The situation
A technology business that had grown faster than its infrastructure. Thirty-four thousand employees and contingent workers across more than two hundred markets, an HR operations budget of roughly €30 million a year, and an operating model that had been improvised at every stage of the growth curve because there had never been time to design one.
Hypergrowth organisations accumulate a particular kind of debt. Every process was correct when it was written, for a company a third of the size, and nobody had authority to retire it.
The work
A global Workday deployment across the full population and every market, run alongside the operation rather than instead of it. The programme could not pause HR while it rebuilt HR.
Three things ran in parallel with the deployment. A People Analytics capability was built from scratch — function, tooling, and reporting cadence — so that the data the platform produced had somewhere to go and someone accountable for reading it. Robotic process automation and chatbot deployment took volume out of the operation, which mattered because deployment years are when transactional load peaks and teams burn out. And GDPR and SOX controls were established across every HR process and data flow, which in a business at that scale is not a compliance exercise but a design constraint on the whole platform.
Twenty-plus touchpoints on the manager and employee journey were redesigned during the same period, along with the programme delivery, communications and change management capability the organisation would need for everything that came after.
What changed
A single global platform across two hundred markets, an analytics function that had not existed, and a materially lighter transactional load on the operation carrying it.
The fifth measure
The risk in a deployment this size is that the organisation emerges technically current and operationally exhausted, having spent eighteen months learning a system instead of running a business. Automating the transactional floor before go-live was not an efficiency measure. It was how the team still had capacity left on the other side.