approach that could move progressively with the SuccessFactors programme.
Most importantly, the project changed the posture of the HR transformation. The organisation did not have to wait for the next platform to deliver a better experience — it could create value immediately and carry the best parts of that experience into the future landscape.
The full measure of the engagement
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