Climate-KIC is Europe’s largest public-private innovation partnership focused on climate innovation to mitigate and adapt to climate change. It helps start-ups bring their ideas to market, provides education programmes to help students deepen their knowledge and runs innovation projects with a network of partners drawn from public and private sectors as well as academia. Headquartered in London, Climate-KIC operates through 18 European locations.
The need for an HR software system was prompted by a major shift in the organisation’s structure earlier this year, when 150 staff from partner organisations were brought together to form one co-ordinated business.
The first priority was to find a system that would help the much enlarged organisation record time and resources spent on projects, so that it could meet the stringent reporting requirements demanded by its funders. It was a big ask. The system needed to be capable of accurately capturing data from staff in different geographic locations, working on more than 100 projects with different reporting needs and aligned to around 40 different cost centres.
After reviewing several providers, Climate-KIC chose Cezanne HR because it felt the system was both robust and user-friendly and would meet its time-sheeting needs while also providing scope to streamline HR processes and provide good quality people-related data. “Time sheeting was the priority for us, but once we had that up and running we soon started to see the many other ways in which the system could add value,” said HR Manager Alex Hyde.
Since going live in January, the organisation has also been using the system to generate management reports on areas such as resourcing and retention, and to support a skills-mapping exercise. Employees have been able to take advantage of the self-service option to manage their own personal data and request annual leave, while managers have benefitted from the ability to easily see when staff are away, and access the information they need to lead their teams.
Climate-KIC were particularly impressed with the support they received from Cezanne HR in uploading data onto the new system and helping them understand how it could be configured to meet their complex needs.
“The support has been excellent and we have really benefitted from having one central point of contact who really understands us as a client,” says Alex. “One of our sister innovation organisations has also just signed up for Cezanne HR on our recommendation – and the fact that we were comfortable recommending them at such an early stage speaks for itself.”