Viking Europe replaces Workday with Oracle HCM Cloud

Evosys Services: Workday to Oracle HCM Cloud Migration

Industry:Retail

About Viking

Viking is the leading provider of workplace products and services in Europe with around 1,500 employees. Pioneering the business lines of workplace innovation since 1960, the organisation currently supports customers in their transition towards developing workspaces and solutions dedicated to a greener, more sustainable future. Post its acquisition in November 2021, the company is now part of the RAJA Group, Europe's largest packaging distributor and a market leader for workplace supplies, equipment, packaging and solutions for a modern and future-proof organisation.

Project Summary

Viking Europe had been using the Workday solution for its HR-related operations for four years. They had also implemented Oracle Cloud Financials for their Order to Cash and Procure to Pay processes. Impressed by Oracle Cloud Applications' ease of use, agility, and reduced HR operating costs (by rationalising its IT estate), the organisation was keen to leverage the Oracle Cloud system to unify its business processes. Hence, they were avidly looking at the costs and timelines for their Workday to Oracle HCM Cloud migration.

We have decided to replace the Workday HCM functionalities for Core HR, Compensation, Benefits, Recruitment, Absence, Learn and Talent with Oracle HCM functionalities, because it offers our employees and managers a better customer experience and simplified our processes to have HCM functionalities in our ERP solution, whilst at the same time have a more cost-efficient solution in place.

Evosys supported us in a very professional and customer friendly way throughout the complete journey.

Sandra Vogels
HR Director, Viking

Highlights

The solution was spread across eight countries (the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Romania, Germany, Austria, Ireland, Switzerland, and Belgium) and benefitting 1500+ Viking employees.
The Oracle HCM Cloud implementation included Global HR, Absence, Benefits, Recruiting, Learning, Talent & Performance Management, Talent Review, and Compensation modules.
The go-live was achieved in 2 phases and a combined timeline of 50 weeks. 13+ legal entities were synchronised and over 10,000 data records migrated for this.

Business Challenges

Workday's solution was less user-friendly for employees and managers. It was also not synchronised with their ERP solution, thus reducing the overall business benefits.

Unsynchronised ERP and HCM solutions led to miscommunication and overall inefficiency within the systems.
Inefficient reporting led to a fogged organisational view.
Employees had to use multiple systems for example to request absence, claim expenses and create a purchase order.
Most importantly, the Workday solution was nearing its expiration, thus, they needed to migrate to a new system before the license expired.

Implementation Approach

The plans and activities were aligned to meet the tight deadlines and included process assessment that was more business focused.
Identifying the key gaps in their legacy ERP system at an early stage helped us as well as Viking to gain significant time to make decisions and strategise workflow.
Separate entities were created to avoid data errors and allow easy data adaptation.
Data cleansing was done to ensure accurate, seamless, and efficient data migration.
A rigorous UAT plan was followed using SpiraTest. 600+ simultaneous test cases ensured effective and timely debugging, leading to timely UAT closures.
Viking also opted for AES (Application Enhancement Services), Evosys' Oracle Cloud Managed Services, to drive their business efficiency and unlock the true potential of their Oracle Cloud investment.

Business Benefits

One of the prime objectives for Viking for their Workday to Oracle Cloud transformation was to develop and expand HR’s role as a proactive business partner.

Aligned to their transformation goals, this migration enabled the HR team from Viking to grow and focus on strategic initiatives. Below are the direct business benefits that the organisation achieved:

Due to the appropriate training provided to the end-users, the business had an easy transition during the Go-Live phase.
A single source of truth for all global HR records empowered the organisation with greater transparency and employee experience.
It empowered the HR team to effectively respond to business needs and rapidly deliver global employee data insights with lowered operational costs.
As both ERP and HCM were now on Oracle cloud, it significantly reduced the synchronisation overheads spent on them.
User-friendly Oracle HCM solutions with strong reporting capabilities helped the client gain higher levels of visibility into their workforce performance and productivity.
As a flexible and robust solution, it enabled the company to support global recruiting, providing transparency and clarity in terms of business processes.
Given the self-service capabilities of the Oracle HCM Cloud, the solution made it easier for their employees to access and manage information related to their employment.

Value Addition by Evosys

As the preferred Oracle partner from Viking, Evosys developed a set of templates, before starting the project, to understand the current Workday system. Adopting a lean development strategy, no requirement gathering was needed. Rather, the processes and policies were directly converted from Workday to the Oracle HCM Cloud solution, which helped the customer save on time and costs.
All the configurations for the post-design phase were done via standard migration tools, reducing 40% of the configuration timeline.
We cleansed the data in the AD of Viking, existing HR, and Finance as the existing employee data was in disarray.
As we offered high availability and constant communication options to the client, all the deliverables were on time, with 100% effectiveness and accuracy.
We eliminated the terminology gaps, to help them stay abreast of the developments.
We ensured that the deadlines were never missed in terms of the required SLAs and, hence, the solution went live in 30 weeks as planned.

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Viking Europe, part of RAJA Group, migrates from Workday to Oracle HCM Cloud for Unified Cloud Applications across 8 European Countries