The situation
The client — a major US educational products and services company operating both retail (bookstores) and manufacturing operations (textbook distribution, educational materials production) — had engaged another vendor to implement UKG Workforce Central. The implementation had stalled. The scope was substantial: UKG across thousands of employees spread across retail locations, distribution centers, and manufacturing facilities, with the added complexity of deploying UKG’s Advanced Retail Scheduling tool on top of the core workforce management platform.
When implementations stall, the problem is rarely the software. It’s the gap between what the vendor’s standard methodology can produce and what the client’s actual operational reality requires. The first consulting firm hit that gap and couldn’t bridge it. The client needed a partner who could look at the existing work, understand what had been attempted, and figure out how to make the implementation actually deliver.
How we approached it
We took over the implementation with a clear mandate: complete what had been started, deliver the capabilities the client had originally contracted for, and do it in a way that would actually work for their operations — not just technically go live.
Our scope covered:
- UKG Workforce Central deployment across the client’s full operational footprint — retail bookstore locations, distribution operations, and manufacturing facilities
- Advanced Retail Scheduling — UKG’s premium scheduling tool for retail operations, which handles the specific complexities of retail staffing (demand-driven scheduling, availability constraints, skill matching, compliance with predictive scheduling laws in certain jurisdictions)
- Dual-operation configuration — retail workers and manufacturing/distribution workers operate on fundamentally different patterns. Retail scheduling is demand-driven and variable; manufacturing is shift-based and predictable. Both had to be handled correctly in the same UKG instance
- Recovery of the prior implementation work — salvaging what was usable, rebuilding what wasn’t, and moving forward with a methodology that matched how the client actually operated
Why rescue engagements are different
A rescue engagement isn’t a fresh implementation with extra steps. It’s a different kind of project. The client has lost trust in consultants generally, is often over budget from the failed prior work, and is under executive pressure to show results quickly. The technical work has to be excellent, and the relationship work has to be equally excellent. Every small decision either rebuilds trust or erodes it further.
Our approach was grounded in the principle that clients know their business better than software vendors. The prior implementation had struggled in part because it was trying to force the client’s retail and manufacturing operations into a standard template. We built the configuration around how the client actually ran their operations — variable retail scheduling here, shift-based manufacturing patterns there, and Advanced Retail Scheduling tuned to the specific demand patterns of educational retail.
Outcome
- UKG Workforce Central live across the client’s retail and manufacturing operations
- Advanced Retail Scheduling deployed successfully — delivering the premium scheduling capability the client had contracted for
- Dual-operation configuration working reliably — retail and manufacturing workforce patterns both handled cleanly in the same instance
- A stalled implementation delivered — the project got over the line that the prior firm couldn’t cross
What this demonstrates
Rescue-engagement capability: the ability to take over a stalled implementation and actually deliver it. Advanced Retail Scheduling expertise, which is non-trivial and not widely available in the UKG consulting market. Dual-operation configuration across retail and manufacturing workforce patterns — a genuinely complex operational challenge. And the relationship intelligence that rescue engagements require: rebuilding client trust while delivering the technical outcomes they had been promised originally.