Caribou Coffee Brews Succession Management Strategy with SuccessFactors

Company Uses Talent Management Software to Retain Top Performers, Increase Employee Engagement and Facilitate Development Planning

SuccessFactors, Inc., a global leader in on-demand performance and talent management solutions, has announced that Caribou Coffee is using SuccessFactors Succession Management software to better align its human resource strategy with overall business goals by retaining top talent, increasing employee engagement and facilitating development planning.

Caribou Coffee, founded in 1992, is the second-largest company-owned gourmet coffeehouse operator in the world based on number of coffeehouses. In the last few years, Caribou Coffee has been rapidly expanding. Yet, as with most restaurant businesses, the company had to find a solution to address talent gaps, bench strength development and better plan for sustained company growth. Leveraging SuccessFactors Succession Management, Caribou Coffee is creating a better process to harvest their talent internally and identify employee leadership strengths and areas for future opportunities.

Using SuccessFactors to drive a company-wide succession planning strategy, Caribou Coffee has been able to create better success metrics in terms of aligning employee development with business goals and better chart the course of the company's succession plan. Caribou Coffee can now address and allot resources to see if they are losing critical talent and put plans in place to prevent attrition from happening in the future.

"Moving from our prior homegrown, paper-based succession process to SuccessFactors has given us a better method to identify and assess our talent," said Shelly M. Gagen, director of management development, Caribou Coffee. "Using SuccessFactors, we are now able to look at talent management through an entirely new lens that gives us the insight to create new ways to retain our top talent and incorporate this into our larger business strategy."

Caribou Coffee chose SuccessFactors because it provided a "cafeteria-style" offering of modules, from Performance Management to Compensation Management, that the company could grow into and roll out over time. SuccessFactors also gave Caribou Coffee the ability to make the succession process more objective in nature and was able to "calibrate" the language to make it more standardized across the company.

"Caribou Coffee is a great example of a company driving the strategy of its business by aligning employee development with business goals," said Lars Dalgaard, president, founder and chief executive officer for SuccessFactors. "SuccessFactors helps to ensure that their population of employees is the best they can be, which in turn will help drive more sales, better service and more engaged employees."

The SuccessFactors Performance and Talent Management Suite, which includes Performance Management, Goal Management, 360 Degree Reviews, Succession Management, Compensation Management, Learning and Development, Recruiting Management, Employee Profile, and Analytics and Reporting applications, creates a company-wide network of information related to employee performance, including skill-sets, interests, career aspirations, ability to relocate, experience, languages spoken and more. By providing deep, real-time, company-wide visibility into such critical performance data, companies are able to make better, more informed decisions about how to promote, recruit, compensate, reward and manage their entire employee base.