How Schneider Electric is streamlining onboarding with WalkMe

Schneider Electric is a leader in energy technology, with a focus on improving sustainability and business efficiency through electrification, automation, and digitalization.

These tenets apply to the firm’s own operations. With over 160,000 employees worldwide, the firm faces the constant challenge of upskilling its workers and training new employees in the latest software.

For nearly ten years, the firm has worked with ERP giant SAP and digital adoption platform (DAP) WalkMe to improve operational efficiency and provide staff with digital e-learning on the go.

ITPro spoke to César Guerra, platform strategy & product owner at Schneider Electric, to learn more about its digital adoption plans and how it’s using WalkMe to achieve them at scale.

“At Schneider, we always put digital adoption at the center of our IT strategy, to connect learning, change management, digital adoption, and support as one team and one voice as standard,” he says.

“So employees can develop proficiency as the system evolves.”

Using WalkMe for ongoing SaaS training

WalkMe provides onscreen, embedded guidance within SaaS platforms to help users learn how they work and become more confident using them.

Schneider Electric began to deploy WalkMe in 2017 to help its North American employees use Salesforce. From this starting point, it slowly began to expand WalkMe to its HR unit and procurement applications across the region, as well as for specific tools such as SAP and Coupa.

At the time this was a limited project, led by Guerra and two colleagues, which slowly began to grow in size as positive results came in.

In 2021, Guerra’s team fielded an SVP from Schneider Electric’s Digital Technology Center, an internal vendor for procuring solutions and IT, who recognized WalkMe’s potential.

“So this person, this SVP, saw what we were doing for North America and said, ‘Hey, why are you just doing it for North America? I want you to do it globally: what do you need?’ And I was like, well, I need people, I need budget and I need support on driving these conversations.”

Guerra adds that at the time, digital adoption was not seen as a high priority, certainly not in the same way as it’s seen now. Without a voice at the table, and a say in the budget, he says that people in his position aren’t able to drive the change that can make a real difference to a business.

“So my boss was a key sponsor to get me to those places, to open those doors,” he says.

“I was very lucky to be very honest, to have this support and this sponsorship and this vision from this excellent top leader and, because of that, I was able to found these centers of excellence, where now I have people in India, I have people in the Philippines, I have people in Mexico.”

The support and services offered by WalkMe has grown in lock step with this project, Guerra says, adding that SAP’s 2024 acquisition of WalkMe helped streamline operations.

“We grow together and we succeed together, we challenge each other,” Guerra tells ITPro.

“So with this acquisition of SAP, what I have noticed is even more support than we used to have, more consolidating [and] integration of the technology. It was very convenient for us because Schneider Electric, we are a great partner of SAP as well.”

Constant upskilling

Though WalkMe can be used for the onboarding stage alone, Schneider Electric has chosen to deploy it as a persistent, embedded helper to keep employees up-to-date on software features.

In systems like SAP S/4HANA and Salesforce, Schneider Electric now uses WalkMe to build user confidence and provide live training in relevant software.

“It basically builds the confidence, no matter the maturity or knowledge of the users,” Guerra says.

“It can be a new joiner, it can be someone that has been there long term and knows the tool, but due to the constant releases, the constant innovation, the constant new versions, WalkMe’s always there to guide them through these advanced rollouts.”

The firm is now seeing an 80% user engagement rate with new tools and has tracked a reduction of 60% in support tickets linked to training.

It’s not all plain sailing. Because Schneider Electric is a decentralized organization, each business unit has its own budget and software can therefore be rolled out in stages rather than simultaneously. But Guerra says that the two largest programs at the firm with SAP have WalkMe enabled, including the core of its operations: manufacturing.

With results like those mentioned above, Guerra and his team have an easier time making a business case for WalkMe in conversations with the C-suite.

“At Schneider Electric, we are a data-driven company,” Guerra says.

“Everything needs to be justified, everything needs to be cost efficient, everything needs to be built on value.”

While this value can be measured in financial terms, he adds, it also extends to user satisfaction as this has a material impact on the level of churn among workers.

Guerra adds that Schneider Electric’s implementation of WalkMe is highly personalized, with tailored advice given according to role.

Through Active Directory, the system also provides onboarding advice with the user’s name and role embedded throughout the advice it gives. The same workflows allow WalkMe to provide the user with role-specific onboarding tasks to complete, in order to get to grips with Schneider Electric’s SaaS tools.

After staff complete a task using WalkMe in-app guidance, Schneider Electric prompts them to complete a survey, so they can detail what worked, what didn’t, and if they know better methods to achieve the same result.

This feedback is used to further tailor the advice that users need.

“If there are key users where they understand, they know and they don't necessarily need the whole walkthrough, we can also automate the experience for them, eliminating unnecessary clicks or filling out information from them,” Guerra says.

Schneider Electric is on a constant mission to improve its internal processes, through process mining and analytics, which it carries out using tools such as SAP Signavio.

Looking ahead, Schneider Electric is trialling how WalkMe Learning Arc, the firm’s AI-native learning offering, can help to automate and personalize training at scale.

Learning Arc will feed into the firm’s ‘UNIFY’ program, which Guerra explains will see it consolidate the disparate ERP systems it uses across its various factory and business sites under SAP S/4HANA.

Currently, Schneider Electric is using SAP Enable Now to create learning content and simulations to prepare users for SAP S/4HANA adoption. Guerra adds that the firm is in year two of the Unify program, with a six-year timeline planned.

The pilot will eventually encompass 50,000 users across Schneider Electric’s global operations, with the new real-time, AI-produced content from WalkMe Learning Arc delivered directly to users.