With its head office in Denmark, B2B retailer STARK Group operates more than 1,150 branches and distribution centers through its subsidiaries in the UK, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Austria, and Norway, as well as Denmark and Greenland. The company has seen turnover double since 2019 as a result of sustained organic growth and significant acquisitions. STARK Group’s annual net sales now stand at approximately €7 billion.
The company’s philosophy is founded on “local ownership and global leadership,” and its decentralized structure helps ensure that decision-making is always anchored close to customers. STARK Group’s culture reflects three core values—decency, passion, and pride—to guide its interactions with people, new service developments, commitment to sustainability, and support and engagement of a 20,000+ workforce.
The dramatic growth in the business and the need to integrate major acquisitions put great pressure on STARK Group’s lean HR resources, fragmented HR management systems, and largely manual processes. Reporting on simple headcount data was difficult and time-consuming. The company decided to proceed with a digital transformation to introduce a more effective, efficient, and flexible HR solution that would fulfill both corporate and local requirements.
Following an exhaustive assessment of potential solutions, STARK Group selected Workday to transform its HR processes. STARK Group determined that Workday was a proven system with the flexibility to accommodate the company’s decentralized structure and the specific requirements of its business units in different countries.
Careful planning ensures smooth transition to improved HR efficiencies.
To enhance efficiencies and streamline operations, STARK Group’s HR team needed to have all HR data in one place and available in real time. Finding the right balance between local empowerment and the need for simplicity was key. Most of the company’s 20,000 employees work in sales and are not on the system for much of the working day, so fulfilling the need for two-way interaction was also a challenge.
In view of the operational complexities, the Workday implementation team comprised individuals with a good understanding of the system solution, as well as the workstreams and processes in specific business units. Key stakeholders were identified from the outset, and great care was taken to engage and involve them fully throughout the project. “Change leaders” were also assigned in each country. Such insight and expertise certainly helped to smooth the transition process. Project implementation proceeded as planned and followed a phased approach, starting with the Nordic countries before moving on to Germany and the UK.
Having everything in one place has greatly increased our reporting capabilities. And with high-quality, accurate data now at our fingertips in real time, it’s so much easier to complete daily HR tasks and to make informed people decisions.
Heidi Ethelberg, Group Head of HR Operations
“Everything flows from Workday.”
Providing easy access to their own information has certainly helped to empower STARK employees and team leaders across the group. Workday has not only helped to eliminate cumbersome and frustrating manual processes but has also helped improve and simplify access to information, as well as provide a reliable and consistent master data system.
“The new system is quite customized to the different business units. They have also implemented some of the modules at their own pace,” says Ane Christiansen, senior HR operations consultant at STARK Group.
“However, Workday is the single source of truth, and we’ve taken great care to ensure it is fully integrated with relevant downstream systems in the different business units to ensure that all HR data flows directly from Workday,” Christiansen continues. “This means data only needs to be updated in one place. There is also a very real incentive for everyone to maintain the quality and accuracy of data on the master system at all times.”
Christiansen also believes the digital HR transformation has provided significant compliance advantages. “Internal auditing on various HR processes is so much more efficient now that we have one system and no longer have to scramble around for different sets of data from a myriad of different sources.”
System flexibility accommodates operational complexities and local needs.
Every effort was made to align all operations with consistent global processes and simple condition rules. However, the flexibility provided by Workday allowed for setup differences to reflect the local needs of different business units, with specific configuration requirements easily undertaken by the internal team. This ensured that the new solution matched STARK Group’s decentralized operating model, where each business unit has its own autonomous national management team.
It was also important to integrate HR operations from major acquisitions into STARK Group—first in Germany and then the UK—as smoothly as possible. “The versatility of Workday enabled us to do just that,” says Heidi Ethelberg, group head of HR operations. “Detailed discussions with the respective businesses helped us to establish the system design requirements and precise business requirements for each acquisition and defined the most appropriate system configuration. Despite the complexity and scale of the newly acquired businesses, such concerted preparations ensured the successful adoption of Workday.”
Workday is a very good fit for us as it has provided the scope to develop simple condition tools and global processes while also reflecting the operational differences in different business units.
Ane Christiansen, Senior HR Operations Consultant