Transforming talent management: DACHSER adopts SAP SuccessFactors HCM
Family-owned business DACHSER has grown into one of the world’s leading logistics providers. The company needed to better prepare its talent pipeline to address the widespread skills shortage. SAP SuccessFactors HCM enables DACHSER to standardize its HR processes and systems, improve the employee experience across its global footprint, and accelerate recruiting.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Travel and transportation | Kempten, Germany | 40,000 employees |
countries’ regulatory requirements met successfully, driving global compliance.
candidate applications processed efficiently, validating large-volume performance.
average time to hire (newly measurable and within industry norms).
Head of Digital Products HR, DACHSER SE
Fueling the talent pipeline to keep the world moving
DACHSER SE is a global logistics provider specializing in transportation, warehousing, and integrated supply chain solutions. Founded in 1930, the business remains family-owned, and its values emphasize trust, reliability, and close partnerships with employees and customers. With operations in more than 40 countries, it provides road transport, air and sea freight, and contract logistics for industries such as automotive and consumer goods.
Logistics keeps the world moving, and employees are key to DACHSER’s success. Like many companies, it’s challenged by a shortage of skilled workers, particularly truck drivers, logistics specialists, and technology experts. The shortage is driven by an aging workforce, a digital skills gap, competition for talent, and a demand surge in e-commerce.
As the company grew, the siloed and manual HR processes and systems in the various countries were no longer sufficient. The HR department lacked accurate employee metrics, such as headcount and turnover, and it was unable to provide up-to-date employee reports. The different systems resulted in cost disadvantages, disparate data structures and interfaces, and duplicate data maintenance.
As well as addressing the skilled-worker shortage, DACHSER wanted to improve the employee experience from hire to retire by making the workplace more efficient with user-friendly processes and dynamic HR systems. The company wished to harmonize HR data with its systems and processes globally so that decision-makers would be better supported by real-time information. This meant integrating local payroll systems, respecting complex legal needs, and undergoing change management.
Head of Digital Products HR, DACHSER SE
Delivering a global HR architecture to support employees and candidates
Based on the stages of the employee lifecycle, DACHSER chose to implement the SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting and SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding solutions first. SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting centralizes the recruitment process, from receiving applications through the redesigned career home page to onboarding, providing a unified experience for administrators and candidates. The solution helps the company attract new workers and speed up the process of introducing new positions and managing candidates. And the built-in career site builder is intuitive and user-friendly for administrators who manage the career pages. SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting connects with multiple free job portals through SAP software, helping ensure extensive coverage for job postings. Clear and organized status tracking empowers recruiters and managers to monitor progress efficiently and communicate effectively with candidates.
DACHSER’s operating countries all use the same recruiting solution, enabling standardization across geographies while respecting local compliance requirements. With unified data, DACHSER can now easily evaluate key HR figures and perform advanced analytics for smarter business decisions. The move to digital processes reduces paper use and allows for easy online access to information. Candidates and employees can update certain data themselves, fostering transparency and efficiency.
Integrating SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding with SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting and the SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central solution enables real-time data synchronization. Entering information once (during the recruitment process) and reusing it across SAP SuccessFactors solutions eliminates manual data entry and redundancy while reducing errors and effort, resulting in faster workflows. Features such as engagement cards, automated notifications, and prioritized “to-do” alerts guide users step-by-step during onboarding, helping ensure no tasks are missed. With a mobile-responsive design, employees can complete onboarding tasks on nearly any device—desktop, tablet, or mobile—making the process highly adaptable and modern.
SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central provides a unified, global HR architecture to manage employee master data and organizational data. DACHSER can now retrieve real-time information at the touch of a button. Added integration with the SAP SuccessFactors Learning solution enables a global learning management platform that helps employees accelerate skills-building and career development. The learning solution strongly supports the DACHSER Academy, its internal educational institution, to keep employee knowledge and skills up to date.
There are 24,000 employees in 27 countries using the solutions to date. DACHSER is looking at other solutions in SAP SuccessFactors HCM, in areas such as performance and succession and development, to help optimize its human capital management (HCM). And it’s working on the first version of an integrated interface to the SAP Customer Identity and Access Management solutions.
Head of Digital Products HR, DACHSER SE
Adopting a proactive stance to attract talent
DACHSER has processed roughly 141,000 applications in SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting to date. And its average time to hire is now approximately 85 days, aligning with industry benchmarks.
Deploying SAP SuccessFactors solutions also enabled DACHSER to harmonize its HR data in a single source, with unified data and an accurate view of its worldwide workforce. The centralized architecture creates a strong basis for global reporting and decision-making. There’s now self-service functionality for employees, digitalized onboarding and offboarding processes, a new career home page, and opportunities for extended learning.
SAP SuccessFactors solutions help DACHSER tackle the shortage of skilled workers by using predictive insights to analyze turnover rates and define appropriate actions plans. The company is also supporting proactive recruiting of passive candidates and improving their application experience. Moving from paper-based processes to intuitive self-services and workflows for employees and managers has enhanced the employee experience. And automating administrative and transactional tasks promotes DACHSER as a future-oriented company.
DACHSER can also scale business processes across countries by meeting individual legal, compliance, and data-protection requirements using global process templates. Speaking about acquisitions, Wolfgang Unterlugauer, Head of Digital Products HR at DACHSER, explains, “The key to successfully integrating a new acquisition is the speed in becoming one company. Employees and managers of both former companies need to grow together, and processes and systems need to be from a single source. With scalable SAP SuccessFactors solutions, we have a solid basis to support this.”
Head of Digital Products HR, DACHSER SE
Supporting a smooth experience across talent management processes
The vision for HR at DACHSER involves rolling out SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting, SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding, SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central, and SAP SuccessFactors Learning from the current 27 countries to more than 40 countries. The company wishes to harmonize its talent management processes globally to create a smooth experience across recruiting, onboarding, learning, and succession planning. It will also introduce additional solutions such as SAP SuccessFactors Performance & Goals and SAP SuccessFactors Succession & Development. DACHSER also hopes to optimize other administrative and transactional processes, such as payroll and time management.
SAP software is important for the future of DACHSER. Unterlugauer concludes, “SAP solutions, services, and technology will help us integrate processes across our business and provide us with data to make the right decisions. We need a reliable, innovative partner that can support our further growth and fulfill our high standards of compliance and data protection. We depend on a robust system that is constantly being developed to meet the latest requirements and possibilities, such as AI, to improve the quality of our work.”