Christin Purmann

Head of SCC Employee Portals, DUSSMANN GROUP

Supernova Award Category: 
Future of Work: Human Capital Management
The Organization: 

Dussmann Group is a service provider headquartered in Berlin, Germany. The group employs more than 60,000 employees worldwide, with a revenue of more than €2 billion in 2020, and prides itself on being one of the largest private multiservices companies worldwide.

The Problem: 

When Dussmann started the implementation project with Neptune Software, in spring 2020, fewer than 15% of Dussmann employees had a digital entity, meaning that only a small percentage could be reached via digital means such as a social intranet. Due to the divisional nature of Dussmann, some employees had to use as many as 40 separate user IDs to operate their systems. To make things more challenging, frontline workers in the service industry constitute a wide demographic group, from old to young, many of whom are not technology-savvy. Therefore, communication with the employee base was conducted via paper.

Consequently, Dussmann’s project team looked for solutions for digitizing the employee experience to facilitate a personal perspective from employees’ first day of work. The basic assumption was that all employees are specialists with individual tasks. myDussmann was to provide access to content and tools tailored to individual needs as much as possible for HR administration, business workflows, and employee communications. With users ranging from smartphone- and PC-literate iGen employees all the way to baby boomers, many of whom have only a desktop PC at home, it was paramount to keep the system simple and intuitive to use.

It was clear that Dussmann Group had to choose a platform that would enable high productivity and velocity to build the necessary applications, because the enterprise planned to go live in fall 2020.

The Solution: 

In early summer 2020, Dussmann established a cross-functional project team with highly committed members from IT, HR, and the corporate communications department, because the company realized that it had to provide a single solution as a “one-stop shop” to its employees. The project team was supplemented by experts from Neptune Software, and jointly the team managed to go into pilot on September 1. After only three months of planning and three more months of development, the new employee portal with a single-sign-on approach launched on schedule with 23 applications and multiple languages. Of these, nine applications were migrated from the previous implementation of Neptune DXP – SAP Edition and 14 were created from scratch. In close cooperation with the works council, the Dussmann team coordinated the topics of IT security, access authorizations, and handling of sensitive personnel data.

The Results: 

Dussmann keeps delivering on its vision of a single employee portal, with SSO for all needs and with a scope of 34 applications. Dussmann made participation in the new system voluntary but nonetheless has achieved more than 60% user penetration, which is remarkable, given the qualification, language, and technology challenges that are characteristic of its workforce. For instance, at project start, only 15% of the Dussmann Service employees had a business email address. Now employees at all levels can participate in the digital world. 

To further improve the portal and the progressive web app, a growing team from different departments is collaborating in an agile manner. The team members continuously integrate new functions that provide employees with practical support in everyday matters, thus strengthening their bond with their employer. In this way, further divisions can gradually be integrated. Over time, the system has been rolled out more widely, and today six Dussmann entities are using the app.

Dussmann has established a digital platform as a single point of entry for employee self-service, business workflows, and internal communications with the Neptune-powered project, which has replaced paper-based and mail-facilitated employee management. The digitization of the payroll processes derived cost savings that alone justified the project expense.

Metrics: 
  • Automating Employee Self Services (alone) paid for the project
  • Postage savings alone (paychecks to 17k employees) paid for the project after 36 months.
  • Neptune DXP solution was one-third the cost of a previously planned platform
The Technology: 

Neptune DXP

Disruptive Factor: 

All Employee automation and communication in one single offering, across platforms, with employees bringing their own devices (BYOD).

Shining Moment: 

The fastest introduction of any software at Dussmann, in 3 months from start to go live.

About DUSSMANN GROUP

With almost 65,000 employees in 21 countries, the Dussmann Group, headquartered in Berlin, pro-vides services for people, and achieved consolidated Group sales of € 2.31 billion in 2021. The largest business division Dussmann is a passionate solution partner in the areas of Facility Management, Food Services and Technical Solutions.