Improving Nexperia’s HR quality by automating repetitive tasks with JIRA Service Management

Company background: Nexperia

Nexperia is a front-runner in the mass production of vital semiconductors. These semiconductors are basically used in every electronic device in the world. Each year the company ships more than 100 billion products, generating around €2.1 billion in revenue. This giant operation is efficiently handled by 14,000 employees across Asia, Europe, and the U.S. and 6 self-owned factories.

The challenge

Nexperia’s 14,000 highly skilled employees are at the center of this huge operation so you can imagine the importance of its HR team. That’s where we get to our involvement. To increase the quality and effectiveness of the HR team and their processes (onboarding, question-handling, etc), Nexperia wanted a future-proof solution that could scale with them while remaining flexible & connectable to other applications like finance tools, and external applications from for example leasing providers, and more.

Now imagine someone joining the company. For this person, all kinds of tasks need to be handled, from arranging a laptop or workwear for factory employees to registering them in internal systems. Then they also need to get their salary on time which must be arranged properly. Their signed contract must be stored in the right place as well. These are just some examples, but you can imagine there are a lot more things that need to be arranged.

Next to this, HR also handles lots of people-related questions coming from employees. These questions come up in random conversations, via emails, in Teams meetings, etc.

Now think of some manual tasks that need to be done in both the question-handling and the on-/offboarding and imagine this would be automated, including a clear interface and useful FAQ pages in the future. That would save a lot of valuable time, right? That’s what Nexperia recognized and wanted to focus on so their HR teams could focus more on qualitative HR operations and improvement.

Jira Service Management was chosen as the right solution for this because of its strong HR use cases, its flexibility, and the fact that the tool is connectable with over 1,000 trusted applications and integrations, ensuring better collaboration with other tools, teams, and departments within Nexperia.

The solution

Setting it up

With a combined team of Devoteam Atlassian experts, Nexperia HR- and technical employees we implemented a ticketing system for Nexperia’s central HR organization to follow up on requests from local HR and employees/managers. At the front of this solution there needed to be a portal, basically, an online service desk to which employees can come with their questions or concerns. These questions/concerns were then handled as tickets in a system that would automatically assign the right tasks to the right persons/systems and keep an overview of the whole process.

Example: An employee can now go to the ‘digital service desk’, type in whatever they need, specify their request, and follow the progress of their requests. The HR team has a centralized overview of all requests and their statuses.

Making it smart

After defining the different request types to be automated and how these should be automated per type, we optimized the quality of requests by defining which information to ask for and optimizing user-friendliness. To make the process even smarter we built in conditional dependencies for each request type, meaning that different follow-up actions would be coupled to a specific request depending on what exactly is filled in in the field.

Example: Let’s say an employee puts in a request for a mobility arrangement. He/she must fill in some fields about what type of mobility they would like (car, bike, public transport, etc). Depending on which of these mobility options is selected, the request will go in a different direction to a different tool or person to do the follow-up.

Automating recurring tasks

With the request types and fields created, we worked on automating some additional recurring HR tasks like sending emails to a team when someone joins or leaves the company. With all the necessary information stored in the tickets, these types of emails could be fully automated in the future.

Example: Let’s say a manager fills in a ticket that someone is leaving the company. Within those tickets, they, for example, specify who it concerns, which team they were part of, what the actual leaving date is, etc. The new HR Service Management tool can automatically send out an email to the concerned team the day after the person left (or any other desired action).

Reducing requests

The next phase was to make sure all processes would work together. In addition, Nexperia is now starting to use Confluence to build up a knowledge base to reduce the number of tickets with FAQs. By providing this information, the employees would be up to date with everything, resulting in a reduced number of tickets. The goal is to solve easier request types before they become actual requests for the HR teams.  

Example: For requests that are made often, and have a general approach to solve, equal for almost all employees, pages can be made to help them solve their own issues. The simplest example is when an employee has basic questions about house rules within the company, they are automatically directed to the right section in the Employee Handbook. In this way, no manual action by HR is needed to answer the questions.

Onboarding everyone

After making sure everything was in its place and working seamlessly, all employees were introduced to the new Service Management environment with proper introduction and workshops to boost adoption (click here to discover more about training).

The benefits

Centralized overview

Now, Nexperia has a central place where employees can raise several types of requests (questions, issues, etc), search statuses of older tickets, centralized communication regarding ticket handling, request tracking and progress overview, and soon FAQ pages that enable employees to solve their own requests.

The process management of some employee requests and questions is now not done by the HR team anymore, but managed by their smart HR Service Management tool, with easy insight into follow-up and clearly specified task owners.

Made to facilitate company growth

With a flexible and modern tool in place to manage a major part of HR’s workload, Nexperia has the right setup to run clean and scalable HR processes for its employees for the foreseeable future.

Timesaving

By automating a lot of repetitive HR tasks and providing specific FAQ pages which reduce the number of requests, Nexperia’s HR team is now able to focus even more on actual in-depth employee conversations, growth, improvement, etc, and less on managing the process of all kinds of requests.