Case Study

How UST enhanced Workday at a global management consulting firm to streamline acquired-employee onboarding

When the HR team at a multinational consulting firm struggled to manage acquired-employee populations in Workday, the company turned to UST to overcome its challenges. Process automations in Workday enabled the HR team to easily onboard employees in an interim capacity and exclude them from HR functions during the acquisition. The exclusion process—which used to take many people and coordination with third-party vendors—can now be handled by one person.

CLIENT

Founded more than 50 years ago, this global management consulting firm works with an impressive roster of international businesses, financial organizations, non-profits, and innovative start-ups. The company employs approximately 20,000 people and is continually ranked as one of the best places to work by many different media and industry organizations. Offering a wide range of consulting services, including strategy, marketing, technology, and sustainability, the company operates in more than 35 countries around the world.

CHALLENGE

Segmenting and managing acquired employees in Workday

When acquiring business entities, the company’s HR team struggled to manage new employee populations in its existing Workday application. While acquired workers could easily be added to Workday when an acquisition commences, these people can’t be onboarded to key HR functions, like benefits plans, pay scales, and vacation schedules until an acquisition is complete, which could take 30 days to an entire year. Therefore, the HR team had to manually exclude the employee group from these HR processes. This tedious process pulled many people from different teams from their core work and often involved third-party entities. The manual nature of the exclusion process also posed significant risks of human error. Since the company typically acquired several businesses every year, this cumbersome process was not sustainable long-term. The HR team needed to implement a reliable, efficient, repeatable HR process automation within its Workday solution to easily manage populations of acquired employees.

TRANSFORMATION

Enhancing Workday to streamline HR onboarding for acquired companies

UST enhanced the company’s Workday application to meet its unique acquired-company integration needs. By creating a single organizational structure for the acquired employees, the HR team can easily exclude the workers from benefit plans, pay scales, paid time off plans, and other key HR functions. Once an acquisition is complete, the worker population can be quickly added to the core organizational hierarchy. The scalable solution allows the HR team to manage multiple acquired-employee groups at once, ranging from dozens to thousands of people. This Workday configuration eliminated the manual tasks and human error risks to manage acquired-employee populations, significantly boosting operational efficiencies.

IMPACT

Digital transformation eliminated manual efforts and increased productivity

This Workday enhancement was a game-changer for the company’s HR team. Now, one person can manage the initial acquired-employee onboarding and HR function exclusion process in a fraction of the time it took before—a task that previously required multiple people from many different internal teams as well as coordination with third-party HR vendors. This massive productivity boost keeps people focused on their core, strategic work versus being pulled into a special onboarding project with every acquisition. The HR team now has the streamlined, automated, reliable process it needs to function at peak performance.

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RESOURCES

https://www.ust.com/en/insights/workday-skill-development-innovation

https://www.ust.com/en/insights/ust-workday-squad-support-for-market-research-firm-cuts-costs-boosts-hris-efficiency

https://www.ust.com/en/who-we-are/ust-newsroom/ust-named-a-workday-services-deployment-partner