One of the advantages of UCMS Group is that you really try to do the right service, to be a partner

Yulia Nersesyan
HR director

Services:

• Payroll (750 employees)
• HR administration (750 employees)
• Military registration

About the company and myself:

I am the HR director of the Russian division of Levi’s, a world famous American brand. We have 85 stores across the country, about 16 cities, 700 employees.

Tell us, did you have another provider or did you move from the inhouse?

Yes, there was another provider before you, but only for payroll. We went further with you. We restructured, and there was a need for support of HR functions, including, mainly, the HR admin and military registration. The decision to change the provider was also due to problems with quality and communications with the previous company. I joined the project just after the end of the test parallel calculation.

Have you had any outsourcing experience before? How difficult was it to rebuild?

My previous experience was more related to remote outsourcing, so in this case I saw a big advantage from having people in the office, being with my team. Of course, the process was different from how I worked before.

But everything was quite easy and understandable, since your employees are professionals in their field and easily found contact with us.

We were interested in building the process together, each side wanted to make it better, more transparent, more correct, in accordance with the law. We had tasks, and I see how we solve them thanks to the excellent qualities of the company’s employees.

We are doing a common cause.

How is your workflow structured? How personally involved are you in the interaction?

At the moment, our HR manager has left, who was just focused on working with the provider, and it turned out that these tasks were transferred to me. I’m just changing it. We remove one HR administrator from the side of the company so that there is one contact person, on whom communication with the outsourcing company will be focused. Now we are experiencing difficulties precisely in the fact that each HR partner is forced to interact with colleagues on HR issues, and this takes a lot of time.

How are relations with our team built? Is everything all right? How quickly do we respond to requests?

There is a certain admiration and respect for your company in the way you recruit people to your team. All employees are well-mannered, intelligent, responsive, our relations quickly improved. We can call at any time and get a professional answer. It makes no difference how we work: whether this is an employee of the outsourcing company or ours, who is sitting at the next table. We are a very dynamic company, we have a really big turnover, every day there are layoffs and hires, high rates of work. Because of this specificity, we need specialists who can energetically fit into our atmosphere and requirements. Retail is a very mobile sector, sellers change, some have seasonal jobs, others work during vacations. Reducing turnover is our biggest challenge. But so far we are not dealing with this so successfully.

The project manager is Elena Skvortsova. How do you work together?

Great. Elena is a wonderful specialist, a person, and an incredible professional. The period when we faced the coronavirus problem was very indicative.

After that, I returned to our legal department, we ordered a very expensive research or legal advice outside the company and received almost the same answers that Elena told me. It’s priceless. I really like that Elena will always find the right approach, the formulation of justifications, why it should or should not be done and will convince how to do it in the best way.

Do you have any peculiarities or unique processes?

What can distinguish our project from others is the presence of a very modified 1C system. We have IT specialists who have adjusted the system, created HR cabinets, many modules added to the standard system.

We were very glad that the UCMS Group company also offered us 1C support with its own resources, it really is like a light at the end of a tunnel. Now any problems of a technical nature are solved by UCMS Group, and not by our internal IT, which was difficult to find or did not have the necessary technical capabilities and knowledge. Therefore, now I have confidence that everything will be clean and tidy with us, because this is very important for us. Any calculations must be perfect and correct.

Quiz

Describe us in one word

The best! I had a lot of experience working with providers and I have never seen such a partnership.

What projects does Levi’s currently have, what are you working on now?

We have a lot of desires and always in short terms. The coronavirus, of course, made serious adjustments, but we plan to complete the automation of many processes: for example, the calculation of bonuses. We want to automate everything as much as possible, and now it strongly depends on the IT support of the UCMS Group company and how quickly 1C adaptation will take place. We, of course, would like to add some labor safety modules.

What is the ideal provider in your mind?

It should be ideal precisely in the correctness of the calculation, in accuracy, in accordance with the law, in the absence of errors.

There is always a human factor, and we can accidentally, for example, put the wrong thing in the timesheet. Attention to detail is important. It is important who works. Anyone in the office must share our values and create a healthy work environment. It is important that people join, make friends, find a common language, quickly respond to any problems and requests.