is a multinational oil, gas, and chemical company headquartered in Vienna, Austria. With operations spanning Europe, the Middle East, Africa, New Zealand, and Norway, OMV is a truly global enterprise.

Like much of the energy sector, OMV is navigating a significant strategic pivot. The company is investing heavily in sustainability initiatives: transforming plastic waste back into oil, building one of Europe’s largest waste-sorting facilities to produce feedstock for refineries, and recycling plastic cups collected from aircrafts into sustainable kerosene. This shift in the business model has triggered a corresponding transformation inside the business—and nowhere more so than in HR.

OMV’s People and Culture (P&C) function launched a strategic program to place people at the center of the company’s transformation. The ambition was clear: become a global HR center of excellence, increase service quality, standardize and harmonize processes, and move decisively towards digitization, automation, and self-service.

The challenge: fragmented data and a manual reporting cycle

Before Â鶹ԭ´´ BDC entered the picture, OMV’s HR data landscape was fragmented across a patchwork of systems that were never designed to work together for workforce reporting and analytics. Employee data lived in two on-premise Â鶹ԭ´´ HCM systems and Â鶹ԭ´´ SuccessFactors HCM, alongside Microsoft Excel, SharePoint, and a system originally built for financial consolidation that P&C used for headcount reporting and planning.

The day-to-day consequences were significant. When a business unit head or department manager wanted a workforce KPI—headcount figures, turnover rates, or anything beyond a basic report available in the system—they would raise a request with their HR business partner. From there, the HR business partner would spend considerable time navigating multiple systems, manually pulling data, compiling it into spreadsheets, and formatting it into a presentation before handing it back to the manager. It was time-consuming, error-prone, and consumed HR capacity that should have been spent on strategic work. Managers had no direct, self-service access to their own workforce data.

Choosing Â鶹ԭ´´ Business Data Cloud and People Intelligence

“Normally, our strategy is not to be the first with a new solution. With Â鶹ԭ´´ BDC it was different,” Bernhard Graser, head of Â鶹ԭ´´ Finance, HR, and Reporting at OMV, said. “We saw the potential immediately and wanted to stop the outbound migration of our HR and Â鶹ԭ´´ data and keep it firmly in the Â鶹ԭ´´ ecosystem.”

The timing was fortuitous. OMV had already completed a substantial Â鶹ԭ´´ SuccessFactors HCM implementation, having deployed , , and and going live in 2023 with , Â鶹ԭ´´ SuccessFactors Compensation, and Â鶹ԭ´´ SuccessFactors Recruiting. With all core employee data now sitting in a cloud-based SaaS system, the foundation for Â鶹ԭ´´ BDC connectivity was already in place.

OMV’s implementation of Â鶹ԭ´´ BDC and People Intelligence

OMV structured its Â鶹ԭ´´ BDC journey in three steps.

The first step—turning People Intelligence live—was connecting Â鶹ԭ´´ SuccessFactors HCM to Â鶹ԭ´´ BDC. This was not entirely without friction: OMV discovered that its on-premise HCM systems sat on a different Identity Authentication service than Â鶹ԭ´´ SuccessFactors HCM, which required alignment before integration could proceed.

A more substantive challenge was data governance. As an Austrian company with a Works Council, it was not possible for OMV to simply push all HR data into Â鶹ԭ´´ BDC. The team implemented data masking, configured Read Access Logging, and established permission controls that mirror Â鶹ԭ´´ SuccessFactors HCM exactly, meaning a user can only see data in Â鶹ԭ´´ BDC that they are already authorized to view in Â鶹ԭ´´ SuccessFactors HCM. This level of governance was a prerequisite before any business users could interact with the system.

The second step, currently in progress, involves migrating both HCM systems to . Once complete, Â鶹ԭ´´ S/4HANA will connect directly to Â鶹ԭ´´ BDC, enabling a fully unified data feed from both Â鶹ԭ´´ SuccessFactors HCM and Â鶹ԭ´´ S/4HANA into a single platform.

The third step, planned for the near future, is the retirement of the legacy reporting stack entirely, eliminating the spreadsheets and replacing the current workaround in the financial consolidation system with Â鶹ԭ´´ BDC as the single reporting and planning environment for HR.

Â鶹ԭ´´ BDC’s architecture played a key role in the decision. Â鶹ԭ´´-managed data products—pre-built data models maintained and updated by Â鶹ԭ´´â€”were particularly attractive, especially because OMV had kept its Â鶹ԭ´´ SuccessFactors HCM configuration close to standard. That near-standard posture meant a larger share of OMV’s HR data could be served through Â鶹ԭ´´-managed products, reducing the internal maintenance burden. When something changes in a source system or a data definition, it is Â鶹ԭ´´’s responsibility to update the model, not OMV’s.

Current and future use cases

After evaluating the intelligent content available in People Intelligence, OMV decided to start with workforce composition insights, now live and providing out-of-the-box dashboards on headcount, workforce structure, and composition, fully configurable and filterable by business users.

With the foundation in place, OMV’s P&C team has been actively collecting ideas for what to build next on Â鶹ԭ´´ BDC. On the operational side, the team wants to track accident-related data as a workforce KPI, monitor open positions across the business, and measure time-to-hire. Diversity is another priority—data that currently sits fragmented across systems. Through its participation in Â鶹ԭ´´’s forward deployed engineering program, OMV is co-building use cases around learning and certification compliance—a business-critical need in a refinery environment where workers must hold current safety certifications to enter operational sites—as well as skills and headcount. Looking further ahead, OMV intends to move into machine learning and predictive modelling, using the capability in Â鶹ԭ´´ Business Data Cloud to forecast workforce demand and identify gaps in skills and FTEs before they materialize.

