Grundfos: Helping skills flow to build a world-class place to work, learn, and grow
Linking skills with work rather than people with jobs
Grundfos, one of the world’s leading pump and water solutions companies, knows that what employees can do is essential information that informs every part of HR. With the talent intelligence hub functionality of SAP SuccessFactors solutions, it’s creating one source of skills information to help it connect people and business needs in new ways.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Industrial manufacturing | Bjerringbro, Denmark | 20,000 employees |
Head of HR Technology and Data Foundation, Grundfos Holding A/S
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Industrial manufacturing | Bjerringbro, Denmark | 20,000 employees |
Head of HR Technology and Data Foundation, Grundfos Holding A/S
Simplifying skills management with one source of truth
In 1945, unable to find a water pump of satisfactory quality to irrigate a customer’s farm, Poul Due Jensen descended to his basement to develop his own model. Nearly 80 years later, the company he built, Grundfos Holding A/S, provides intelligent, energy-saving pump and water solutions for water utilities, industries, and buildings across the globe.
Not surprisingly for a company so rooted in innovation, Grundfos has always maintained a sharp focus on both product quality and people development. In the 1970s, it provided night schools to educate production workers in skills from languages to engineering. Today, it is anchored in Grundfos’ value to be “focused on people.” Happy customers and employees are foundational to the enterprise, which recently recorded its highest-ever employee motivation and satisfaction score.
Regardless of this success, the company experienced challenges in nurturing its people fully in line with its high ambitions. For example, it found some younger employees were leaving after one or two years, citing a lack of development opportunities. Meanwhile, longer-tenure employees were staying in the same position, increasing resistance to change. Critical skills were both difficult to hire externally in an extremely competitive market and hard to find within the company itself. And managing data on competencies, behavior, knowledge, capabilities, experience, and certifications was a complex task across platforms.
Recognizing that skills are at the heart of all HR processes, from talent development and succession planning to compliance and workforce planning, the company set out to adopt a new approach. Rather than connecting people to jobs, it needed to connect skills to work. To achieve this, it needed a better overview of who can do what at what level and of future skills needs from an individual, team, and organizational perspective.
Søren Nielsen, Grundfos’s business architect for HR technology, explains, “Without a centralized view of what a skill is, what skills are needed, and how we can connect them, we can’t support our people in a consistent way. Skills are the foundation we need before looking at anything else. Our ambition is to build one source of truth – one taxonomy that supports different workforce groups across platforms.”
Mads Kidmose, the company’s head of HR technology and data foundation, adds, “Many of the jobs we have today didn’t exist even 10 years back – so, what will the needs of the future workforce look like? We knew digital HR solutions could help us understand this and enable data-driven decisions on how to become a skills-based organization to deliver on our business outcomes.”
Business Architect, HR Technology, Grundfos Holding A/S
Identifying and enabling growth opportunities for employees
Any HR solution at Grundfos has to satisfy three criteria: It must help enhance the employee experience, improve efficiency, and aid compliance. Accordingly, the company already had in place a comprehensive suite of SAP SuccessFactors solutions, including the SAP SuccessFactors Learning, SAP SuccessFactors Performance & Goals, and SAP SuccessFactors Succession & Development solutions.
Recognizing that the talent intelligence hub functionality of SAP SuccessFactors solutions matched its aspiration to build a skills-based Grundfos, the company decided to explore the hub through the SAP Early Adopter Care program. The talent intelligence hub is a centralized framework available within SAP SuccessFactors solutions that helps organizations understand the skills employees have today, gaps that exist, and how to close these gaps. With machine learning and AI-powered talent intelligence, it provides highly personalized learning and development recommendations that let employees expand their skill sets while pursuing a career aligned to their ambitions. This accelerates upskilling and reskilling at scale while delivering unique talent experiences for employees.
