Van Leeuwen Pipe and Tube Group founds new people strategy on state-of-the-art HRIT

By Ester Schop

By acquiring Benteler Distribution, the Van Leeuwen Pipe and Tube Group became twice as large in one fell swoop at the end of 2019. The distribution company and specialist in steel pipes and tube applications operates in no fewer than 33 countries with some 80 branches. As its turnover, staff size and footprint doubled, it was time for a new vision and strategy.

   “This calls for an optimal design of your processes, but also for state-of-the-art HRIT”

This strategy not only has a customer and business side, but also led to a new HR agenda. In order to achieve the new people strategy, the company chose Workday as its HRIT tool, with additional support through Workday FastLane, SuccessDay’s traineeship. “This way we are guaranteed the right support and knowledge preservation in the long run”, says Caroline van Nieuwkerk, Executive Director HR at Van Leeuwen and member of the Executive Board since November last year.

Vehicle for the HR strategy

Van Nieuwkerk was appointed to set up and implement the people strategy in line with the new, overall strategy. “We see Workday as a vehicle to bring that strategy to our people. The most important goal is to help them to be the best leaders and to enable our people to thrive and to grow every day.”

First, the new strategy is centered on Van Leeuwen’s customers, who are active in virtually all (industrial) sectors: from construction to automotive, and from mechanical engineering to the energy sector. The specialist in steel pipes and tube applications – a family business founded in Zwijndrecht that will be celebrating its centenary in 2024 – focuses on delivering added value to companies, so that they can improve their work.

“We are going to develop all kinds of programs to help our leaders become the best”

In addition, the business processes must be made even more efficient following the acquisition. Digitization plays an important role in this. “We already do a lot very well, but it can always be better and more efficient,” says Van Nieuwkerk. To achieve these two points, you need the best people and the best leaders, but also optimally designed HR processes. To this end, a new HR agenda has been drawn up, with five priorities: leadership & culture, talent attraction & development, recognition & reward, HR digitization and employee well-being.

State-of-the-art technology

“We’re going to develop all kinds of programs to help our leaders become the best. Our talent development and succession planning can be better and more purposeful, but we also want to support our employees by further developing skills they will need in the future. For this purpose, we are setting up a Learning Architecture. We are also focusing on culture and behavior. We therefore want to collaborate even more effectively and better facilitate the sharing of knowledge among ourselves and within our international network. All this requires an optimal design of your processes, but also state-of-the-art HRIT,” says Van Nieuwkerk.

The choice was made for Workday. Vincent Nauman, Corporate Manager Compensation & Benefits and Workday project leader at Van Leeuwen, explains that the choice was based on a number of factors. Time pressure, for example, played an important role. Six countries of Benteler Distribution, which belonged to Van Leeuwen after the takeover, used a Shared Service Center in Germany for the personnel and payroll administration. “After the acquisition, that service came to an end. We had to make sure that something else was in place quickly. In eighteen weeks, those organizations switched from SuccessFactors to Workday. That’s really fast, but we had no other choice,” explains Nauman.

Everything on one server

Workday can be implemented quickly thanks to its launch-methodology. This makes use of established best practices from other organizations, after which organization-specific adjustments can be made. Nauman: “This ensures speed and the certainty that it will work properly after going live. In addition, the software is well constructed. Everything is in the cloud, on one server, and there is no need to tie all kinds of packages together.”

“We will soon have access to transparent data and essential management information for our leaders and employees”

Workday is also easy to maintain on its own, without the use of expensive consultants or intermediaries. Provided, of course, that you have the right knowledge and experience on board. Last summer, Nauman and his team turned to SuccessDay for support. Van Nieuwkerk on this: “When I started here, I said: this is a sizeable program that will take several years to complete and good preparation is crucial. This plays such an important role in supporting our new strategy that additional resources are needed if we are to get it right.”

Because Workday specialists are scarce, Nauman chose Workday FastLane, SuccessDay’s traineeship. “They know how to find young talent like no other and they themselves train them in a year. That’s how we found Gijs.”

