Cirque du Soleil Meets HR Challenges With SAP’s SuccessFactors

With revenue approaching $1 billion annually and an approximately 5,000-strong employee roster spread across five continents, Cirque du Soleil has a lot of moving parts to manage. It has chosen SuccessFactors, an SAP company, to manage its HR needs.

“Our business requires constant mass moving of our employees from country to country with varying requirements,” said Bernard Hébert, vice president of Information and Business Systems at Cirque du Soleil. “And with help from solutions such as SuccessFactors Employee Central and SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics, Cirque du Soleil can effectively manage these issues anytime, anywhere, from any device.”

The challenge of managing various departments, including talent, behind-the-scenes workers and management from continent to continent necessitates the use of mobile technology which also emphasizes transparency.

One of the recurring issues facing legacy companies is their reliance on multi-platform or in-house solutions for managing operations, which creates cascading inefficiencies for companies that require the left hand to know what the right hand is doing. Cloud-based management solutions enable team collaboration and co-working across departments and time zones.

Cirque du Soleil has proven their far-sighted business sense on other occasions. In 2012, they cemented their decade-long relationship with PR agency Sid Lee by taking a minority stake in the firm.

Since then, Sid Lee and Cirque du Soleil have gone on to co-present several innovative events, most notably the massive business conference C2MTL, renowned for its immersively cool aesthetic and overall lack of resemblance to every other business conference. Last May, Cirque du Soleil used C2MTL as a platform to announce its next major collaboration: an adaptation of James Cameron’s Avatar for the stage.

Citing a Harvard Business Review study from 2005, which states that “companies on average deliver only 63% of the financial performance their strategies promise,” SuccessFactors has taken a dynamic, collaborative and transparently accountable approach to closing that execution gap.

Companies as disparate as auto supplier Continental AG and IT firm NTT Data Inc. also use SuccessFactors.

What SuccessFactors’ “human capital management” (HCM) solution offers is a degree of flexibility, mobility and efficiency needed to push the needle on the execution gap ever closer to 100%.