STADA empowers 12,000 employees with self-service and scales HR transformation across 60 countries

STADA Arzneimittel AG, a leading global pharmaceutical company, embarked on one of the largest IT transformations in its history: implementing SAP SuccessFactors across 60 countries and 12,000 employees in just two years. This major digital transformation initiative required a strong change management and digital adoption strategy from day one.

From the start, STADA deployed WalkMe alongside SuccessFactors to ensure a seamless experience for its global employees and managers. With WalkMe, STADA quickly built solutions to enable self-service workflows across roles and geographies – driving adoption at scale.

By including WalkMe as a core component of its implementation plan, STADA significantly reduced support tickets and gained access to valuable analytics that helped optimize business processes. Today, WalkMe plays a vital role in STADA’s ongoing digital adoption journey, enhancing employee experience, simplifying workflows, and making data-driven decisions.

STADA launched one of the largest IT projects in its history: deploying SAP SuccessFactors across 60 countries and 12,000 employees in just two years. With such a fast-paced, large-scale rollout, user adoption was critical.

“We took a big bang approach,” said Nikola Samsal, Global C&P IT Head at STADA. “But we knew adoption could be a major hurdle.”

STADA recognized that a strong digital adoption strategy would be essential to support users, minimize disruption, and ensure a smooth transition during such a significant transformation. With the goal of empowering employees to complete tasks and processes on their own, in compliance with their regions’ policies and across various languages, the company sought a way to make the transition intuitive, efficient, and scalable.

“Our goal was to empower users to help themselves,” said Victor Postu, Global Manager Culture & People Digital Experience. “We needed a solution that would reduce friction, support self-service, and preserve productivity from day one.”

As they planned for the SuccessFactors rollout, STADA took a strategic change management approach and deployed SuccessFactors and WalkMe simultaneously. “WalkMe was a change management tool for us,” said Nikola Samsal, Global C&P IT Head at STADA. “When you’re implementing so much in such a short period of time, the biggest challenge is always ensuring that people are properly educated on the system. Otherwise, IT will receive an influx of process-related tickets that are outside their scope.”

Known internally as “HERO Navigator,” to complement STADA’s branding of SuccessFactors as “HERO”, WalkMe provides always-on, in-the-flow guidance tailored by role, region, and need. “WalkMe – or HERO Navigator – is a floating tool that opens up when you need it. It’s always there. It’s always visible,” said Victor.

STADA created digital adoption solutions for more than 50 business-critical processes. For example, during performance reviews, WalkMe highlights related coaching or development resources – bringing valuable information directly to employees at the moment they need it and enabling them to take action immediately. Automation is also used to streamline key tasks. “WalkMe guides the user and actually moves the user to the right place,” said Victor. “It’s especially valuable for complex processes like job requisitions, where managers need to input detailed information.”

WalkMe’s robust segmentation capabilities enable STADA to tailor content for different user groups. “We have segmentation for managers, for HR, and for regional users so we can deliver personalized guidance based on roles and responsibilities,” said Marija Smiljkovic, Global IT C&P Consultant at STADA.

By using WalkMe ShoutOuts, the team can alert users to time-sensitive messages and updates in real time, which helps prevent unnecessary support tickets. “We have pop-up notifications if there are important updates and upgrades,” said Victor. “This is so much more effective than posting it on a webpage or sending everybody an email for every incident.”

This speed to solution is key, Marija explains: “WalkMe is fast and customizable. It takes no more than 10 minutes to create a new solution and launch it to users–and we can remove solutions quickly, too.”

Following the SuccessFactors launch, STADA used WalkMe to gather valuable user feedback through a global satisfaction survey delivered directly in-platform. This approach ensured higher response rates and targeted feedback specific to employees’ SuccessFactors experience. These insights helped STADA ensure that employees were getting the most out of the new system and sparked ideas to continuously improve and maximize the organization’s SuccessFactors investment. “Our WalkMe survey feedback also informed our ‘HERO Days,’ a global workshop dedicated to improving processes and making adoption even better,” said Victor.

Today, WalkMe continues to play a key role in ongoing optimization. STADA uses WalkMe’s analytics capabilities – including insights from UI Intelligence – to identify friction points like unnecessary fields or commonly missed steps and make fast, user-driven changes to improve employees’ experience. “I really appreciate the ability to gain insights into how long certain tasks take to complete – like filling out a form or creating a position – as it helps us identify opportunities to streamline workflows and improve efficiency,” said Marija. “WalkMe is helping us realize how to make our processes better.”

WalkMe’s integration into STADA’s SuccessFactors rollout enabled a consistent, intuitive digital experience – across 12,000 employees in 60 countries. Despite regional nuances and process complexity, every user receives the same high-quality guidance. “We saw the impact quickly,” said Victor. “Our ticket volume for questions related to processes has become less and less frequent. Now, if somebody opens a ticket, it’s for an incident or a change request.”

This reduction in tickets enables support teams to focus on higher-value work, while employees get answers without spending critical work hours seeking assistance. “Productivity is the biggest impact WalkMe has had on the organization,” said Marija. “Employees are completing their processes in much less time so they can focus on higher priority tasks that are more impactful for the business.”

The flexibility of WalkMe enables STADA to customize and augment the system to suit its unique needs, from targeted guidance to unique branding. “What’s amazing about WalkMe is that it gives us additional features that are very customizable to our standards,” said Victor. “WalkMe gives us the flexibility and power to make real changes.”

Looking ahead, STADA is excited about continuing to use analytics to enhance employee experience and expanding the benefits of WalkMe to SuccessFactors’ mobile experience – as well as other applications, including Ariba.