Case study: White Cap driving efficiencies through payroll standardisation and simplification with Workday

Strada help white cap improve efficiency with payroll standardization

Challenges faced

The challenge for White Cap was twofold. Not only did they need to establish operations in becoming a new organisation, but the current HR technology landscape and lack of payroll standardisation was disparate with several different systems including Kronos, PeopleSoft, HRMS, VIBE (CSG) and multiple spreadsheets.

White Cap had important goals in establishing the HCM solution for their new organisation:

Standing up the solution to exit the Transition Services Agreement (TSA) with their former owner on time Creating a strong employee experience for the new organisation by streamlining technology Establishing the framework and nimbleness for future MA activity

Being successful in these goals would allow them to reduce operational risk, improve productivity and support organisational growth objectives.

Because of Strada’s guidance and expertise, we were able to build things into Workday that White Cap didn’t even know was possible.

Ajay Patel
Senior Director, Talent Acquisition, HR Planning and Operations

Our partnership

White Cap’s parent company was already midway through deploying Workday when the divestiture took place. Since the deployment was underway, Strada already had a deep understanding of the company’s processes and operations and a strong relationship with the White Cap team. This helped Strada to partner with the HR team in the early stages of divestiture to review how best to approach the separation of the HR function and which elements of the existing Workday deployment project could be leveraged.

Payroll standardisation

After careful consideration the team chose to clone a copy of the Workday tenant currently in deployment which would simplify the approach. This enabled White Cap to proceed from the point of cloning to configure the deployment for their needs — and proceed faster — while also allowing the parent company to continue their own deployment path. Post-clone, Strada completed the deployment for both organisations in parallel.

Immediately after deploying Workday for the White Cap population, the CSG population was converted into the White Cap tenant concurrent with the deployment of several additional Workday SKUs.

By partnering with Strada to deploy Workday, White Cap now has a single system of truth for their entire global workforce and the core foundation for success both now and long term. Not only did the project help to drive efficiencies through standardisation and simplification, but the timely delivery also meant White Cap could complete the TSAs on time without the need for extension, avoiding over $100k of costs.

Workday solutions

  • HCM
  • Compensation and Advanced Compensation
  • US and Canadian Payroll
  • Recruiting
  • Learning
  • Time Tracking

We would not have been able to adopt Workday without Strada — every bit of what White Cap has adopted in Workday is because of the recommendations from Strada based on how well they know us and the Workday technology. They provided insight on capabilities and gaps with our current processes and working as partners through the deployment allowed White Cap to address these process gaps.

Ajay Patel
Senior Director, Talent Acquisition, HR Planning and Operations

Ongoing support

White Cap knew that go-live was just the start of their journey and having access to a team of Workday experts as well as a trusted advisor post deployment was very important to them. To leverage Workday expertise and enable focus on supporting business and HR objectives, White Cap therefore continued their partnership with Strada for Workday Optimisation, Workday Release Management and Managed Payroll services.

The HR team is already realising the benefits of Strada’s continued partnership with the deployment of resources in other areas of the business with value added roles such as talent acquisition and MA. In addition, from knowledge transfer provided by Strada both during deployment as well as in quarterly governance forums, White Cap’s HR/IT is moving towards self-sustaining in the long-term. The team is also looking forward to approaching their first Workday release with the support of a partner, saving them time while also ensuring more of Workday’s innovation is adopted by the company.

Strada services

  • Workday Deployment
  • Workday Optimisation
  • Workday Release Management
  • Payroll Services
  • Data Quality Management (DQM)

Strada also helped to reduce the operational risk in payroll by converting and standardising payroll delivery for the companies acquired by White Cap since becoming its own company, while also future proofing payroll operations for future acquisitions by developing an acquisition playbook framework.

Strada provided expertise of the Workday platform and used this as a catalyst to share process advice and improvements within functional areas providing options and best practices for us to consider. This was critical to our success with Workday.

Ajay Patel
Senior Director, Talent Acquisition, HR Planning and Operations

The results

The successful delivery of Workday enabled White Cap to effectively separate operations and become their own company and quickly incorporate future acquisitions.

The number of HR platforms was reduced from 9 to 1 and after several acquisitions, all payroll platforms and operations are consolidated with Strada fully managing payroll operations.

By using Workday Recruiting and Workday Learning, the recruitment and learning teams now have a solid foundation for hiring and training talent across the organisation.

Workday Payroll’s automatic tax deductions reduce risk of payroll and compliance errors and corporate compliance is now standardised within Workday.

A single consolidated platform enables rapid onboarding of acquisitions, further mitigating acquisition risk.

Strada help white cap improve efficiency with payroll standardisation

User satisfaction increased

Employees no longer require access to multiple platforms with multiple logins. White Cap now has confidence that their processes are standardised across their entire organisation, and optimised for maximum efficiency providing an enhanced user experience

Employees are now using a modern, mobile enabled, personalised technology that makes solving their HR needs a more engaging people experience

Paper-based processes such as merit planning and compensation planning have been removed with more paper-process replacements possible as the team’s confidence with Workday grows.

Significant improvements in reporting and analytics capabilities

With Workday Optimisation Services, business problems are solved quickly and velocity of business operations is much faster

Using Strada’s guidance, White Cap was able to adopt more features and functionality than they realised was possible. This included the ability to automate actions within Workday, saving time and driving efficiencies

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