For over 5,000 employees in Eurobank, based in Athens, Greece, each working day begins with an important action to ensure the organization’s compliance with local labor legislation: they clock in on a personalized application powered by the SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking solution.

Eurobank is one of Greece’s largest employers, numbering approximately 6,500 employees and one of the four leading banks in the country, with €81.5 billion in total assets under management and 500 office locations throughout Greece. In addition, it has 2,200 employees based at 120 sites in Luxembourg, Cyprus, Serbia, Bulgaria, and the UK.

As a leading employer in Greece’s banking industry, Eurobank provides its employees with a simple, modern method to accurately track their working hours. This not only ensures that employees are paid correctly but also helps the bank comply with strict new laws that require all clocked hours to be transmitted in real time to the Greek Ministry of Labor.

“We had to combine the strict legislation requirements along with a seamless and flexible work experience that we want to provide as an organization. We had to be very smart about this and we needed to do it fast,” says Maria Tachataki, head of People Engagement and Communications at Eurobank and leader of the SAP SuccessFactors solution implementation team. “We achieved this using SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking in conjunction with SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) in order to create that flexibility and achieve external connectivity.”

New Law Puts Labor on the Clock

In 2021, the Greek government enacted labor law 4808/2021, which requires organizations with more than 250 employees to provide daily “live” monitoring of their employees’ work schedules, shift planning, and overtime. The introduction of a Digital Work Card means employers need to connect their time tracking system directly to the Ministry of Labor’s ERGANI II IT platform for real-time updates to ensure compliance with rules around the maximum weekly working time and minimum daily and weekly rest periods for employees.

SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking enables Eurobank to maintain compliance with the new regulation – especially important as penalties can exceed €10,000 per employee.

“Compliance is a reality of modern business. Eurobank demonstrates its leadership in this area with an innovative approach for advanced and sophisticated employee time tracking,” comments Andreas Xirocostas, managing director, SAP Greece, Cyprus, and Malta. “As laws and regulations evolve, it’s increasingly important for companies to have accurate data to meet compliance requirements. Companies that have visibility into their employee data will be best positioned to adapt to new regulatory directives.”

Unified HXM Suite for a Live and Interactive Experience

Since 2018, Eurobank has been using SAP SuccessFactors solutions as its core HRMS for all HR processes and talent management operations. The bank has recently also introduced SAP BTP as a solution for agility to help innovate and adapt to evolving business needs.

Harnessing the power of SAP SuccessFactors Human Experience Management (HXM) Suitehas enabled Eurobank to deliver an inspiring employee experience and empower employees with tools to improve their daily work. With its people-first approach, Eurobank has achieved impressive milestones for employee engagement among its active SAP SuccessFactors users, including more than 775,000 training hours logged and 13,000 performance assessment forms completed. By utilizing 124 interfaces or APIs, the SAP SuccessFactors portfolio can effectively integrate data with other Eurobank IT systems and applications.

“It’s a very live and interactive experience for our employees, and time tracking with digital punch clocks is the cherry on top,” Tachataki says. “Since we had the entire suite of SAP SuccessFactors, implementing the time tracking solution was an obvious choice.”

Learn more about how Eurobank puts people at the center of business with SAP SuccessFactors solutions.

Prioritizing Data Accuracy, Integration, and Employee Experience

Most importantly for Eurobank, the new time tracking solution needed to be reliable, accurate, and seamlessly integrated with other HR processes. The bank required a high level of data accuracy to comply with Greek law and perform payroll processing on a third-party system.

“We are in the process of digitizing a lot of our workflows and a lot of our systems and services in the bank,” says Tachataki, who underscores the attention given to ensuring an employee experience that accommodates shift work, remote work, and preapproved overtime and flex time – in addition to providing seamless work schedule management and optimization. “We wanted to go to a modern platform where we could give both the employee and the manager the ability to manage their schedule much more efficiently and transparently.”

The HR administrator’s experience also needed to be streamlined for efficiency and to reduce administrative burdens. “We wanted it to be simple,” Tachataki says. “We wanted to have reporting and analytics based on that to support decision-making processes.”

Change Management for Employees Enhances Success

Eurobank went live with SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking in January 2023, concluding a six-month project that included an intensive blueprint phase and near-daily interactions with the Ministry of Labor. Working within SAP BTP, the IT team customized an interface to the solution, so the data collection adhered precisely to the requirements of Greek law. Altogether, the team developed 28 interfaces to facilitate the data exchange with the ERGANI II system.

Clear communication to the employees was an important contributing factor to the project’s success. “We provided a lot of training and support before we went live,” says Tachataki. “We went through a change management pathway with our employees to allow them time to adapt to this new reality. We continue to improve the module through the SAP upgrades and through our own intuitive creativity with the platform’s abilities.”

When employees clock in or clock out in SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking, they see a clean, simplified user interface that facilitates quick action. They have an overview of their schedule – including flex time, approved overtime, and estimated leave time.

“The amazing results that Eurobank has achieved by using SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking for compliance show why agility is the watchword in business today,” says Maryann Abbajay, chief revenue officer, SAP SuccessFactors. “When faced with new legal requirements, Eurobank reached into the SAP SuccessFactors tool kit and adapted a solution to meet compliance – and it did it while keeping employee experience in focus.”

Truth in Data

As a result of providing an empowered employee experience through self-service, Eurobank logs over 5,000 clock-ins and clock-outs per day. SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking supports the company to make 131,000 API calls to the Ministry of Labor’s ERGANI II system each month.

Despite a high level of employee engagement, Eurobank is realistic that it is not possible to have 100% daily compliance among 6,500 employees, and some discrepancies have had to be clarified. Fortunately, this is an area where SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking supports the organization with data accuracy and transparency. “The point is to have a managed inconsistency,” says Tachataki, who explains, “If there is an inconsistency, you need to be able to justify it so you don’t get fined and have a system that very accurately logs employees’ clock-ins and -outs and supports your case. SAP SuccessFactors can help us do this.”