The situation
A manufacturing group operating in more than ninety countries, across three hundred plants, with forty thousand employees, and no global people platform. Not a fragmented one. None. Every country ran its own systems, its own processes, and its own definitions of what a hire was.
The organisation was decentralised by conviction rather than by accident. Local managing directors held real authority and had used it well for decades. Any proposal that read as head office imposing uniformity would have been correct on paper and dead on arrival.
The work
The first task was not a platform. It was a business case that had never been written, for an investment of €15 million, in an organisation with no precedent for a global people programme.
That meant building the argument in the language the board already used: capital allocation, operational risk, and the cost of not knowing how many people worked for you. It also meant designing the ledger before the programme existed, which included one measure the standard business case does not carry — what the organisation would still be able to do locally after go-live.
The case was approved at CEO level. It was the first global people platform in the company's history.
Then came Phase 0, which is where most of the value was created and none of it was visible. Before a single line of configuration, more than four hundred hire-to-retire processes were mapped, compared, and rationalised across the group. Not standardised. Rationalised. The distinction mattered: the question at every gate was whether a local variation existed because a market genuinely needed it or because nobody had ever asked.
Alongside it, a global HR digital solutions team was built from nothing — operating model, structure, governance framework, and a Global Process Owner model to hold the design after the programme ended.
What changed
An approved investment, a rationalised process estate, and a governance structure that survived the programme. Two adjacent platforms were also selected and delivered: a global learning platform that consolidated more than forty legacy systems, and a global applicant tracking system standardising twenty recruiting processes.
The fifth measure
The temptation in a decentralised group is to treat local variation as waste. Most of it is. Some of it is the reason a market works. Phase 0 existed to tell the difference before configuration made the decision for us.