How Deloitte brought recognition for 200,000+ professionals under one roof

About Deloitte

Deloitte describes itself as the largest privately owned partnership in the world. Its two largest populations, in the United States and India, account for 200,000 professionals.

Recognition sits inside Deloitte’s broader talent architecture. The firm uses talent models to give different parts of the workforce different experiences, and every change in the talent organization is judged first by whether it improves the experience of Deloitte’s people.

The challenge

Before 2018, recognition at Deloitte meant cash awards. Between 2018 and 2019, the firm built its own nomination platform to handle workflows, approvals and budgets, and paired it with an outside vendor for electronic gift cards.

It worked, but much of the process ran on email, with manual steps from nomination through approval to payroll. The experience in the US and India was inconsistent, the gift card catalog was stronger in one country than the other, and employees were unsure which recognition categories were available to them.

When Deloitte moved its HRIS to SAP SuccessFactors, recognition was next. Before choosing a vendor, the team met with leaders, partners and managing directors across the firm to map every interface point the new platform would need to touch. From that work came four requirements:

• One roof: nominations, points and gift cards in a single integrated tool, not two vendors stitched together
• Differentiation by talent model, by country and by population, as the models evolve
• A better talent experience for the people giving recognition as well as those receiving it
• A simpler technology landscape, with fewer vendors outside the SAP ecosystem

The solution

Deloitte launched the Recognition Hub, powered by Semos Cloud, in June 2026. Employees reach it from a tile inside SuccessFactors and from Deloitte’s internal portal, with full mobile access and Deloitte’s own branding.

Three types of recognition now live on one landing page:

• Shout-outs. Non-monetary, open to everyone, and posted to a social wall on the landing page
• Applause awards. Points redeemed for electronic gift cards and experiences such as travel, with low-value spot awards that need no approval so they stay fast
• Outstanding performance awards. Monetary awards paid through payroll in dollars or rupees

Every award is tied to one of Deloitte’s five values. Behind the experience, eligibility, talent model, job level, approvals and individual budgets are all governed by rules built on SuccessFactors employee data. Each award is stored as a structured record of the giver, the receiver, the program, the value and the reason, and that record lives in SAP Business Data Cloud next to SuccessFactors organizational data and S/4HANA financial data. A two-way payroll integration handles taxation and cash-paid programs.

During implementation, Deloitte’s volume of approval delegation, for example from a leader to a chief of staff, turned out to be far higher than in any other deployment. Semos Cloud built dedicated delegation functionality for the go-live release.

The main reasons Deloitte chose Semos Cloud:

• One platform for every program, award category and company value
• Configuration that follows Deloitte’s talent models across countries and populations
• A solution that runs under the SAP umbrella, next to SuccessFactors
• Recognition data governed in SAP Business Data Cloud and connected to workforce KPIs in SAP Analytics Cloud
• Flexible approvals, budgets and delegation for a partnership structure

The results

Since go-live, adoption has set a new record in every month, with peer shout-outs and monetary awards growing together.

With the Recognition Hub, Deloitte has:

• Replaced a homegrown nomination tool and a separate gift card vendor with one platform
• Cut the nomination form from a page of drop-downs to a few clicks
• Given employees in India the same breadth of catalog options as their US colleagues
• Moved its quarterly leadership recognition report from manual PowerPoint to platform dashboards
• Kept support volume low, even at go-live

See how Deloitte did it. Peter DeMartin and Filip Misovski walk through the Recognition Hub, the old and new nomination experience, and four practical lessons from an enterprise rollout.

Watch the full session →

Why Semos Cloud?

Recognition becomes most valuable when its data can be trusted and connected. Semos Cloud runs natively on SAP BTP, so programs inherit the governance of your SAP landscape and the data sits beside the rest of your people and finance data.

Organizations choose Semos Cloud because it:

• Brings recognition, rewards and payroll-paid awards into one experience
• Adapts to complex structures, legal entities and talent models
• Integrates fully with SAP SuccessFactors, SAP S/4HANA and SAP Business Data Cloud
• Turns every award into governed data ready for analytics and AI