With a proud 130-year history, STARK Group has grown into one of Europe’s leading business-to-business merchants and distributor of heavy building materials for the construction industry. Operating in seven countries, the company serves professional builders and tradespeople through more than 1,000 branches and a workforce of 20,000 employees.
As STARK Group's growth accelerated through strategic acquisitions, so did the need for a modern HR foundation. The business required a solution that could bring together people data from across its expanding footprint, provide global oversight, and still give local teams the flexibility to meet country-specific needs.
That’s when the company turned to Workday. “Workday was intuitive, easy to use, and able to support both global frameworks and local variations,” says Heidi Ethelberg, Senior Director, Head of HR Operations. “Just as importantly, it gave us the flexibility to adapt quickly to new acquisitions without relying on developers for every change.”
Creating consistency and agility across HR operations.
Five years into its transformation, STARK Group has rolled out Workday across key areas of HR, including Performance and Development, Compensation, Recruiting, Time Tracking and Absence in several countries. The move has replaced spreadsheets and siloed legacy systems.
The shift to Workday quickly set a new standard for how STARK Group manages its people data. With strong training, clear communication, and ongoing support, employees embraced the platform as the single source of truth, replacing fragmented tools with one trusted system of record.
Integrating payroll further demonstrated the value of Workday’s flexibility. Denmark and Sweden were the first to go live, creating a solid blueprint for future rollouts. Those early experiences enabled STARK Group to accelerate subsequent implementations in Germany and the UK, each one smoother and faster than the last. “Each country taught us something new,” Ethelberg explains. “Workday gave us the flexibility to apply those lessons and improve as we expanded.”
With Workday, we have access to data we can trust, and that changes the conversation. It allows HR to truly support the business.
Heidi Ethelberg, Senior Director, Head of HR Operations
Lean, competent, and ready for continuous growth.
STARK Group's journey shows that success isn’t about the size of the team, it’s about having the right model in place. By combining a strong central function with empowered local experts, the company has created a structure that is both agile and scalable.
Their key to success was to integrate a complementary solution directly with Workday to automate and streamline requests, making it easier for teams to manage change efficiently. At the same time, the company also developed a power-user model that gave local teams ownership of everyday configuration and first-line support. First introduced in Germany and later expanded to other regions, this approach ensured employees received quick answers while the central team remained focused on driving strategy and innovation.
Today, even after significant company growth, STARK Group runs its global HR operations on Workday with a very lean central team. “With Workday and strong local collaboration, we’ve proven that you can scale HR operations to 20,000 employees without building a massive central function,” says Ethelberg.
Empowering people and processes for lasting success.For STARK Group, the Workday journey is more than technology, it’s about building trust in data, empowering local teams, and putting the right processes in place to manage change.
“Implementation is never easy,” Ethelberg reflects. “The most important thing is change management. You need to invest in training and communication, avoid overextension of scope, and make sure people really understand what they are building. When you do that, Workday becomes more than a system, it becomes the foundation of how you operate.”
STARK Group’s transformation demonstrates how Workday enables a business to grow with confidence. By unifying data, enabling local flexibility, and supporting a lean operating model, the company has built a scalable HR foundation that will continue to evolve with its strategy and will continuously improve their readiness for the future.
Efficiency isn’t about cutting corners, it’s about the right structures, and Workday enables us to do that our way.
Heidi Ethelberg, Senior Director, Head of HR Operations