Removing HR complexity
At this time, Centrica was using two separate instances of SAP, one in the United Kingdom and one in North America. As they began to truly globalise their organisation, the disconnected HR systems, and related costs led to frustrations amongst the leadership team and Centrica due to HR complexity made the decision to move to Workday as their core HR platform. Joint discovery sessions were held between Centrica and Strada Solutions, driving global process standardisation and harmonisation.
Centrica’s HR technology really didn’t give our people the kind of first class, user experience we were developing for our customers, they deserved better.
Rob Cook
Vice President of HR Technology Centrica
Centrica’s needs
- Looking to implement a fully integrated, mobile ready, people management platform that could be delivered through lean cloud technology.
- Vision to create the best in market employee experience by transforming all associated people processes to adopt simple, standardised, global templates to enable significant business efficiencies.
- Visibility into and reduction of cost to serve after realising their support costs were considerable.
- Improve data quality so employees could analyse and act on readily available data more efficiently.
- Expedite time to hire.
- Simple, integrated technology and vendor landscape.
- 24/7 connected and empowered employees.
Challenges associated with HR complexity
Centrica’s current HR and payroll systems, processes and operations were extremely complex including:
- 23 systems: 5 HR, 7 payroll and 11 time-recording systems in place.
- 355 templates: 175 different employee contract templates and 180 offer letter templates.
- Few using self-service: Only 6% of all HR requests in North America were submitted through self-service.
- 20,000 monthly emails: Over 20,000 HR operations emails distributed monthly in both the UK and North America.
- Significant restructuring following Centrica’s strategic review added an extra layer of complexity to the project.
- Centrica was the first global deployment of Workday and HR Services since Strada Solutions acquired Kloud in 2015.
- Large scale deployment required the development of over 80 integrations, including a complex bidirectional integration with all of the existing SAP Payroll systems in the United Kingdom and North America.
- Strada Solutions needed a strict programme governance to be upheld, in order to ensure all security and risk requirements were met.
- Deploying a ‘big-bang’ approach is always a potential risk, as deploying all software modules within Workday across the whole company on the same day leaves zero room for error.
Services provided
- Application of Strada Solutions standard methodology, leveraging our experience of deploying and operating for other organisations.
- Discovery sessions ultimately driving global process definition.
- Workday change and test management.
- Operating procedure preparation for the Strada Solutions ongoing delivery team.
- 12 month ‘big bang’ deployment of global Workday functionality with future phases planned to cover payroll, benefits and learning.
- Configuration of HCM, benefits, talent, absence, compensation, recruiting, time, expenses, integrations, data conversion and reporting.
- Development and deployment of over 80 integrations in and out of Workday.
- Workday developed interface to link into SAP Payroll systems for payroll in the United Kingdom and North America.
We’re looking forward to continuing our long standing partnership with Centrica and the next phase of their journey.
Dave Portsmouth
Director HR and Financial Solutions EMEA Strada Solutions
Results
- 37,000 global employees, and 12,000 contingent workers in 6 countries, including the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Canada, Ireland, Norway and the Netherlands.
- Single, largest global transformation in Centrica history and the first ever Centrica system deployable on personal devices.
- Strada Solutions + Workday provided a high impact, innovative and targeted change that leveraged an extensive change network while successfully competing for attention in a crowded airspace.
- For the first time, Centrica is able to see a single overview of its permanent and contract staff, allowing managers to keep a tighter control on costs.
- Employees are averaging significantly higher HR transactions per day, with most accessing the HR system over mobile devices.
- Significant cost savings in technology after eliminating over 30 HR and IT systems used for managing Centrica’s workforce.