Great Lakes Cheese: Transforming HR to preserve an employee-first culture amid rapid growth
Safeguarding a unique company legacy
The founder of Great Lakes Cheese saw infinite potential everywhere – in everyone and everything. Now, a flexible and agile suite of SAP SuccessFactors solutions enables the company to harness the passion of its employee-owners, helping them and the business thrive.
| Industry | Region | Company Size | Partner |
| Consumer products | Hiram, Ohio | >4,000 employees | Capgemini |
of paper eliminated from HR processes.
of HR traffic now through mobile devices.
source for employees’ HR needs.
HRIS Manager, Great Lakes Cheese Company Inc.
Fostering company culture with accessible, mobile-enabled HR
When Hans Epprecht started his cheese business in 1958, he probably could not have imagined it would become the world’s largest packager of private-label cheese, with nine plants including the world’s biggest packaging operation.
This enterprise, Great Lakes Cheese Company Inc., has put employees front and center from day one. For instance, Epprecht set up a profit-sharing scheme in the 1970s that lives on in today’s employee stock ownership plan. As Brian Shellhorn, the company’s human resources information system (HRIS) manager, explains: “This tangible stake in the business created the ownership culture we have today. Our values are still based around hard work, honesty, and integrity. We want to see our company succeed because for every dollar we save, we can see the return on investment for ourselves as well.”
Rapid growth can dilute even the strongest company culture, and Great Lakes Cheese had almost doubled in size in five years, sometimes making it challenging to hire people who could embody the company’s values. As Shellhorn says, “We’ve added a plant almost every year since I’ve been here. So that means we’re hiring not only first-line people but also new leaders who need to learn our culture and what it means to be a Great Lakes Cheese employee. We don’t want to lose what people have spent the last 60-plus years building just because we’re hiring for a skill set.”
The HR team was also wrestling with largely paper-based operations that made it hard for employees to update personal data and access information on pay, roles, and organizational structure. Shellhorn adds, “Benefits was another significant struggle. In many cases, we had employees who had never really reviewed their benefits over their careers once they were hired. We needed to give employees ownership of their content and information.”
Another aspect of giving employees ownership involves allowing them to work in a flexible way. With a largely deskless workforce that cannot use cell phones in plants due to reasons related to health and safety, the company had installed kiosks to let employees complete some HR tasks. According to Shellhorn, “We started asking how people were getting paychecks, changing and maintaining their profiles, accessing learning, and onboarding. We realized that whatever we did, we had to focus on mobile.”
With these requirements in mind, Great Lakes Cheese set out to redesign its HR.
HRIS Manager, Great Lakes Cheese Company Inc.
Rapidly deploying a unified suite of HR solutions
Great Lakes Cheese already used SAP software in areas such as warehouse management and finance. The company knew it made sense to deploy the same ecosystem for its HRIS and so opted to implement SAP SuccessFactors solutions. In addition, the SAP SuccessFactors Mobile app was the right choice to help meet the needs of employees on the go.
Another key benefit of SAP SuccessFactors was the solutions’ high degree of flexibility. Shellhorn explains, “This made it much more cost-effective for us to go quickly. We aimed to use the system as it was designed as much as possible, unless there was a significant business need to address.”
The company decided to implement multiple solutions simultaneously, setting itself an ambitious project timeline of 18 months. It worked with partner Capgemini to deploy the SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding, SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting, SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central, and SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll solutions as well as the SAP U.S. Benefits Administration application by Benefitfocus.
Employee champions in each plant played a critical role in helping individuals embrace the new technology. Shellhorn says, “The message needed to come not from corporate but from the ranks. Over several months, we went to every single plant with an army of laptops. We helped each employee log in to the system for the first time. We set them up on the mobile app, got them started with SAP U.S. Benefits Administration, and helped them walk through getting their benefits in place and double-checking their bank account. All the time, their peers were standing behind them, helping.”
Equipping teams to succeed through streamlined HR
Now, Great Lakes Cheese has replaced what Shellhorn describes as “paper and zero transparency” with a centralized and automated HR system that empowers both employees and HR teams. Through one intuitive platform, employees can take charge of jobs, from updating personal data and completing onboarding tasks to accessing information on pay, benefits, and organizational structure. Shellhorn elaborates, “Our employees don’t feel like they have 15 systems to learn. The continuity within the system makes it feel, especially to the end user, like a contiguous, one-stop shop.”
The solutions’ flexibility has lived up to expectations, as outlined by Shellhorn: “The software is very configurable when we run into a business solution that’s maybe just a little bit outside the box. Often it takes zero customization. Or we can deploy the solutions’ metadata framework (MDF) to create something on our own without using professional services or taking up a significant level of overhead, helping us move more quickly.”
A mobile-first approach helps employees get HR tasks done at a time and place that suits them. “Our mobile devices, including the SAP SuccessFactors Mobile app, have been a huge win for us, especially with the intuitive new interface,” states Shellhorn.
Shortly after the new HR platform was installed, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. It proved invaluable at a time when colleagues were unable to physically sit together. For example, the company was able to create a tracking mechanism using the MDF in just one day. Shellhorn says, “I remember sitting on a Zoom call working on some structural changes to the company. And we realized how lucky we were to have the new system in place because just a couple of years ago, that remote collaboration would have been impossible. Without SAP SuccessFactors solutions, I don’t know how we would have functioned as an HR team.”
Building on a reimagined HR landscape
Great Lakes Cheese continues to evolve its HR platform to unleash the knowledge and skills of its people. For instance, it plans to enhance learning offerings using the SAP SuccessFactors Learning solution. The company also wants to more tightly integrate SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll and SAP U.S. Benefits Administration to enable a smoother benefits experience for employees.
Also on the agenda are looking at how SAP SuccessFactors solutions can support continuous performance management and exploring the software’s built-in artificial intelligence capabilities. Shellhorn says, “I’m excited about the possibilities of AI in creating efficiencies that make life easier for our people.”
With SAP SuccessFactors solutions behind its employees, Great Lakes Cheese can look forward to the next 65 years of packing every moment with passion and potential.
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