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Headquartered in the United States with offices in eight countries around the world, Aprimo is the global leader in delivering marketing technology and insight, having delivered over 200 successful customer deployments across 40 countries. Aprimo's integrated, on demand marketing software enables B2C and B2B marketers to successfully navigate the changing role of marketing by taking control of budgets and spending, eliminating internal silos with streamlined workflows and executing innovative multi-channel campaigns to drive measurable ROI.
Aprimo's success comes from a unique combination of thought leadership, solid financial performance and the strength of its talent. Aprimo's 380 employees are the foundation for its achievements and the organization has made strategic investments to ensure it effectively develops and manages its talent. To ensure that the company is doing all it can to build a performance-based culture, Aprimo has adopted Halogen Software's talent management solutions. The organization's investment in Halogen has enabled it to:
- Implement standardized performance management and compensation practices globally
- Conduct project based reviews for professional teams
- Link performance and compensation
- Accommodate a rapidly growing workforce
The Limits of Paper in a Global Company
Like so many organizations, part of the inspiration for Aprimo to move to an automated talent management solution was simple: reduce the paperwork! Keeping up with rapid growth was also a major factor. In 2005 it was clear the organization had grown beyond the limits of its pen and paper process for performance reviews. The paper copies and/or emailed versions of appraisals became untenable when managing global initiatives. Since the organization's HR initiatives are run from the U.S., it was extremely difficult to track and control the performance management process overseas.
"In the first two years I was with the company, we grew over 100 percent a year," said Kim Kean Vice President, Human Resources with Aprimo. "In addition to domestic growth, we had significant global growth. We have offices in the U.S., Canada and Australia. We also have two offices in the UK and a presence in France, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. This rapid growth — global and domestic — triggered our search for a best-in-class automated talent management solution."
This tracking and consistency problem in this model meant the Aprimo team also struggled to accurately link pay to performance. Nor could they successfully conduct project based reviews, which ideally would be completed for the professional services employees after each client project was complete.
The Learning Curve
Halogen was not the first automated system Aprimo tried. Prior to deploying Halogen, Aprimo had rolled out a web-based HRIS system, but quickly found its talent management capabilities fell short. The system failed to accommodate many of the organization's processes and global employees. This led the Aprimo team to look for alternatives and perform a full-scale review of several systems.
The entire organization recognized the need for an effective system having suffered through the challenges of the previous implementation. In addition, everyone involved still understood the importance of a unified employee performance management process to keep Aprimo a cohesive and focused organization.
As part of their research, Aprimo consulted with Gartner, one of the largest technology analyst research firms, and then put together a selection team to source a new and effective talent management system.
The selection team identified a short list of "must haves" for their solution of choice. The new talent management system would have to:
- be web-based, and easily accessible
- integrate seamlessly with their current HRIS and payroll system
- provide integrated support for pay-for-performance initiatives
- be easily configurable and able to accommodate existing terminology
- provide the ability to conduct project based reviews
The team consulted SHRM bulletin boards to get further information about the vendors in a Gartner report, which provided a series of customer testimonials discussing Halogen Software. Following a demo from Halogen, the team agreed its search was over. The solution met all of Aprimo's requirements, and provided great value.
Getting everyone fully trained on the new employee performance management system was vital to the organization. The firm has a number of company-wide objectives that all team members are accountable for, which makes it important to have a system that can record and track an employee's progress towards these goals. The scoring system is also the basis for compensation, which underpinned the organization's pay-for-performance initiatives. "Halogen has been an obvious success for us," said Kean. "Using the new system, we are now able to identify employees who deserve reward and those with performance shortcomings."
Project-Based Reviews
As part of their evaluation process, Aprimo relies on project-based reviews for its professional teams, which are smaller scale performance appraisals, conducted after each project completion. While project reviews were attempted using the previous systems, less than 50 percent were ever completed. Once the Halogen solution had been deployed, senior management mandated that project reviews also be automated. After a short time the completion rate was nearing 75% and climbing, providing critical ongoing performance feedback throughout the year.
Linking Performance and Compensation
In addition to using Halogen eAppraisal to manage employee performance appraisals, Aprimo also invested in Halogen eCompensation. In fact, due to timing of implementation, Aprimo actually launched eCompensation before eAppraisal. The organization imported existing paper-based appraisal scores into Halogen eCompensation, which then calculated compensation adjustments accordingly. Since that first roll out, things have continued to go wonderfully. Aprimo is preparing to use eCompensation to go beyond base salary increases and add its incentive program into eCompensation.
Global Success
Now that Aprimo uses Halogen Software, the company's talent management processes and standards are uniform worldwide. Every employee uses the same system and the same forms, and pay is solidly linked to performance. Response to standardization from the global offices has been very positive. Beyond annual appraisals, the new system enables offices overseas — where employees and managers may be located in different countries — to easily complete project reviews, providing managers constant visibility into an employee's ongoing performance.
A True Partnership
Aprimo has also taken advantage of the opportunity to work closely with Halogen Software on its Customer Advisory Boards. Aprimo has enjoyed their experience on these boards and has seen their feedback become integrated into the product's continuous improvements. Halogen values these opportunities to get frank customer input as it ensures that all the features added to any solution are not just flash, but address real business needs for users.
"Halogen excels at listening to its customers and solving any issues that arise," said Kean. "We have had outstanding issues with other vendors that have never been addressed, which is obviously extremely frustrating. With Halogen any functionality enhancements have been addressed quickly."
Halogen's solution has exceeded the Aprimo team's expectations. The firm has gone far beyond what it had planned to do with any talent management solution. "The benefits we gain from our investment in Halogen just keep continuing to grow," said Kean. "I would and I have recommended Halogen to many other firms."
About Aprimo
Only through the use of Aprimo's modular and on demand software, Aprimo Marketing Studio B2B and Aprimo Marketing Studio B2C, can marketers truly integrate marketing organizations, manage, deliver and track the right message targeted to the right audience over the right channel, and translate marketing efforts into measurable business impact and revenue. Hundreds of thousands of marketers trust Aprimo to revolutionize their marketing including Bank of America, Honda, King Pharmaceutical, Pearson Education Ltd, Time Warner Cable-NY and Wal-Mart.
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