The challenge
The client ran UKG Workforce Central, the legacy UKG product, supporting a public university workforce — faculty, staff, student employees, and the union complexity public higher education carries. Stabilization came first: getting the platform operating correctly against the workforce reality, with the integrations to internal university systems running cleanly and the configurations holding up through academic-year cycles. Stabilization succeeded, and the engagement ran as a multi-year managed support relationship. Later, the client made a strategic decision to migrate off UKG to Workday — driven by the client's own evaluation of platform direction, not by RJR's recommendation. The challenge then became executing the platform transition without disrupting the operational continuity that stabilization had earned.
How we built it
Stabilization came first. Through multi-year consulting and managed support, RJR worked alongside the client's internal team to get UKG Workforce Central operating correctly against the higher ed workforce reality — pay rules, accruals, scheduling, and the integrations to internal university systems all configured and running through academic-year cycles. The engagement model gave the client capability without forcing them to staff up an internal UKG specialist team.
When the client decided to migrate to Workday, RJR led the transition as a structured four-stage program. The first stage built the foundation tenant — requirements gathering, configuration, and unit testing across roughly three weeks. The second stage migrated the configuration into the end-to-end tenant and ran end-to-end testing. The third stage moved the build into sandbox and then production. The fourth stage covered post-go-live support and payroll enhancement work in the new platform.
Throughout the transition, the operational continuity that stabilization had earned stayed intact. Pay cycles ran on schedule. The internal university systems integrating with workforce data continued working through the platform cutover. The client got Workday up and running without losing the configuration discipline they'd built up under the prior engagement.
Outcome
Stabilization closed with UKG Workforce Central operating cleanly against the client's workforce reality, with multi-year managed support continuing as the operational baseline. The Workday transition closed on its planned timeline, with the client live on Workday across HR, payroll, and the internal university system integrations that depended on workforce data. The client retained operational continuity through both phases — no payroll cycles missed during the transition, no integration gaps to internal university systems, and no loss of the configuration knowledge that had been built up across years of partnership. [CONFIRM: any specific timeline data — total elapsed time across stabilization + transition phases, or transition program duration if separate]