Sarvesh Sishir Bhargav

31

MBA (Finance) A

Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Limited is a British luxury automobile maker. A wholly owned
subsidiary of German group BMW, it was established in 1998 after BMW was licensed the
rights to the Rolls-Royce brand name and logo from Rolls-Royce plc and acquired the rights
to the Spirit of Ecstasy and Rolls-Royce grill shape trademarks from Volkswagen AG. Rolls-
Royce Motor Cars Limited operates from purpose-built administrative and production
facilities opened in 2003 across from the historic Goodwood Circuit in Goodwood, West
Sussex, England, United Kingdom. Rolls-Royce Motors Cars Limited is the exclusive
manufacturer of Rolls-Royce branded motor cars since 2003.

Although the Rolls-Royce brand has been in use since 1906, the Rolls-Royce Motor Cars
subsidiary of BMW AG has no direct relationship to Rolls-Royce branded vehicles produced
prior to 2003. The Bentley Motors Limited subsidiary of Volkswagen AG is the direct
successor to Rolls-Royce Motors and various other predecessor entities that produced Rolls-
Royce and Bentley branded cars between the foundation of each company and 2003, when
the BMW-controlled entity started producing cars under the Rolls-Royce brand.

The Rolls-Royce Phantom four-door sedan was the first product offered for sale in 2003.
Since then, the company has expanded its product line to include extended wheelbase, two-
door coupé, and convertible versions of the Phantom sedan, as well as the smaller Ghost four-
door sedan and Wraith two-door coupé.

Rolls-Royce is without a doubt one of the best car manufacturers in the world. Not only cars,
the British company has also gained an international reputation for gas turbines, jet engines,
and ship propellers among the other products that they manufacture. What has made the
company a leader in its market is not only its innovation but also Rolls-Royce HR practices.

Their people strategy focuses on three key areas:

Enabling business transformation – Embedding a simpler organisation to introduce greater

performance enablement, helping our people achieve their potential every day.

Building strategic capabilities – Developing key organisational, leadership, technical and

functional capabilities for future performance and growth.
 Creating a lean, agile, high performance culture – Achieving our strategic goals requires
that we have the right cultural elements that support our workforce to be enabled, engaged
and energised to drive performance and growth.

Their goals are to:

 Increase awareness and understanding of all employees of the value of diversity and inclusion
 Build diversity and inclusion into the way we work
 Drive commitment to diversity and inclusion

Apprentice Program

The car and aircraft engine manufacturer is long synonymous with apprenticeships and quality
training. Looking at the current employees of the company, more than 30% of the senior
managers of Rolls-Royce started with an entry-level job at the company. The company displays
evolution and transformation through its value chain and its innovative business model.

Rolls-Royce is proud of its apprentice program. The company evidently understands that with
the aim to maintain its level of success, training is indispensable. Each year, more than 180
apprentices from the age range of sixteen to eighteen are added to 12 sites of the company in
the United Kingdom. The majority of apprentices stick to the company and work there for the
life of their career.

Value Chain

What strikes your mind when you hear Rolls-Royce? Engineering excellence? Reliability?
Innovation? Or the obvious one – quality? Most of us think of quality as soon as the company
name strikes our ears. That’s exactly how its employees see the company, everyone from the
lunch lady to the CEO take pride in working for the company.

In an employee engagement survey, the most important factor that elevated employee
engagement was “take pride in working for the company”, as rated by its employees. Such
work environment is the result of Rolls-Royce HR initiatives, which have not only provided a
great work culture but has also provided a boost in employee morale.

With aircraft engines becoming a mature product now, Rolls-Royce will have to improve its
competitive advantage, its market share and its volumes over its competitors. This can be done
in many different ways by Mergers & Acquisitions. M&A is very complicated and will take
sufficient amount of time if seen through HR perspective. Rolls-Royce HR practices will need
to be merged as the company is merged, which includes dealing with the employees who will
be affected by the change.

