The secret behind Commercial Bank of Africa’s success: Empowering business HR through SAP SuccessFactors

CBA owns its success to SAP SuccessFactors talent solutions which empowers business integrations with a human key in this age of automated banking.

In an age where banking is becoming increasingly automated, Commercial Bank of Africa (CBA) has unlocked the door to better structure and business integration with a human key – an SAP SuccessFactors talent solution implemented by Altura Consulting.

CBA’s investment in its workforce is yielding high returns. It all starts with an integrated SAP SuccessFactors platform, which allows CBA to plan, reward and retain its human capital, track performance against targets, and engage in continuous learning and development. The ultimate payoff? The promise of increased productivity and unprecedented service delivery.

CBA employs approximately 1200 employees in a diverse workforce. As the largest privately-owned bank in Kenya, its primary focus is Corporate, Institutional and Personal Banking. It seeks to provide a comfortable, elegant and secure environment for corporate clients, institutional clients, foreign missions and NGOs to transact their financial business. Talent is a key resource at CBA and its greatest differentiator. The bank needed a robust system that could streamline and unify its HR processes, and help build, develop and retain an effective workforce globally.

“The World Bank projects that Kenya’s economy will rise by 6% in 2017. Whilst the economic performance remains solid, this is an opportunity for banks to reimage their business operations to create more and better jobs. SAP believes that CBA’s investment in its workforce is a positive step in this direction,” commented Dr Gilbert Saggia, Managing Director, SAP East Africa.

“CBA chose SAP from top three world-leading solution providers because they provide the best-in-class integrated solution for all our business processes, including Procurement, Finance, Human Resources and Analytics. Because SAP is open-ended application software, we knew that we would be able to leverage our capability to integrate with other live applications,” commented Geoffrey N. Githinji, Group Chief Operating Officer at CBA, who also sponsored the project.

The ideal technology platform was one with the ability to integrate many disparate systems and entities. CBA was faced with many challenges, arising primarily from its acquisition strategy. To date, the bank has acquired eight separate entities since it started operations in 1962, making it the one of the largest private banks in Africa. The bank was looking for a homogeneous system with the capability to integrate the core banking system across functions such as Procurement, Finance and Human Resources and across all groups, entities and functions.

According to Ms Roopa Karemungikar, Managing Director of Altura, an SAP specialist HR transformation partner, the SAP SuccessFactors implementation was seamless and successful across all three implementation territories, namely; Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. The ability to align all business processes in these key countries was a highlight of the solution and will help CBA to reduce paperwork, increase the productivity of the HR department and automate the bank transfer of salaries. CBA is now running efficient with SAP Performance Management, Goal Management, Employee Profile, Compensation Management, Workforce Performance Builder, Travel Management and Expense on SAP HCM On-Premise.

“We are already working on phase two of the project, which will include Career Development, Succession Planning, Learning Hub, Learning Solution, Cloud Connector and SAP Fiori. SAP technology is a fully integrated innovation platform – making it simple to integrate entire business functions. We are confident that the use of this digital platform will result in fewer human errors as a results of less manual intervention,” added Ms Roopa.

Automated processes such e-recruitment, candidate tracking, shortlisting and interview feedback enable HR departments to do more with the time and resources they have. In addition, the employees become much more engaged with their own careers and performance because of the self-service functionality available including online leave application, automated calculations for overtime, payroll components and reporting.

As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 345,000 business and public sector customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably.