"The service provided by projekt0708 was outstanding across the board," said Holger Holz, Director Global HR Systems at Linde. "The colleagues went far beyond the usual."

Linde is adapting to the technological possibilities of digitalization with comprehensive self-services for employees and managers. Linde's Human Resources division previously focused on targeted optimization of the administrative workload and delivered maximized transparency to its employees.

In the course of Linde’s continuous growth, its human resources solution needed to take into account the individual needs of old and new employees in terms of user-friendliness. As a long-standing partner in HR/IT projects, projekt0708 was brought in to modify the user interface of existing self-services while meeting technical requirements and maintaining user-friendliness.

The pilot project focused on connecting around 20,000 new employees as a result of the merger with Praxair, Inc. in 2018. The complete revision of the self-services was intended to facilitate the daily work with central HR processes for this location and future locations of the company. The project brought a global consistency to the system in terms of look and feel. The pilot covered three SAP solutions:

• SAP Fiori®: SAP’s design system that enables the creation of business apps with a consumer-like, consistent experience across devices, including tablets and smartphones.
• SAPUI5: the development toolkit for HTML5 that supports application developers in creating fast and easy applications based on HTML5 and JavaScript.
• SAP Fiori launchpad: the central access point to apps and services such as search, navigation, personalization, and embedded support.

"SAP’s ongoing investment in user interface and user experience helped us decide to take our system to a new level in terms of appearance and user-friendliness," said Linde’s Director Global HR Systems, Holger Holz.

A particular challenge for projekt0708 as an implementation partner proved to be a system that had grown over years of use.

"The biggest challenge was to replicate familiar functions in the new user interface in terms of functionality and processes," said Dirk Jäckel, project manager and Managing Director/CTO at projekt0708. "We succeeded with this, despite the disparate elements of the existing system, which differed greatly from the SAP standard."

In the end, projekt0708 combined 16 self-services in the new system with a hybrid approach of agile and classic project management methods. The uniquely individual platform includes both SAP Fiori standard apps and customer-specific components. Where third-party applications complement the SAP standard at Linde, projekt0708 succeeded in integrating them into a holistic design to ensure a streamlined look and feel.

“These are the kind of customer success stories we love to hear,” said Lars Thiwissen, Head of SAP SuccessFactors/Human Experience Management and Member of the Management Team SAP Germany. “Partners like project0708 are close to customers and understand their specific needs. This helps them deliver tailored services so customers can thrive and grow.”

After a successful roll-out in the USA and positive feedback from users, further rollouts happened in Canada, UK, Ireland and Singapore. In total, projekt0708 will support Linde in expanding the revised system to locations in around 75 countries.