Dalmia Bharat Group pours new HR foundation with Oracle Cloud

Dalmia Bharat Group is among the largest producers of cement in India. Since it installed its first kiln in 1939, the company has diversified into the production of sugar and refractory products (heat-resistant materials that line furnaces and reactors).

Today, it has the capacity to produce 26.5 million tons of cement a year. The group also controls 35,500 TCD of sugar capacity (tons of cane it can crush a day) and 320 KMTs (kilo metric tons) of refractories capacity.

Dalmia Bharat Group is celebrated for being one of the most sustainable cement manufacturers in the world. The company has the lowest carbon footprint among cement producers globally, and it aims to be carbon negative by 2040.

Dalmia Bharat is also one of India’s fastest-growing blue-chip companies, delivering a compound annual growth rate of 24% during the last decade, to more than 121 billion rupees ($1.6 billion) in revenue in fiscal 2020.

That growth rests, in part, on its strategy of acquisitions and diversification. But that strategy also created HR challenges with managing the group’s 8,500 employees. What Dalmia Bharat needed was a single, flexible, user-friendly HR platform application suite that would help it streamline its hire-to-retire processes group-wide.

After evaluating a number of competing applications, Dalmia Bharat chose Oracle Cloud HCM, under a phased implementation that included the Oracle Cloud application’s talent acquisition, time and attendance, time and labor, core HR, absence management, performance management, and compensation management modules.

Dalmia Bharat leaders liked the breadth of the Oracle Cloud HCM suite, as well as the clear product roadmap. In addition, they were impressed with the R&D investments Oracle is making to regularly introduce new capabilities.

Dalmia Bharat leaders also appreciated how Oracle experts helped them rebuild the group’s HR processes around best practices, rather than merely digitize its existing processes, and how responsive they were to the group’s multiple queries. Oracle Cloud HCM’s ease of use was another important consideration.

At the broadest level, Dalmia Bharat’s implementation of Oracle Cloud HCM enabled it to digitize, standardize, and streamline its HR processes across business units and geographies.

The Oracle Cloud applications improved the group’s efficiency by eliminating the manual work involved in generating reports, uploading documents, and maintaining systems. The HR team estimates it was able to free up 25% of its people’s time for more meaningful work.

Oracle Cloud HCM’s dashboards and automated reports keep group leaders updated on hiring activity, employee performance, compensation levels, and other key HR metrics, helping position the HR organization as a strategic business partner.

Oracle Cloud HCM’s ease of use paid off quickly: The applications required minimal user training, leading to an adoption rate of more than 90%—32 percentage points higher than the rate with the group’s previous HR solution. “I see that as one of our biggest achievements,” says Shalini Kapoor, deputy general manager of HR in the group’s Dalmia Cement unit.

Additionally, the Oracle applications’ self-service functions ensure that employees have easy access to their HR information.

Among the spinoff benefits of having a robust, centralized HR application is speed: faster responses to a variety of queries. “Speed, I would say, has now become a part of our DNA,” Kapoor says.