The situation
The client — a top-10 global pharmaceutical company operating in approximately 80 countries — had completed a $62 billion acquisition, combining two major global businesses into a single enterprise with roughly 50,000 employees worldwide. The deal was one of the largest pharmaceutical M&A transactions in history.
The post-close priority: bring the acquired entity’s payroll and timekeeping systems onto the acquirer’s platforms without disrupting paychecks, compliance, or employee trust anywhere in the world.
Payroll integration during M&A is one of the higher-risk domains in enterprise consulting. Employees notice payroll problems immediately. Regulators notice compliance gaps quickly. Senior leadership notices missed integration deadlines. And the work has to happen under timelines set by deal close — not by operational readiness of the systems involved.
How we approached it
We engaged across three workstreams over an extended, multi-year relationship:
Post-merger payroll and timekeeping migration
Led the migration of the acquired entity’s payroll operations to ADP and timekeeping to UKG Pro WFM. This required detailed mapping between legacy systems, validation of historical payroll data across a global workforce, and cutover planning designed to prevent any gap in pay continuity. The full migration ran nearly two years — the kind of timeline that M&A integration of this scale actually requires.
UKG platform modernization
Led the upgrade from UKG Workforce Central to UKG Pro Workforce Management — a significant platform transition to UKG’s modern cloud-native workforce platform with meaningful architectural differences from the prior generation.
Global integration engineering
Built the integrations between ADP GlobalView (for payroll across the client’s full 80-country footprint) and UKG Pro WFM (for workforce management). This integration moves workforce data globally into payroll operations, with the data precision that pharmaceutical regulation and multi-country tax compliance require.
The complexity
Multiple things had to be true simultaneously: post-merger integration timelines set by corporate, ~50,000 employees across ~80 countries each with their own payroll rules, global regulatory requirements, historical data that needed careful mapping, and two platforms (ADP GlobalView and UKG Pro WFM) that had to speak to each other reliably across the full global footprint.
This is enterprise integration at true global scale. The client needed a partner who could handle every dimension — post-merger migration, platform modernization, global integration engineering — without forcing them to coordinate multiple vendors. RJR served as that single accountable partner across all three workstreams over multiple years.
Outcome
- No disruption to employee payroll during the post-merger migration — the highest-priority outcome for an M&A integration of this scale
- A modernized workforce management platform replacing legacy UKG WFC, positioning the client for continued global growth
- Reliable global payroll integration between ADP GlobalView and UKG Pro WFM serving 50,000 employees across 80 countries
- A partnership since 2017 spanning three major workstreams — the mark of a client who found the delivery consistent across increasingly complex engagements
What this demonstrates
Enterprise-scale HR systems integration across the specific complexity that global M&A creates. Integration capability proven at 50,000-employee, 80-country scale in a highly regulated industry, across two of the most demanding HCM platform combinations. Multi-year, multi-engagement relationship depth — the kind of client retention that reflects genuine delivery credibility.