The result is that Seek has removed the silos between its Australian and New Zealand business and its business in Asia. It can now offer products in any language and a product needs to be built only once before being offered to the 250 million potential customers in Asia.
There remains a distinct difference; Australia is a self-service system for jobseekers, whether they be individuals or companies. But it is the opposite in Asia, where most accounts have a salesperson helping clients to use the platform.
These two approaches required very different workflows and systems. Now, the platform supports both the self-service and the high-touch sales model in Asia.
The tech upgrade involved the implementation of a unified enterprise resource planning system, supplied by Workday, a unified customer research management system supplied by Salesforce, and taking the functionality and flexibility of the Australian online platform to the Asia-Pacific region.
Seek’s regional marketplace unification director, Jesse Stratford, led the initial three-month scoping phase, which involved workshops with every function around the organisation in Asia and Australia.
He says the team asked a range of questions such as: “What are the things that are going to come out of the woodwork and hurt us when we try to engineer this project? If we replaced our ERP, with this new ERP, or replaced our homebrew CRM with Salesforce and Australian products, what are the major changes that we need to deal with?”
After the initial due diligence, the team told the executive leadership the project would take three years but it was so comprehensive that it could be the only thing the company could focus on.
“They gave us the green light to go into the scoping phase, which was a three or four-month period with a little larger team who went around and dug deeper on each of the big issues,” Stratford says.
Questions asked during this phase included: What are the fundamental differences between the products that we offer to our customers in Asia and the products that we offer to our customers in Australia and New Zealand? And where is the effort going to be? What are we going to need to change? What does it mean to scale our platform across Asia? How much are we going to have to do on scalability? How much tech debt will need to be remediated before we’re comfortable to roll this out to a quarter billion people?
The initial estimate of the cost of the program was $140 million but a couple of months later this was revised to $180 million.
“That figure was based on us having gotten even closer to the detail, having started to build out the road map to estimate the scope, all of those kinds of things that gave us more competence as to what the actual cost and duration would be,” Stratford says.
The fascinating aspect of the budget is that $120 million was operating expenses and $55 million was capital investment. This is explained by the fact that Workday and Salesforce sell software as a service which cannot be capitalised on the balance sheet.
Three guiding principles
There were three founding principles agreed to at the beginning of the project.
“We agreed it has to be the only thing that we do during this time – put everything down and give 100 per cent to this,” Stratford says.
“Second, we are not large enough to actually get this done within the time period, so we need to scale with help from third parties.
“And the third one was we have to be willing to make tough trade-offs along the way.”
It helped immensely that Seek had already replaced its SAP enterprise resource planning system in Australia with Workday, and it had rolled out the Salesforce CRM system in Australia.
This meant it had hands-on experience working in partnership with two systems integrators – Accenture on Salesforce and Deloitte on Workday.
Narev ensured that every senior executive in the business was brought into the digital transformation through two separate steering committees, which oversaw the work of 1000 people including 350 in-house software engineers.
The project sponsor was Narev, and he headed a steering committee comprising his leadership team: chief financial officer, Kate Koch; chief people and culture officer, Kathleen McCudden; chief executive Asia, Peter Bithos; managing director Americas, Emmett Sheppard; managing director Australia and New Zealand, Kendra Banks; managing director technology, Lisa Tobin; and managing director strategy and AI, Simon Lusted.
This committee met every two weeks to get a briefing from Stratford and the program director, Steve Coughlan.
A separate subcommittee was spun off the main committee, and it comprised the heads of finance, technology and strategy, as well as the heads of ANZ and Asia. This committee met once a week for an hour to hear from Stratford and Coughlan.
These meetings were all about informing senior management about the compromises being made to ensure the unification was happening on time and on budget.
To ensure the staff engagement with the program went deep into the company, another group was formed, called the strategy forum, which was made up of about 25 executives who reported directly to the executive leadership team. This committee met for an hour every week.
Stratford says this committee was arguably the most influential because it was where the compromises and trade-offs over software capabilities were negotiated.
One of the compromises was driven by the realisation that it would not be possible to merge multiple accounts. Instead, individual and corporate customers had to pick one account and delete the others.
‘Nine, nine, nine’
Seek was lucky to have Coughlan on board as program director, given he had worked nine years at Accenture, including two as program director, and he had led business transformation projects at EnergyAustralia and Sensis.
It was Coughlan who came up with a brilliant idea called “nine, nine, nine” to make certain the Platform Unification project met its deadlines and budget.
This meant breaking the project down into three nine-month blocks. At the end of the first nine-month block, Seek would deliver several of the largest and most challenging changes to the online marketplace, as well as the first release of CRM.
By the end of the second nine-month block, Seek needed to have the software build complete for all the components including the ERP, the CRM and the online marketplace.
By the end of the last nine-month block, Seek needed to be ready for launch day, which required the decommissioning of platforms in Asia, remediating major security issues, tearing down the infrastructure established to support the unification and closing out contracts with partners and external contractors.
Stratford says the unified system holds out the prospect of “huge” efficiency gains because software upgrades don’t need to be done three times and there is no longer the need to maintain servers and systems in three different markets.
The system gives Seek the option of offering services on an app in a different language in a discreet market, which has just been done within three weeks for the Kowloon jobs market in Hong Kong, using the traditional Chinese language.
Seek has told the market that one of the advantages of the new unified platform is the ability to gain access to larger data sets, which can be used to train the large language models used in artificial intelligence.
The Seek platform unification could garner a global audience. Stratford says, “McKinsey, who came in at the start to do an audit of the approach were here the other day, and they were like, we’d love to do a case study on this because it’s a rarity.”