Grundfos understood that the talent intelligence hub would support a skills-based approach to talent management to help it identify, develop, and retain top talent. By shifting the focus from job titles and degrees to a comprehensive understanding of employees’ skills, the company could evaluate talent across diverse levels more accurately and efficiently.
And it could provide employees with growth portfolios to help them map their skills and competencies to formal and informal learning opportunities within and outside the organization, including through AI-based recommendations.
The company also sees great potential in the Joule copilot, a capability including AI assistance that improves both user experience and productivity.
Transitioning steadily toward a skills-based organization
Grundfos is now testing its talent intelligence hub, refining its data model, defining the skills taxonomy, and running pilots and training sessions. Although it’s still early days for the project, the company is seeing some very positive results.
The new approach has already enabled a different way of looking at skills. According to Kidmose, “Going forward, working with skills will be integrated into everyday work rather than being something you do at specific points in terms of your annual performance cycle.”
One early outcome of Grundfos’s investment in this area is how the talent intelligence hub gives people leaders an overview of team members’ required skills and supports on-the-spot skill assessments. This eases the challenge of having to manage such overviews on an individual basis as leaders can now digitalize this information and store it centrally without privacy concerns.
Nielsen says, “We had been working with skills and competencies for quite some time before the hub. But the AI enablement and support are already providing different opportunities to address our skills shortage. In terms of educating and growing our people, we can see how the hub can recommend the right training at the right time to help people develop the right skills. Maintaining taxonomies, skills, competencies, and behaviors was a huge, cumbersome task when these were connected to roles. Now, we have boiled it down to talking only about skills. And we can set up a framework that supports both the role and the individual with a top-down and bottom-up approach.”
Once the skills foundation is fully in place, Nielsen explains, the hub can give individuals recommendations for learning, mentoring, and coaching, bringing internal mobility to the forefront in the competition for talent. “This will help us inspire people, based on their skill set, to consider opportunities or positions they may not have thought were valid or applicable to them as a potential career step.”
The talent intelligence hub also increases flexibility across the enterprise by supporting project-based work. Nielsen explains, “We’re trying to be more agile and work more in project teams where we don’t necessarily need formalized departments. The hub supports this goal because we can engage people on projects for shorter periods of time or field product teams that support different business units.”
Building on the new skills foundation with intelligent technologies
Work continues at Grundfos to finalize its data model and fully implement the talent intelligence hub. For instance, the company is looking at how it can build dashboards, use stories reports, and combine data from different sources, including using the SAP Datasphere solution.
Grundfos is also exploring the wider potential of intelligent technology. Plans include testing how combining Joule and SAP SuccessFactors solutions can aid tasks such as maintaining and creating job positions, managing promotions and spot awards, and transferring data between platforms.
Kidmose explains, “HR is the first function at Grundfos to consider Joule – and for good reason, as it can help us on both the employee experience and efficiency fronts. First, it has huge potential to enhance the employee experience across different platforms. Whether they’re posting a job vacancy or submitting an expense claim, employees can ask the same assistant for help, enabling a consistent experience. Second, the copilot can help us increase efficiency across our HR operations, such as by supporting the move toward more online services. We have high hopes for Joule.”
One of the strengths of the talent intelligence hub is its extensibility. Skills data now lives outside of SAP SuccessFactors solutions, spanning the ecosystem of platforms available to Grundfos employees. Kidmose says, “It is of critical importance that we are able to deliver smooth skills experiences across our platforms to truly gain the full value of pivoting toward becoming a more skills-based organization. We are therefore happy to see this extensibility with third-party solutions.”
Grundfos also wants to look at the potential of generative AI functionality within SAP SuccessFactors solutions across the areas of talent acquisition, learning, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. Nielsen says, “We are thrilled to see some of the designs for creating interview questions and extracting skills from job applications. These can help us focus on skills in a vacancy ad rather than just a job description. So, in this regard, we see huge potential.”
Wherever these explorations with intelligent technology take the company, there’s no doubt that the company’s pioneering founder would approve of the current drive toward a skills-based Grundfos.