Pinpoint HRM Helps the Helpers
72% of funds from donors and donations to The Smith Family go into school-based programs which improve key learning milestones in reading and maths, technology, and high school completion rates. As Australia’s largest national education charity, The Smith Family delivers its Learning for Life programs across 91 communities and supports more than 57,000 disadvantaged young students through sponsorship.
In 2018, Annette Young, Head of People and Culture, recognised current HR systems needed upgrading to help fulfil The Smith Family’s Five-Year Strategy (2018 -2022) to reach more disadvantaged young Australians.
“We needed to make data accessible and consistent for ongoing decision making. We also wanted to streamline our hiring processes and enable security requirements such as Working with Children and Police checks to be digitised for more proficient, and safer decision making.”
Partner-first approach to HR Tech pays off
Annette issued a feasibility study call-out for an HR technology design and delivery expert.
“I needed to find the experts who would recognise the issues particular to our NGO and could allow business as usual while upskilling and future proofing our HR team”, says Annette, who has worked in consulting, manufacturing and retail for Goodman Fielder and Hunter Douglas.
Pinpoint HRM and Managing Director, Craig Aunger were recommended.
“Craig listened and understood what we needed, which was reflected in the proposal that he turned around in two days,” says Annette. “This was indicative of the professionalism, attentiveness and customised commitment we received from Pinpoint as our HR tech advisers throughout the project.”
The project began in February 2020. In the feasibility study, Pinpoint helped Annette and her team articulate ‘Future State” requirements. The process of vendor evaluation confirmed the wisdom of engaging Pinpoint HRM.
“We would not have been able to navigate the vendor evaluation and selection process without Pinpoint. There was a lot of analysis involved and it was complex. They helped us get an understanding of the vendors that we would never have uncovered ourselves, their innovation roadmap, insights into other client experiences, expertise in these projects, knowledge of products.”
The Smith Family selects SAP SuccessFactors to enable HR Transformation
SAP SuccessFactors was the solution of choice for The Smith Family and Phase One of the implementation included Core HR (Employee Central), Onboarding and optimisation of their existing Payroll system (ADP).
One of the big undertakings was creating a new payroll shell before SucccessFactors was implemented, says Annette.
“Pinpoint advised us to be cautious with integration and not to underestimate issues that can arise. With regards to payroll optimisation with ADP, having Heenal Singh from the Pinpoint team, map out our processes to integrate with ADP was intrinsic to future success.”
Uptake of HR Central as Annette coined The Smith’s Family new HR platform has been first-rate, with excellent user adoption and feedback. Bottom line, the charity estimates by mid-year it will have achieved its Five-Year Strategy target of reaching 156,000 families across Australia.
“The whole process made us realise we can gain so much from automation of our HR systems“ says Annette. “We were successful in a Government Tender which awarded us $38 million over four years to scale up the organisation and fund our new HR platform. This in turn has given us the ability to scale up the student career programs we can offer.”
“Everything we do at The Smith Family is about reaching and supporting more disadvantaged young Australians through education and helping them build a bright future for themselves. This project has enabled us to do that even better and continues to support our vital work.”
“We went live in July 2020 under budget. Hand on heart, all the advice Pinpoint gave us, was the right advice. That’s the advantage of working with a niche, nimble implementation partner.”
