Digging deep: Three lessons from Cameco’s HR transformation journey

The ‘future of work’ is more than a concept. It's already here and quickly reshaping how work gets done, how employees grow, and how organizations remain competitive. Among other priorities, HR leaders are exploring new ways to recruit, make confident decisions, redefine performance, and reimagine compensation. But for many organizations, too much time is spent navigating systems and coordinating handoffs to focus on strategic decisions. This is where SAP's vision of an autonomous enterprise can move your business forward with innovative, AI-powered cloud technology that keeps up with today's changing requirements.

We recently sat down with Heather Shiels, Manager of IT Business Systems at Cameco Corporation, to discuss her experience with migrating from SAP ERP HCM on-premises to SAP SuccessFactors HCM. Heather shared her recommendations across three key areas that helped guide Cameco to a smooth migration and cutover.

HR owns the move

Heather believes it was important for Cameco’s HR team to take a leadership role in driving the migration. HR understands the data and underlying processes that tie back to the needs of their employees.  From the start, Cameco built a strong steering committee with senior representatives from HR, IT, and each of its geographic sites to ensure good governance on the project. “HR owns the processes, and they own the systems. IT can’t tell them how to promote or how to terminate people. HR had to be involved and had to lead the way.”

With HR fully engaged, the Cameco team first took the time to analyze their as-is processes running on legacy systems and align them to a desired state. They looked at what was occurring at each site and began working toward standardizing the most effective processes. “We asked, what's Ontario doing? What are our Northern mine sites doing?’’ says Heather. “And then, why can't we all do it the same way?” That speaks to streamlining workflows, which benefited from internal HR ownership.

Do the work of data and system integration

Also contributing to success was the early work that went into migrating and integrating systems that use HR data. Cameco assigned a senior team member with strong knowledge of the company’s employee data to act as a liaison between the implementation and data migration teams. This liaison sat in on design sessions throughout the project to stay on top of configuration choices that affected data migration. When the configuration team made a field mandatory, changed a data mapping, or created a custom change, the migration lead immediately brought it to the migration team.

As the go-live date approached, implementing a data freeze with extensive testing was another key activity that paid off for the team. It was not easy to enforce, but it accommodated the multitude of system integrations. “I was so surprised by how many integrations use HR data and were connected to our on-premises system that needed to be mapped back to SuccessFactors,” says Heather. Putting a freeze on new transactions, even if it meant processing a promotion before or after, allowed the team to focus on extracting data, applying the appropriate migration templates, and handling all necessary integrations.

Leverage tools for configuration and ramp up

SAP offers migration tools and assets that support your individual journey to the cloud, such as an ROI calculator, SAP Readiness Check for SAP SuccessFactors solutions, and more. Additionally, the Cameco team used tools to assist with configuring SAP SuccessFactors HCM wherever possible. Specifically for payroll, they used a third-party tool to copy their existing payroll configuration, rules, and schema directly into SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll. It was a lift-and-shift approach that worked well. “I think it saved us about 10 weeks of effort,” says Heather.

Big bang or phased approach?

At the time of Cameco’s HCM migration, the company was shifting its entire SAP portfolio away from on-premises infrastructure. The HR team already had a positive experience using SAP SuccessFactors solutions for recruitment, onboarding, and succession so they went all-in with a ‘big bang’ approach. "I'm not sure if I'd advise it," says Heather, "but it's what we did. You could do it in small pieces, starting with Employee Central, then time and payroll later. Even if you’re not quite ready, you could start documenting your as-is processes and break them out by action so you’re ready to speak to design when the time comes”.