The situation
The client — a major research-based pharmaceutical business being spun off from its parent company — was becoming an independent, publicly traded biopharmaceutical company with approximately 21,000 employees selling into more than 170 countries. The new company needed its own standalone HCM infrastructure, including time and labor management that could operate globally from day one.
The clock was the hard constraint. A Transition Services Agreement (TSA) with the former parent company provided temporary HR systems support — but only temporarily. TSA extensions are expensive, and a late departure would mean paying the former parent for services the new company was capable of running itself. The TSA timeline was the deadline everything had to hit.
How we approached it
As part of a multi-firm consulting team delivering the full HCM stack, RJR served as the lead implementer for time and labor management. Our scope covered building UKG Workforce Central from the ground up, integrating it with Workday (the client’s new HR platform) and ADP Payroll, and delivering comprehensive testing across the full global footprint.
Unlike post-merger integration work — where the challenge is migrating existing systems — a divestiture requires building new systems under time pressure while the parent’s clock is running out. There is no existing instance to inherit. The new entity has to stand up its own platforms, processes, and country-level configurations from scratch.
Country-level complexity
Operating time and labor across 170 countries means respecting the particulars of each: country-specific labor regulations, union agreements where they apply, local holiday calendars, overtime rules, reporting requirements, and the operational realities of how local HR teams actually run their payroll cycles.
We worked directly with HR operations in each country to understand those requirements and build configurations that fit how the local teams actually operated. This is where the principle that clients know their business better than any software vendor plays out concretely: each country’s HR team was the expert on their own needs, and our job was to build the technology around what they actually did rather than forcing them into a standard template.
Outcome
- UKG Workforce Central live across the global footprint, integrated with Workday and ADP Payroll
- Comprehensive testing completed across countries, configurations, and integration points before go-live
- Timely departure from the TSA — the deadline that defined the entire engagement
- Country-level HR operations supported with configurations that matched their actual processes rather than a one-size-fits-all template
- A multi-year partnership extending through 2017, including a subsequent comprehensive payroll migration to Workday — the kind of sustained relationship that reflects consistent delivery trust across increasingly complex engagements
What this demonstrates
Divestiture execution at global scale. Ground-up HCM implementation under TSA-driven timeline pressure, with country-by-country configuration depth across 170 countries. Time and labor management expertise coordinating cleanly with parallel HR and payroll implementation workstreams. The opposite side of the M&A coin from post-merger integration — building new systems under deadline pressure rather than migrating existing ones. And a multi-year, multi-engagement partnership demonstrating sustained delivery trust across increasingly complex work.