The bottom line

The direction is clear: a single source of truth for HR data, self-service access for every manager and business unit head, and a platform capable of growing from descriptive reporting today into predictive workforce intelligence tomorrow. As Graser encouraged his audience at the end of his session at Madrid: “We see great potential in Â鶹ԭ´´ BDC—not only in HR, but also in finance. You should try it.”

Learn more about People Intelligence .

A total workforce management strategy allows businesses to keep the whole workforce in focus for increased agility, productivity, and bottom-line impact.  

OG&E’s experience with contingent and contract labor is unique. Despite the 121 years under its belt, OG&E has embraced the changing landscape of employment with open arms. For over 25 years, OG&E has been utilizing Â鶹ԭ´´ solutions, including for over a decade. Together with the HR solutions of , Â鶹ԭ´´ Fieldglass solutions – a comprehensive vendor management portfolio for external labor – help pave the way for the successful workforce management of permanent and contingent and contract labor. 

The challenge lies in determining which positions to fill with contingent workers or profile workers, a process OG&E has mastered over the years. The decision hinges on the specific skills required and the immediacy and duration of the need. This flexible approach has enabled OG&E to successfully bring in workers with diverse profiles for various projects, such as its recent Â鶹ԭ´´ SuccessFactors Human Experience Management (HXM) Suite implementation project.

Ownership of this process is shared between the departments of HR, the business units, and procurement, reflecting a trend observed across various organizations. A study conducted in 2022 revealed that HR was responsible for external worker functions about 51% of the time.* This is a testament to the rising importance of contingent and profile workers and the need for HR to engage them effectively.

However, this process isn’t without its complexities, necessitating collaboration between HR and procurement. Issues such as rate cards and other procurement-specific processes require strong cooperation between the two functions.  

Previously, a lack of comprehensive understanding about OG&E’s workforce made everyday HR and finance decisions increasingly challenging. The management of contingent workers through Â鶹ԭ´´ Fieldglass solutions was handled by a third party. However, the transition to internal management provided more visibility.  

This has empowered OG&E to make more informed decisions. For example, OG&E had 10 excellent candidates from different suppliers for a position, two of which came at a significantly higher cost. Recognizing the value of the other eight candidates, it challenged the high markup, resulting in one supplier lowering its rate. This type of negotiation was previously not possible for OG&E due to the lack of visibility, but now it’s an integral part of the process. 

In contrast, Brightspeed, a company that has recently started out, is managing a dynamic workforce of  4,200 employees and almost as many contractors. Its mission? To lay high-speed fiber in the South and Midwest of the United States. Alongside this, it also had a recent divestiture from Lumen, with hundreds of inherited applications and a fresh contingent workforce.

But its workforce needs are ever-evolving. With a contingent workforce that ebbs and flows according to the company’s needs, Brightspeed is flexible and can adapt, from field workers laying fiber to IT specialists building new applications.

Brightspeed utilized Â鶹ԭ´´’s suite of applications to help streamline its operations post-divestiture. Lumen had already implemented Â鶹ԭ´´ SuccessFactors solutions and Â鶹ԭ´´ Fieldglass solutions, so Brightspeed decided to create a seamless transition and continue to use these solutions. The suite it uses now includes Â鶹ԭ´´ SuccessFactors solutions, Â鶹ԭ´´ Fieldglass solutions, and Â鶹ԭ´´ S/4HANA.

The Â鶹ԭ´´ Fieldglass portfolio is used to help manage contingent workers. Within this context, Brightspeed’s managed service provider plays a crucial role. It liaises with the hiring manager, handles candidate selection, and ultimately delivers the temporary worker in Â鶹ԭ´´ Fieldglass solutions. These workers are then trained in compliance and technical procedures, with all the information interfaced back into Â鶹ԭ´´ SuccessFactors Learning. From an Â鶹ԭ´´ S/4HANA perspective, cost center project activities and other elements are pushed out to its time system and raw time is imported to Â鶹ԭ´´ S/4HANA, capturing millions of dollars in project cost every pay period.

However, the journey wasn’t without its challenges. As a young company, Brightspeed had a massive task ahead of it in getting these systems up and running in just 10 months. The team successfully navigated this initial hurdle, but soon realized it hadn’t fully prepared for the post-go-live period due to the compressed implementation period. This led to a challenging few months, as it scrambled to train personnel and resolve system errors. Despite this, the team has since stabilized operations.

As these examples show, the role of contingent and profile workers is evolving and becoming increasingly integral to the success of organizations. They are no longer just field workers but are being relied upon for specific skill sets. This allows companies like Brightspeed and OG&E to stay agile, adapt to business needs, and manage their contingent and profile workers as well as their permanent employees.

A , when done right, can leverage the full potential of a diverse workforce and make companies more agile. Â鶹ԭ´´ SuccessFactors solutions and Â鶹ԭ´´ Fieldglass solutions can work together to help create and manage a dynamic, flexible workforce that can easily adapt. The experiences of OG&E and Brightspeed highlight the importance of strategic planning and the effective use of technological tools in managing the workforce.

Andrea Domhardt is part of Product Marketing for Â鶹ԭ´´ SuccessFactors.

*“Workforce Solutions Buyer Survey 2022, Americas,“ Staffing Industry Analysts, 2022.