More Digital and More Efficient.
Overview
Over the past 3 years, Mercer | Leapgen has partnered with the People Team at a financial services organization to help build its digital capabilities. The 4 areas we have helped the company build up their capabilities the most include:
- Digital HR strategy: Developing and supporting the execution of a plan that aligns with the company’s evolving business strategy and workforce needs
- People reporting & analytics: Designing and supporting the launch of a team
- Service delivery model design: We helped redesign the company’s ‘Tier 1’ service center, both recommending the migration of some responsibilities of HR business partners and COEs and eliminating some work through automation provided by a ‘Tier 0’ tool in ServiceNow HRSD
- Workforce experience & technology with a focus on Talent Acquisition, New Hire Onboarding, Benefits Administration, and ‘Getting Help’ from the People Function
Approach
Mercer | Leapgen initially leveraged our Strategy consulting services to help design and launch its People Analytics Team. We also collaborated with the team and their counterparts in both the business and IT to define the company’s most pressing reporting & analytics needs (i.e., use cases) and provided specifications to inform system design, data management, and integration. The team then leveraged our LeapNow advisory service to hire and onboard new members; this included involvement on the part of Mercer | Leapgen in both job design and interviewing.
Our Strategy consulting services were also used to develop a digital recruitment strategy designed to put easy-to-use technology in place that enables a personalized candidate experience and helps people managers, interviewers, and recruiters make better decisions. This work also included human-centered system requirements definition and software selection support.
The company has also leveraged our LeapNow service in a number of different ways, including updating the People Team’s overall digital vision and strategic roadmap. We also used it to design and develop a proof-of-concept for international benefits administration optimizing systems – ServiceNow and SAP – in which the company already invests. This saved the company approximately $1.5 million that would have been spent on evaluating, deploying, and running a separate system.
This proof of concept is now part of an ongoing service delivery transformation Mercer | Leapgen has been managing through our Deployment consulting services, including experience design, service delivery model design, change enablement, and program management support.
Results
$1.8M
in software-related spend, thanks to system optimization and rationalization
30,000+
Elimination of over 30,000 hours manual work annually, thanks to streamlined processes and automation
Accelerated time-to-hire and ramp time for new employees onboarding
Improved decision making and compliance-related cost avoidance through enhanced reporting & analytics
Conclusion
This proof of concept is now part of an ongoing service delivery transformation Mercer | Leapgen has been managing through our Deployment consulting services, including experience design, service delivery model design, change enablement, and program management support. The company has also leveraged our LeapNow service in a number of different ways, including updating the People Team’s overall digital vision and strategic roadmap. We also used it to design and develop a proof-of-concept for international benefits administration optimizing systems – ServiceNow and SAP – in which the company already invests. This saved the company approximately $1.5 million that would have been spent on evaluating, deploying, and running a separate system.
A True Activation of Technology.
Overview
Foundational design oversight was needed to help establish this company’s newly formed Enterprise Service Management Team and define requirements to inform the implementation of a new enterprise services delivery platform. We developed overall alignment with business needs and priorities to set a multi-year roadmap to digitally transform service delivery for IT and Global Business Services (GBS), including the business functions of HR, Marketing & Insights, Commercial Sales, Financial Control, and Financial Planning. Mercer | Leapgen also designed and deployed an Enterprise Service Management Governance & Team Model to support the enterprise ServiceNow platform in an agile way. All work was rooted in Mercer | Leapgen’s human-centered design methodology focused on identifying the moments that matter to create a great digital employee experience.
Approach
Due to Mercer | Leapgen’s successful track record of digital transformation with multiple vendors in complex environments, we were able to design very custom solutions. We don’t subscribe to a one size fits all methodology, so our flexible and agile team-style approach worked well in this partnership. Mercer | Leapgen’s industry-leading experience design team brought human-centered design capabilities while their change team built an agile framework for change enablement. We helped establish a global service management model and mindset to drive consistency and efficiency across all GBS entities. We helped create a truly global “service enterprise.”
Results
6-week
Agile delivery with 6-week continuous improvement sprints, supported by agile change framework
300,000+
ServiceNow for HR and Marketing & Insights deployed to over 300,000 employees with additional business functions on the way
Professional new hire onboarding program deployed globally
Conclusion
Mercer | Leapgen helped this company align on the Vision for Enterprise Service Management and Digital Workforce Experience across global senior leadership, which then helped them design and deploy a scalable digital employee experience for their diverse workforce. Additionally, our intentional voice of the employee research influenced design for HR, M&I, and IT services and was the backbone of the success of this project. Our three-year partnership with this Food & Beverage giant has steered them towards their goals of being better, faster, and stronger than ever.

Transformed to a Digital HR Operating Model.
Overview
Mercer | Leapgen conducted a multi-workstream program to guide this Software company’s transformation to a digital HR operating model. This work comprised an effort to precede and overlap with the planned “Phase 0” of preparatory activities for the re-implementation of Workday, as well as the introduction of a new digital operating model, change management capability, and governance capacity for the overarching digital employee experience.
Approach
Because of Mercer | Leapgen’s extensive HR technology expertise, they wanted to work with a deep HR Innovation expert who could complement the efforts of their IT consulting firm who was developing an ERP technology strategy while also being vendor-agnostic. This assisted in the approach to strategy, prioritization, and design.
Results
18-24 mos
Developed a plan to regularly update their HCM solution (compared to their past tendency of being 18-24 months behind the latest release)
16 to 1
Reduced the number of maintained cloud HCM tenants from 16 to 1
50%
Reduced the size of the IT support team for HCM by 50%
150
Figured out a way to scale for double employee/workforce size with HR services team of 150 people
Conclusion
Mercer | Leapgen defined workforce experience vision and guiding principles for the program team to govern the workforce experience tool implementation. We also completely rethought, standardized, and streamlined processes and acceleration of system configuration decisions which truly benefited the company as a whole. Mercer | Leapgen was able to redesign processes and provide change management-related recommendations to drive adoption and ensure value of solutions for this partner.
Created Central HR for this Complex Global Organization.
Overview
Mercer | Leapgen’s partnership with Amsted Industries began when the AI team became interested in delivering centralized HR services to their various businesses in a more scalable and consistent way. Mercer | Leapgen partnered with top HR leaders to develop the mindset and vision for Digital HR, identify competitive differentiators for HR, and ultimately define a practical roadmap to make that vision a reality.
Approach
The guiding principles developed by the Mercer | Leapgen and Amsted Industries HR teams (Accessible, Evolving, Integrated, Intuitive and Simple) led to two key foundational decisions that informed the approach. The first, to help achieve simplicity and integration, was to explore using the Core HCM provider as a first option for all HR capabilities going forward. This led to a seamless environment where employees don’t need to navigate across solutions and the HR administration required to maintain it was greatly reduced. The second, to ensure solutions were intuitive and accessible, was to lead with holistic journey and process design informed by the voice of the employee to be completed BEFORE any configuration decisions were made. This ultimately led to the adoption of new capabilities throughout the business.
Results
350+
interviews plus additional survey data delivered a 360 perspective on employee experience
Reduction in the complexity of the Digital HR landscape and the administration required to maintain
Improved HR functional capabilities in recruiting, onboarding, HCM, performance, development, compensation, succession and learning
Single source of truth for all HR and People Data
Conclusion
Over two years later, the Amsted team has successfully executed on the vision that they built out with the Mercer | Leapgen team and are beginning to think about their operating model and measurement strategy for ROI – Run, Optimize & Innovate to ensure they are continuously improving on their strong foundation and great employee experience.

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