Case study

As the popular business adage goes, a company is only as good as its people. That’s certainly true for Capita, a UK headquartered consulting, transformation and digital services company, which has 58,000 employees around the globe, many of whom work with companies to digitally transform their operations. Over the last two decades, Capita has grown rapidly, through a combination of acquisitions and large scale client contracts. While that has been good news for revenues, it’s made tracking human-resource-related data and providing better employee experiences increasingly challenging.

Despite every acquisition being brought under the Capita banner, each business continued to use its existing processes and human capital software to manage its people. Having so many disparate systems and processes was really inefficient, says Steven Raymond, Capita’s Director of people transformation. For example, it took days of combing through different systems to just figure out how many people worked at the company at any point in time. It was also difficult to manage and plan for other HR activities, such as forecasting recruitment activities or determining how much it was spending on external staffing vendors. “Everything was being managed in different places and in different ways,” says Raymond.

In 2018, Capita decided it needed to fundamentally transform its people function across all areas of HR. One of the key elements of this transformation was to centralise its systems under one human capital management (HCM) solution. However, it needed to do more than implement new technology – it needed to completely redesign its human resource processes and capabilities. It wanted to standardise its hiring process, better understand its workforce, increase diversity and more. While it chose Workday as its new HCM platform, it enlisted PwC not only to assist with the implementation of the system but to also help it develop a set of best-in-class processes. “The first thing we needed help with was imagining what an efficient end-to-end process would look like,” says Raymond. “Then we could go to our colleagues and say, ‘why can’t we all move towards a standardised set of processes?’”

In December 2019, Capita deployed Workday to nearly all of its employees and completed the rollout in August of 2020 to its German employees with the support of PwC. It now has much more insight into its workforce, it’s collecting key human capital data to continuously improve and it’s running a far more efficient and centralised HR operation. That’s allowed Capita to reduce its HR costs and external spend by over £10 million annually.

The Challenge: creating a simplified solution

After years of acquisitions, Capita found itself using several disparate HR systems across its various lines of business. It wanted to transition to a single solution – Workday – which would allow the company’s executives to gain much more visibility into the workforce and ultimately, help them provide better employee experiences.

While getting more than 58,000 employees onto a new platform is a challenge of its own, it didn’t want to simply implement new technology. Capita had to reimagine its HR processes and develop new and more simplified end-to-end solutions that suited its ever-expanding international operation. “Our mantra at Capita is ‘simplify, strengthen and succeed’,” says Raymond. “We needed to simplify how we do things in the HR space.”

The Approach: building trust – and relationships

A full-scale revamp of processes and technologies requires developing a strong business objective, which can then inform what tools and structures to put in place. PwC, which implemented Workday into its own business a few years earlier, helped lead that process.

“Its first job was to listen, build relationships and understand the broader organisation’s needs – beyond its HR requirements,” says Para Chandrasekera, HR Technology senior manager at PwC UK. It engaged Capita in what it calls a ‘readiness phase,’ where it could learn more about the business. “We had to understand its background, issues, vision and what it wanted to achieve,” he explains.

They took that information into the design phase, building out processes that would help Capita better manage various functions, from day-to-day workforce management, onboarding, benefits, learning, reporting and absence management. “It was an iterative process,” says Chandrasekera. “We had a number of prototypes and there were other workstreams, too, like getting data from their existing systems.”

As for Capita, once it identified the processes that needed to change, it had to convince its HR staff to follow along. To do that, it put 170 people together in a room and said, “give us a really good reason why you can’t help your business use this process,” says Raymond. Fortunately, everyone was on board. “We just said, ‘Imagine if you could get access to data that tells you what’s going on in the business – that you could actually get people to log information that could help us understand attrition or get on top of resourcing.’ There was a real buy into what we were trying to do.”

The company also decided to set up an office in Mumbai that would be responsible for handling Workday inquiries from its tens of thousands of employees and HR administration. Nearly 170 people work out of that office and do everything from running payroll, processing data updates, handling employee filings and answering questions by phone or email. Another 50 people do recruitment administration for recruiters and also manage the company’s learning catalogue. “Our People Hub team in Mumbai are such a great group of people to work with, we had full confidence that we would successfully deliver on our objectives”.

When it comes down to it, the transformation was successful because PwC and Capita ensured there was clear communication and trust between both sides. Getting to that point required Capita to build a strong internal team that knew the project inside and out and could work closely with PwC. “It was as important to have a strong internal team as it was to have the PwC team,” says Raymond. “There was always this healthy tension among the team to try and find the best possible solutions.”

The Impact: significant savings and streamlined systems

In December 2019, Capita rolled out Workday to nearly all of its employees. In a matter of weeks, most of its staff were using the platform – 85% of its employees log into Workday every month – and because its HR function is now far more streamlined through its transformation, it’s now expected to save about £10 million per year.

Jeremy Lief, HR transformation and technology consulting leader and partner at PwC UK, says the company is now making more informed judgments about its employees, while the data it’s collecting is more detailed than ever before. “They can make decisions about their workforce more efficiently and more reliably, while the depth of their data is much improved,” he says.

While the transformation isn’t finished, Capita now has streamlined and standardised processes that will help it grow even more in the future. Raymond chalks the success of the programme up to one thing: people. “Change like this doesn’t just happen,” he says. “You need the right partners and buy-in from leadership, but nearly 400 people within Capita worked for many hours in the background to bring the business together on this transformation. It always comes down to people.”