Rolls-Royce cloud HR project

A multi-million-pound project by Rolls-Royce to replace the HR systems used to manage

more than 40,000 employees will pay for itself within two years, the company said today.
The Derby-based engineering and aerospace firm has swapped ageing ERP and spreadsheets
used across 46 countries with a company-wide core HR system.The project, which went live
last October, will give Rolls-Royce new capabilities to plan for its future recruitment needs,
and enable it to deploy existing skilled employees more effectively.Rolls-Royce, which
operates in 46 countries, made a strategic decision to move its HR technology to the cloud
following a period of rapid expansion.The company began evaluating cloud HR services in
2012.

Taking soundings

The £14bn-a-year company took soundings with 25 large businesses that had already
implemented big HR projects in the cloud, before selecting a supplier.

Rolls-Royce signed a contract with Workday and hired consultants Deloitte to advise on the
project – which became Rolls’ first company-wide cloud implementation – in mid-2014.
The company had previously relied on a SAP system to manage the HR records and payroll
of the employees in its five largest territories, representing 85% of the workforce.
Smaller territories relied on a combination of smaller HR and payroll systems, and what Judd
described as a “vast array” of spreadsheets and PowerPoint files
As a result, it was difficult for managers to generate an accurate picture of the workforce
world-wide, or to produce reports on the skills and talents of its employees, said Judd.

Software out of the box

The project team decided at an early stage to work with a standard implementation of
Workday. The plan was to keep variations in different regions to a minimum, unless there
were good legal reasons to customise the software. The HR team worked with other parts of
the business to rethink the company’s HR processes. It was able to complete the work, and
test the new processes in each geographic region, within five months.

A team of more than 20 HR and IT staff from Rolls-Royce and a similar number of
consultants from Deloitte rolled out Workday over 15 months, finally going live in October
2015.

Business benefits

Although it is still early days, Workday has given managers at Rolls-Royce a clearer picture
of the organisation’s structure, and the skills, history and salaries of their teams, said Judd.
Managers can also use the software to set goals for employees and carry out performance
reviews – a process that previously required them to access several different computer
systems, then make a series of phone calls and send emails.

The new technology has also allowed Rolls-Royce to free its HR staff from administrative
support work to focus on more strategic roles.Judd plans to spend the next 12 months
“bedding in” the cloud HR service, and improving the company’s talent management and
performance management processes.

Rolls-Royce is also collaborating with Workday to help it develop learning management

software. The company currently uses SuccessFactors’ learning management technology.

Mobile and analytics

In the longer term, Rolls-Royce plans to use data analytics to improve its training and
development programmes. The company also plans to make Workday more widely available
to employees to access from their mobile phones. This should particularly appeal to the next
generation of employees who expect to access information electronically.

Lessons learned

Judd advises other HR professionals to persuade executives to buy into cloud-based HR as an

concept, rather than a technology. It also pays to invest in a well-thought-out integration
strategy to make it easier to link cloud services to the existing IT infrastructure. It is also
important to be uncompromising about observing Workday’s standard out–of-the-box
configuration, said Judd.
Refrences :

1. Our people are our power-

https://www.rolls-royce.com/sustainability/our-people.aspx#section-diversity-and-
inclusion
2. Rolls-Royce HR Practices that made it more than a British Car Manufacturer-
https://www.thehrdigest.com/rolls-royce-hr-practices-made-british-car-manufacturer/
3. Rolls-Royce cloud HR project will pay for itself in two years-
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500278704/Rolls-Royce-cloud-HR-project-
will-pay-for-itself-in-two-years
4. Rolls-Royce Motor Cars-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Motor_Carsesources
5. Rolls Royce Human Resources-
https://www.ukessays.com/essays/management/human-resource-management-rolls-
royce-management-essay.php
6. Rolls-Royce-
http://www.hse.gov.uk/business/casestudy/rollsroyce.htm
7. Human Resource Management Rolls Royce Paper -
https://paperap.com/paper-on-human-resource-management-rolls-royce/
8. Rolce Royce hr policies –
https://www.scribd.com/document/45259683/Rolce-Royce-hr-policies
9 . World-class products with world-class people-

https://careers.rolls-royce.com/india/professionals/

10. HR challenges in international joint ventures at Rolls Royce plc –

https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/9591/