Municipality of Dilbeek: technology as a lever for an innovative work organisation

When the municipality of Dilbeek (Belgium) decided to embrace the principles of the innovative work organisation, they soon realised that the right technology would play an essential role in the process. In cooperation with Flexso for People, the municipality set out to transform their HR IT landscape with SAP SuccessFactors.

Dilbeek Success Factors low

The municipality of Dilbeek had a clear vision of the future of its work organisation. With over 700 employees, ‘Group Dilbeek’ consists of many entities within the municipality. To tackle the challenges of a quickly changing environment, they set out to apply the principles of the innovative work organisation, which is based on primary self-regulating teams, close collaboration and maximum responsibility.

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Quickly changing environment, new role

Evolving regulations, new technology and a changing population that expects to participate more in civic processes … Changes outside of the organisation posed real challenges for the municipality. To keep up with these changes, the organisation needed to be flexible, adaptive and ever more creative with limited budgets.

In its old way of working, the municipality struggled with the speed of these changes. Siloed teams, fragmented processes and a lack of collaboration curbed its ability to cope with these challenges. As a result, Dilbeek decided to transform the organisation according to the principles of the innovative work organisation – technology was an important lever in that process.

From centralised service-based HR to a proactive HR policy

Dilbeek defined clear goals for the digitisation initiative:

  • Digitising processes
  • Using tools to support the vision
  • Tools enabling custom work
  • Enable a process-centred organisation through collaboration

For the HR department, this meant redefining their vision to evolve from a service centre into a proactive HR partner that plays a supporting role for the primary teams in each department. For instance, recruiting would no longer be done entirely by the HR organisation, but by the teams and team leaders themselves. As a result, HR is expected to deliver the right information, tools and support to these teams.

Payroll at the centre, supported by digital tools

With the new vision for HR defined, Dilbeek chose SAP SuccessFactors and partnered up with Flexso for People to digitise and transform their HR processes.

The implementation was split up into two main phases.

  1. Payroll and time registration unification
    The old way of working had resulted in different systems being used for payroll and time registration across several entities in the municipality. The first step was unifying these processes and integrating them so that time registration automatically and directly informed the payroll process.
  2. Implementation of supporting HR tools
    Once payroll and time registration had been integrated, the next phase was introducing the right tools to realise the newly defined role of the HR department to support dedicated teams.
    These tasks were split up into three domains:
    - Recruitment and selection
    - Performance
    - Learning

Data-oriented recruitment for greater agility

Recruitment and selection were the first processes to be digitised. With SAP SuccessFactors, a centralised database allows candidates to create a profile and keep track of their recruitment progress. This results in a more efficient recruitment flow, but it also enables data analytics. Through insightful reporting, the data from the platform is easily translated into quick, informed business decisions. Since the primary teams can use this system and utilise the reporting tools, HR doesn’t become a bottleneck and recruitment becomes a shared process for all teams involved.

The next steps in Dilbeek’s digitisation will focus on implementing performance and learning tools. But even at this early stage, it’s clear that the steps they’ve taken have changed their way of working for the better.

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