How Bewel upskills 2,200+ workers with SAP SuccessFactors

Sep 16, 2025

people
operations
SAP
SuccessFactors

Bewel is a social employment organization with over 2,200 employees in the Belgian province of Limburg. Their goal? Helping employees grow while keeping daily operations running smoothly. To modernize their HR strategy, Liesbeth Gerits, Director HR and Organizational Development, teamed up with delaware. The new setup combines SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Datasphere, and our Growth Companion App, a custom competence app that we developed together with Bewel. It connects employee growth, coaching, and operational planning in a single, streamlined approach. (6-minute read)

Challenge

Aligning employee growth with operational needs and regulatory requirements.

Solution

With SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Datasphere, and our Growth Companion App, Bewel has centralized employee data and aligned workforce growth with business needs.

Results & video

Bewel gained real-time visibility into skills and compliance, enabling faster staffing, targeted training, and greater efficiency.

Watch the video

Challenge

To support employee growth in line with evolving production needs, Bewel needed a clearer, more unified way to plan and manage employee development. Additionally, Belgium’s Maatwerkdecreet requires Bewel to prepare a personal development plan for each employee, and review it annually.

But the reality on the ground wasn’t living up to the intent. “Upskilling our workers is essential to our mission,” says Liesbeth Gerits, Director HR and Organizational Development at Bewel. “However, creating these employee development plans had turned into a box-ticking exercise. We needed a system that actually helped people grow.”

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The existing process relied heavily on spreadsheets and supervisors’ personal judgment.
There was no integrated platform to track progress consistently. This made it difficult to ensure quality and nearly impossible to scale or demonstrate compliance.
Meanwhile, production requirements are becoming more complex. Matching the right people to the right tasks requires real-time insights into employee skills. Without that visibility, planning will always remain reactive instead of strategic.

Solution

Confronted with these challenges, Bewel recognized the need for a unified platform accessible to both HR and operations, allowing employee development data to directly inform staffing decisions. To address this, the team engaged delaware to help establish clear, practical guidelines for training and workplace learning.

With guidance from delaware’s experts, Bewel successfully implemented a customized HR technology landscape that effectively bridges the gap between legal requirements and everyday operational priorities.

At the core of the solution is SAP SuccessFactors, including the Employee Central, Performance & Goals Management and Learning Management modules. This platform provides the HR backbone Bewel needs to manage personnel data, performance cycles, and development initiatives in a centralized and auditable way.

In addition, SAP Datasphere seamlessly integrates HR and operational data, creating a dynamic, analytics-ready foundation. This integration unlocks enhanced opportunities for comprehensive reporting, strategic talent planning, and effective performance tracking throughout the organization.
Finally, delaware built a custom Competence App on SAP BTP, ‘the Growth companion App’. It’s designed for floor supervisors and lets them log skills and behaviors in real time, directly against Bewel’s own growth frameworks. Supervisors can now log development moments and track employee progress on the spot. Every data point feeds back into the matching individual’s growth profile within SuccessFactors.

Together, these tools make it easier to connect development planning with daily production needs. Moreover, HR, supervisors, and operations have access to the same view of employee capabilities: a key enabler for smarter staffing and targeted upskilling.

We wanted to make competence tracking as easy as checking your phone. With this solution, team leads no longer need to guess who’s ready for what. They see it, they log it, and they can act on it.

Liesbeth Gerits, Director HR and Organizational Development at Bewel

What did
we do?

Smart phasing for focused delivery

The project began with a series of hands-on workshops and a full demo of the SAP SuccessFactors suite. After aligning priorities, the teams agreed on a phased rollout. In Phase 1, Bewel launched Employee Central (EC), Performance & Goal Management (PMGM), a fully digital personnel file, and the custom Competence App - now up and running, supporting both HR and supervisors on the floor. Next up: activating the Learning module and enhancing reporting to get even more insight into development and planning.

Balancing ambition with pragmatism

Rather than chasing an all-in-one solution from the start, delaware advised Bewel to limit the scope of the Growth Companion App in v1. This ensured high usability and smoother adoption while building a robust foundation for future extensions, such as reporting or additional training modules.

Inside the Growth Companion App

One of the most impactful innovations of the Bewel project was the Growth Companion App, which was built on SAP BTP. Designed with non-desk workers in mind, this app allows team leads to easily assess competence levels, log on-the-job training moments, and feed data directly into the Talent Intelligence Hub in SAP SuccessFactors.

More than logging tasks, this approach helps line managers make better, faster decisions. Who can handle a specific machine? Who’s ready for a next step? This information is now readily available to everyone who needs it, when they need it, empowering them to take action.

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Results

While still in the early stages, it’s clear that the new setup makes Bewel’s HR processes far more efficient, while providing a complete digital overview of their workforce. Even in the early stages of deployment, Bewel has witnessed increased agility and accessibility in key HR processes. Managers are now equipped to make faster, data-driven decisions, moving beyond assumptions to informed actions. This has led to:

improved HR team collaboration across departments, thanks to pre-hire flows in Employee Central;
floor managers being able to log skills, training, and development moments in real time;
faster and more accurate allocation of skilled workers to production orders;
a clear view on capability gaps and upskilling priorities for leadership teams.

This structured and integrated approach has transformed employee development at Bewel. Supervisors are more engaged in nurturing talent, and employees get more focused support. As a result, the entire organization can adapt more quickly to changing needs. Moreover, the app not only helps ensure compliance but also empowers every employee to reach their full potential.

Bewel & delaware

At the heart of this project was a shared conviction: technology is only valuable when it serves people. From day one, delaware and Bewel worked as one team, grounded in mutual trust and a clear purpose. That purpose – supporting meaningful employment through smarter ways of working – guided every design decision, every workshop, and every milestone along the way.

“The project only worked because the focus stayed on people and their day-to-day work instead of just the technology,” says Kenny Gysemans, Project Lead at delaware. For Bewel, that mindset made the difference. “The trust and collaboration with delaware was key,” adds Liesbeth Gerits. “They helped us see beyond tooling, towards transformation.” It’s this kind of close, strategic and personal collaboration that turns ambition into lasting progress.