For Indorama, one of Asia’s leading and globally expanding chemical corporations, people are at the heart of everything they do. The HR team’s vision has always been about designing a world-class HR function with the best people-centric practices. Driven by values of personal growth and development, transparency, respect, and compassion, the leadership recognised that employee experience was critical to their success and building a high-performance culture. 

Achieving this vision, however, called for accelerated HR digitalisation, especially as Indorama increased acquisitions and led market expansions into new regions. And like any journey into uncharted territory—in this case, the evolving digital landscape—having the right partner by your side makes a difference. And so, Indorama joined hands with Darwinbox to champion this new growth journey. Darwinbox’s HRMS is built for standardisation, configurability, and meeting employee expectations across regions. 

The search for a standard platform across all regions

As Indorama continued to expand its base across the globe, the burning challenge was that every geography had its own local HR system. Two objectives were vital at this point: firstly, standardising and digitalising HR processes. This would then lead to achieving the second objective: gathering people data at the group level across all its business entities in a central system. 

For Indorama, this entailed a single cloud-based platform that would seamlessly incorporate existing entities, onboard new projects, and include new acquisitions.

After a two-month study in partnership with EY, which tapped into all the technicalities and functionalities of various HRMS platforms, Indorama partnered with Darwinbox HRMS, an intuitive and highly configurable end-to-end HR management software trusted by the world’s biggest brands. 

Darwinbox became the solution of choice to accelerate expansion and integration for Indorama. It checked multiple points off Indorama’s requirement list, including performance management, worldwide accessibility and system availability, availability on cloud, and security requirements. 

Leading change management by addressing all expectations

“What made Darwinbox’s cloud platform stand out from the others is its options for configuration,” said Shailesh Tulaskar, Group IT Head at Indorama. While standardisation was a key priority, it had to proceed keeping in mind the expectations of three stakeholders: the organisation, the HR team, and the employees. The latter two obviously differentiated across regions, so to bring them on board, the implementation of Darwinbox proceeded in phases, with the full support of the Darwinbox team. 

The implementation process started with India, Indonesia, and Nigeria with full implementation in 2021, followed by offices in Dubai, Singapore, and Delhi, with implementations in the works for more regions in India, Senegal, Brazil, Uzbekistan, and Turkey. Cross-geo deployment went smoothly as multiple local statutory and HR requirements and language accessibility are already factored into the system. HR Heads at different locations and their respective HR & IT teams played anchor roles in getting the implementation done with pace and accuracy. Aditi Agrawal, HR Excellence Head at Indorama, emphasised that a phase-wise implementation was important because it curated important lessons for the next implementation.

The impact of any HR tech-led change management strategy rests on successful adoption. So, taking a ‘Train the Trainer’ approach, the HR teams were first trained in Darwinbox, after which SPOCs across locations were trained and tasked with ensuring seamless end-user adoption. This entire strategy was backed by a larger task force of ‘Super admins’ who are aware of every functionality of the HRMS platform. This was done to ensure complete guidance and support in the implementation and adoption process.

Unlocking new possibilities for HR transformation

With Darwinbox HRMS, there was a gradual shift from standardising functional structures to organisation-wide standardisations for business expansion. This included standardising nomenclatures across functions and departments to ensure consistency across regional divisions. This was critical to support the collection of business data from across the company for decision-making. 

Darwinbox HRMS also ensured increased compliance with local labour laws. Zubair Ahmed Shikalgar, HR Excellence Lead at Indorama, pointed out that the platform enabled the enterprise to build customised compliance reports for efficient record-keeping. 

Ankit Roy, a Customer Success Consultant at Darwinbox, also shared how the system accommodated approvals of both budgeted and unbudgeted manpower in the Recruitment module. As a result, there was a smoother requisition and approval process for the Indorama team. 

Given the options for customisation, Indorama also benefited from having a single source of truth, which included different data elements. Nitin Joshi, Software Specialist at Indorama, highlighted how this feature has supported Tableau reports to help top management in keeping a tab on company trends related to HR. 

Another critical facet of HR transformation was the formation of Indorama’s central HR Excellence team, which can now drive HR policies and mandates for all Indorama locations across the globe. Having the right digital system in place has been an important means of support for this. 

Features such as Vibe, Darwinbox’s employee engagement portal, is being positively used by employees across the globe and has positively impacted Indorama’s employee experience. Adeline Edward, HR Excellence Specialist, and Snehlata Singh, L&D Specialist continue to make further efforts towards enhancing the employee experience, and modules such as LMS and Rewards & Recognition are to be implemented in the near future. 

Thriving in the future of work

For successfully leading any change management strategy, Aditi said: “Teams must first be aligned with the company vision and there must be complete clarity on processes, backed by proper stakeholder communications.”

In addition, cultural integration of the workforce takes on special significance when it comes to the geographical expansion of enterprises. This calls for, among other things, language checks to ensure smooth translations, continuous training, and reiterating the goals of this change management agenda. 

With the future of work evolving at the pace that it is, rapidly expanding global organisations like Indorama need a tech partner with features that strengthen and streamline business continuity, documentation, and processes. Enabling and empowering cross-border teams is critical. By leveraging Darwinbox HRMS and implementing strategies for long-term growth and success, Indorama is all set to shine in the future. Click here to learn more about how Darwinbox HRMs can help you get started on this growth journey and achieve high impact.