ASK Group: HR is the Key

Business Requirement

The challenge before the company was aptly put as “ASK Group won’t be able to meet its aggressive growth goals without hiring the right people, cultivating them assiduously—and holding them accountable to the firm’s very high-performance standards”, by Leena Wakankar, the

Mumbai-based firm’s chief people officer.

Solution Deployment

Working with Indian partner Altimetrik, ASK deployedOracle HCM Cloud’s core HR, time and labour, and absence management modules in the short span of eight weeks (earning Wakankar and her team Oracle’s “Express Lane” HCM Cloud Rubies Award).

Since completing that initial deployment in September 2016, ASK has gone live with the cloud application suite’s goals and performance management, compensation, career and succession planning, data analytics/reporting, and expense management modules.

Solution Benefit

ASK managers can now access and update employee goals, performance, training, and other information from any desktop or mobile device, whether or not they’re in the office. As such, managers are encouraged to give their people regular, personalized feedback via scheduled catch-up calls, in-person meetings, and stop-by conversations so that they know exactly where they stand. The year-end performance appraisal then becomes a culmination of the real-time feedback that preceded it, not a singular event.

Oracle HCM Cloud applications have helped the four-person team raise its productivity by as much as 50%, as they now spend much less time managing Excel spreadsheets, downloading data, and rechecking data and more time providing HR advice and partnering with other business units.

What’s more, senior management has more faith in the HR data contained in the Oracle applications, because it isn’t being pieced together and re-input from multiple sources, she says.

In an Indian economy growing 7% to 9% a year, ASK will need a variety of productivity-boosting tech tools to meet or exceed its own bullish growth plans.