Thermo Fisher Scientific boosts productivity, improves adoption of Workday® thanks to WalkMe

Thermo Fisher Scientific is a fast-growing provider of innovative technologies to health care, life sciences, and related industries. With over 70,000 global employees, the company needed a tool that would ensure efficient and consistent onboarding and training in multiple languages. The company also wanted to improve employee adoption of, and ongoing engagement with Workday®.

As part of its digital adoption and change management strategy, Thermo Fisher implemented WalkMe for Workday which gave employees access to customized in-app guidance and real-time instruction. By using WalkMe, the company ensures consistent training, efficient onboarding, and increased productivity. Furthermore, WalkMe ShoutOuts and SmartTips have revolutionized how Thermo Fisher is able to communicate with users from within the applications.

With over 70,000 employees globally, Thermo Fisher Scientific needed to think strategically about how to roll out their new HR software, Workday®. The HR Technology Services team knew it would be a cumbersome task to create training documentation for their different processes, translate it into 10 different languages, and update it with every Workday® version release or internal process change. Additionally, Thermo Fisher wanted to provide a personalized, just-in-time training experience to their employees, regardless of the employee’s location or access to live training and help.

To support a seamless migration to Workday®, the HR Technology Services team created role-specific onboarding guides using a combination of WalkMe apps, like Onboarding Tasks, Walk-Thrus, Launchers, and Segmentation. These tailored guides helped each employee navigate the system and complete their tasks with minimal confusion or disruption.

Even after Workday® was implemented, these guides continue to add value as the organization grows. Thermo Fisher frequently acquires new companies and must onboard up to 10,000 new employees at a time to their organization and systems. These WalkMe onboarding guides help to manage new users and new processes at scale, and are easy to maintain even as the Workday® UX changes.

But WalkMe isn’t only about training for Thermo Fisher. They also love WalkMe’s ability to draw users’ attention to important information within the application and push people towards the right behaviors.

In one example, employees struggled to complete the Job Requisition Request process on their first attempt. By using a WalkMe Survey to collect real-time user feedback, the team learned that users started the process without possessing the necessary information required to complete it.

The team created an automatic ShoutOut that played at the onset of the process, which listed everything needed in advance and helped guide the users in how to retrieve that information. Once collected, the user could efficiently complete the process in one sitting.

Lastly, WalkMe helps the Thermo Fisher team overcome certain product limitations and tailor content for specific audiences. One example of this is related to challenges with custom fields, which can’t be translated into supported languages and can’t be marked as mandatory.

With WalkMe, Thermo Fisher created Launchers that translate the custom fields into the 10 supported languages, and then segmented those Launchers to display to the user in the native language instead of the default text. They also added a red asterisk to mandatory custom fields, giving the user a visual cue to complete. Solutions like this help to ensure that all users can efficiently complete their processes, reducing user confusion and support requests.

The Thermo Fisher team uses WalkMe Insights’ robust analytics to measure their ability to provide scalable, real-time training and support to users globally. In the last year alone, 46,000 Thermo Fisher employees interacted with almost 555,000 WalkMe items. 70% of new users to Workday® engage with their personalized WalkMe onboarding experience, and 83% of users continue to engage with WalkMe on a recurring basis for training and support.

WalkMe Insights also allows Thermo Fisher to get more granular with the data, to see how specific solutions are impacting user behaviors. For example, since deploying the automatic Job Requisition Request ShoutOut, an average of 5,800 employees per quarter benefit from its contextual messaging to complete the process on first attempt. Additionally, the solutions they built to overcome custom field product limitations benefit over 6,100 employees globally, empowering users to accurately fill out forms without any confusion.

Updating content after a Workday® version release is easier than ever. From previous professional experience working with Workday®, the HR Technology Services team members knew that new version releases usually a required a 6-month period to update all training documentation. With WalkMe, the team’s need to update documentation and screenshots is basically eliminated. This saves the team a tremendous amount of time and energy, allows them to focus on more important initiatives, and ensures that end-users don’t go without accurate and up-to-date help.

Additionally, using WalkMe’s automation capabilities, the team was able to automate processes to save their end users millions of useless clicks, helping users to complete processes faster and more accurately. For example, when requesting a job requisition, users would often submit the job requisition but forget to complete the next step of the process of editing additional data. The result was an increase in incomplete processes that required escalation to support.By using WalkMe to automatically click the user through to the next steps, they were able to increase process completion rate to 100%, accelerate time to complete the process by 5%, and reduce support tickets submitted by 10%. By automating this one process, along with other key workflows, Thermo Fisher saved the organization thousands of hours in inefficient support and wasted productivity.

Most importantly, the experience Thermo Fisher creates with WalkMe empowers the company to create a systematic, proactive approach to change management. Whether it’s introducing new users, new processes, or UI changes in Workday®, WalkMe has enabled Thermo Fisher to effectively and efficiently lead employees through organizational change.