Transport Industry | SAP SuccessFactors HR System
15,000
Employees
3 days
Restructure cycle time
1
Live, on-demand
modelling environment
For large transport operators, org design has stopped being an occasional project and become a constant one. Cost-saving and process-improvement initiatives now keep a steady pipeline of restructures moving through HR.
At one state transport agency, a five-person specialist team carried the restructure workload for all 15,000 employees. The tools they relied on, Excel and Visio, had become the slowest part of the job.
Discover how org.manager gave their team a live, secure modelling environment connected to SAP SuccessFactors, cutting a restructure cycle from 3 weeks to 3 days and freeing the team to focus on strategy and design. The project was primarily run by Navigo and their HR team, with minimal need to include IT.
The Challenge
Every restructure began with the same slow sequence:
| Step | What it involved |
| Pull the data | A report was manually extracted from SAP SuccessFactors through the Admin Centre in Employee Central into Excel. |
| Clean it up | Find-and-replace passes stripped data; a custom formula worked out who was acting versus who substantively owned a role, alongside further manual manipulation of several other fields. |
| Build the chart | The spreadsheet was imported into Visio, producing dozens of unlinked pages that had to be dragged together and restyled by hand. |
| Mark up changes | Every change was colour-coded manually, page by page, with no way to apply formatting across the whole chart. |
| Deliver the pack | By the time it reached consultation, the data was already out of date. |
The consequences went beyond a slow turnaround. Their team was buried in data handling, rather than their actual job, to design and deliver optimised and sustainable structures.
“A team of just five was carrying the entire restructure workload for a 15,000-person organisation, split across two disconnected tools, Excel and Visio, with all the reconciliation risk that creates.”
Head of Remuneration and Organisation Design
Why they picked Navigo
The organisation needed a solution that could handle genuinely complex workforce data and close the loop back into SuccessFactors, rather than adding another export to manage. Navigo’s write-back capability, approved changes flowing back into SuccessFactors instead of being re-keyed, held the real value for their team.
Here’s what Navigo delivered:
- The data is always current. Org charts natively integrated with SAP SuccessFactors through an API. No spreadsheets needed to interpret the data or lists of formulas to untangle.
- Scenarios run without touching live data. The team models a future-state structure, compares scenarios side by side and sees the impact on FTE, cost, span of control and diversity as they go. Nothing writes back until it’s approved.
- Consultation packs in one click. Proposed structures export straight to PowerPoint, PDF or Excel with change highlighting automatically applied. The manual Visio restyling and hand colour-coding are gone.
- Write-back to SuccessFactors. Once a structure was finalised, two of the five team members had to manually edit every impacted object, positions, org units one by one. That’s now completely automated with org.manager’s writeback functionality.
- Data that keeps itself aligned. A business rule trigger watches for any changes to data and automatically propagates the organisation’s existing SuccessFactors rules, so cost centres and reporting fields stay correct without manual handling.
Figure 1. Scenario Modelling with visualisation rules and custom filters
The Results
Implementation ran module by module, modelling, write-back, the business rule trigger, a current-state chart, tested against the team’s live restructure work. Navigo handled the data and rule configuration, their IT team was only involved for review and approval.
What’s changed for their team:
- A restructure cycle that ran two to three weeks now runs 75% faster, with all heavy data preparation removed and confidence elevated.
- Consultation packs are produced on demand from a single source of truth, instead of being hand-built across Excel and Visio.
- Write-back and the business rules trigger run end to end, so a department change flows back into SuccessFactors and propagates down to positions automatically.
- A small specialist team is back on design, spending its time on structure and strategy rather than spreadsheet and chart admin.
Figure 2. Workforce view with tailored metrics and KPIs on display
Would They Recommend It?
When we asked what the Head of Remuneration and Organisation Design what she thought of org.manager:
“We love it! It has saved us weeks of effort, late nights and stress.”
A restructure that once took weeks of prep across scattered tools now runs from a single live environment in a fraction of the time, with data staying aligned to SuccessFactors throughout.
With weeks of time saved and the process improvement plain to see, the business case sold itself, organisational buy-in came easily. The team was thrilled to get back to the design work they’d actually been hired to do.
Ready to Get Your Team’s Time Back?
If your team is still building restructures from spreadsheets and manual box-drawing, you already know the cost.
Book a chat to see more examples of what’s working for our customers in your industry.
