Weeks, not months: how Chiesi rebuilt the foundation for its workforce transformation

Business context: an AI agenda with nowhere to land

Boards are investing heavily in AI and asking where the return is. Much of the answer sits inside the workforce. Work is being redesigned in every function, but until that new work is captured in roles, levels and skills, it has nowhere to land. Pilots stay pilots.

The structure it should land in is the job architecture. In most organisations, that architecture is years out of date. Chiesi employs around 7,900 people across 31 countries from its base in Parma, and had already invested in skills intelligence and in SAP SuccessFactors Talent Intelligence Hub. The foundation underneath those investments was the gate.

Challenges: a grading structure where a job architecture should be

• Job titles and grades, not a job architecture. Chiesi had both. What it lacked was an architecture detailed enough to build on.
• No link between the work and the record. The structure did not reflect the work individual people were doing day to day.
• Skills had nothing to attach to. Without the granular work captured, and without consistent job descriptions, skills could not be reliably attached to roles. That put the value of the skills intelligence investment, and of Talent Intelligence Hub, on hold.

We were missing a real connection between the work that each person was doing and how this was captured in our Job Architecture."
— Marco Camin, Head of people tech & insights at Chiesi

How we helped: redesigning from the ground up

Instead of fitting Chiesi into a generic template, the work started from what already existed. Every position title linked to a job went into the Job Architecture Redesign Agent. The Agent analysed the work behind those titles and grouped it into job roles representing distinct skill profiles. Seniority was then applied using Chiesi's levelling framework from WTW.

Chiesi's team stayed in control throughout. The Agent drafted, the team reviewed and decided.

The result was a structurally redesigned job architecture, a new level-aware job description for every job in it, and job titles and employees remapped to the new roles.

Our mutual partner, TalenTeam, configured SAP SuccessFactors alongside the redesign and brought the new architecture live in SAP Job Profile Builder.

Outcomes: weeks, not months

We completed the redesign in a matter of weeks, including the remapping of job titles and employees and uploading it into SAP Job Profile Builder. Without the Agent it would have been far more complex, and it would have taken months."
— Letizia Gasparre, VP Global Talent at Chiesi

Speed is only half of the story. Because the architecture was built from the work people actually do, business stakeholders could recognise their own roles in it. That made validation far easier: instead of debating an abstract model, leaders were checking whether the structure reflected their teams, and it did.

What it unlocks

Chiesi now has a single source of truth for how roles, work and skills change with AI.

It also changes the shelf life of the architecture. Job architectures typically go untouched for years while the organisation reorganises around them. Because this one was built with the Job Architecture Redesign Agent, it can be maintained as roles change, instead of waiting for the next big project.

That is the difference between redesigning work on paper and making it real.