Working and learning simultaneously

Gijs Mutsaers started at Van Leeuwen as a trainee on January 1, 2021. During the first few weeks, the former HRM student with a minor in IT followed an intensive Workday bootcamp via SuccessDay. Since then, he has been working and learning simultaneously. After a year, he will be employed by his client. Van Nieuwkerk says she already doesn’t want to lose him. “It is unprecedented how steep his learning curve is. And through SuccessDay’s trainee model, we are also assured of the right support and knowledge preservation in the long term.”

Gijs receives extensive coaching from Ruben Stavast, Senior Consultant at SuccessDay. Ruben not only teaches him the technological skills needed to successfully implement Workday worldwide, but also elevates his business skills, such as HR and consultancy, and his soft skills to a higher level. In the beginning they were in touch almost daily, but because Gijs was making such big progress, this was soon reduced to once a week. Van Nieuwkerk: “Gijs is service-oriented, very good at thinking in processes and precise at picking up things and working them out; crucial skills for the roll-out. He is held in high esteem by our representatives in the countries where the system has already been implemented and is in the process of being implemented.”

The fact that Ruben is there in the background as his sparring partner feels reassuring to Van Leeuwen. “Not that this is often necessary, but still. It is quite intimidating when you have just left school and suddenly have to do business with people from the Czech Republic and Singapore, but Gijs just does it,” adds his supervisor.

Match with organizational culture

Bas Eggelaar, director of SuccessDay, says that when recruiting, he looks very carefully at whether a candidate matches the culture of an organization. “We’re talking about a pretty complicated profile here: you have to be extroverted, because you have to be able to communicate and collaborate with many different people from all layers of the organization, but at the same time you also have to be able to work very accurately and systematically. Test work, in particular, rather requires an introverted type. You don’t see that combination of skills very often.

“Employees will soon be able to take the steering wheel themselves of many processes, where they used to have to wait for things to happen”

The Workday FastLane service from SuccessDay was developed because the company itself was growing very fast and could hardly find people with this kind of knowledge. “Then we started training people ourselves, and soon customers asked if we could do the same thing for them. I don’t think it hurts our own business model as an HRIT consulting company, because we believe in long-term partnerships.”

Massive added value

Gijs would love to continue working at Van Leeuwen after his traineeship. The freedom of doing things his own way is particularly appealing to him. He realizes that he is on a fantastic assignment and has been given a unique opportunity. By mid-2022, the new HCM platform should be working in 33 countries and delivering what it was purchased for: providing massive added value to the realization of the strategic objectives.

In the interest of speed, the organization implemented only the basic functionalities (HCM core module, leave and absence and payroll integration) in the first six countries last year. Ten other countries will follow this year, including the Netherlands. Functionalities are also being added, such as the entire assessment cycle and the annual salary- and bonus review. Next year, recruitment and e-learning will follow, and Workday will be implemented in the final group of countries.

The Netherlands is therefore in the middle of the implementation process. Gijs: “We started in March and the planned go-live date is October 5, 2021. We are immediately doing a full integration with our AFAS payroll system, and also include leave and absenteeism. In the Netherlands alone we have five entities with multiple collective labor agreements, so that has to be carefully arranged. By comparison, in countries where we are much smaller, such as Denmark, we only take nine weeks from start to go live.”

Benefits of good HRIT

In the countries where Workday has already been implemented, managers and employees experience it as a tremendous leap forward: the organization goes from fairly traditional HRIT to state-of-the-art in one fell swoop. Van Nieuwkerk lists the main benefits. “We simplify and standardize our processes worldwide, we will soon have transparent data and essential management information for our leaders and employees, and it is hugely user-friendly. Employees will soon be able to take the wheel themselves for a great many processes, where they used to have to just wait and see.”

“If our CEO has made a video message, everyone will soon be able to see it on the app on their smartphone”

Because a lot of complexity and noise is being eliminated, HR professionals have more time to add value. They will be able to focus completely on the people strategy. Nauman sees another important advantage: “Workday offers future opportunities and is a communication tool, which means that everyone will feel even more connected. Not just the staff behind their laptops, but also our people in the warehouse who load the tubes onto trucks. If our CEO has made a video message, everyone will soon be able to see it on the app on their smartphone.”

The next countries on the schedule are Denmark and Lithuania. Nauman notes that the initial response has been enthusiastic. “I have already received several messages about how happy they are about us starting there. That says it all, doesn’t it?”