Over the past 40 years, Greenyard, a global market leader in fresh, frozen, and prepared produce, has grown steadily through both organic expansion and acquisitions. Not just in Belgium, its home country, but globally. Today the company operates across more than 80 countries, employing over 10,000 people across 22 business units and 44 legal entities.
That scale is a clear sign of success, but it also created a significant challenge. Decades of growth through acquisition had left Greenyard’s HR operations deeply fragmented, with critical people data spread across 120 separate systems and no single unified view to tie it all together.
Rethinking HR from the ground up.
Greenyard's transformation started where it mattered most: with HR. The team's first focus was on data catch-up, strengthening data quality and building trust in the system before rolling it out to managers and office employees.
After years of mergers and acquisitions, without a strong focus on harmonization, moving toward a more consistent way of working was a real challenge, especially in an organization not historically used to operating in a single, aligned model.
The scale of the problem was significant. Not only were there different systems in every business unit, but different ways of working and different levels of HR maturity across the organization.
Data quality had become a critical issue, making it hard to build the kind of consistent, company-wide people strategy that an organization of Greenyard's size and ambition needed. The decision was made to realign, to rethink the systems, the processes, and the ways of working, and to bring them onto a shared HR platform.
“Driven by a clear HR need, we started by transforming our operations to establish trustworthy, auditable people data at the top of the organization, giving us the opportunity to make the function more professional and mature,” explains the Group HR Transformation Lead.
The right platform, and the right partner to make it work.
To tackle a transformation of this complexity, spanning multiple countries, cultures, and ways of working, Greenyard chose Workday as the platform to unify HR operations across the business.
Workday offered not just the breadth of functionality Greenyard needed today, but the scalability to support the company’s continued growth tomorrow. Critically, it gave the leadership a trusted, consolidated view of people data that had been missing for decades.
Workday gives us something we never had before: one consistent view of our workforce that we can trust. That's changing how we plan, how we lead, and how we grow, and, most importantly, it will enable us to deliver that same experience to the whole organization going forward.
Group HR Transformation Lead
For the implementation and as a strategic partner on this journey, Greenyard turned to PwC Belgium selected for a combination of cultural fit, global reach, and a proven track record in HR technology transformation.
PwC Belgium not only understood Greenyard and the context in which we operate, but has a strong track record in HR transformation experience, something we confirmed by talking with PwC clients who’d been through similar processes. The firm understood which challenges we’d face and how we could best tackle them.
Group HR Transformation Lead
With a tight deadline and an intricate, multi-country scope, PwC Belgium’s global network proved essential, putting consultants on the ground in the countries where Greenyard needed it most, running in-person workshops, and drawing on best practices from comparable Workday implementations.
“The team was very pragmatic and adaptable to our needs,” the Group HR Transformation Lead recalls. “With PwC Belgium, it was a true partnership. It wasn’t just about delivering a project. The team was really in it for the long run to help us get maximum value from Workday.”
Strong foundations: data, buy-in, and real initial results.
One of the first and most important lessons of the project was that data quality would be the determining factor, a challenge Greenyard acknowledges it underestimated.
“The PwC Belgium team was very open, honest, and clear on the challenge we’d face when it came to data quality. And they were right,” the Group HR Transformation Lead says.
“We brought in extra resources, and PwC Belgium helped us put a strong governance structure in place to gather data that would work in the vast majority of places. It was important not to get bogged down in the nitty-gritty and lose momentum.”
Rather than waiting for perfect data, Greenyard and PwC Belgium took a phased approach. Initial data collected early in the project was used directly in workshops across different entities, giving participants meaningful information to work with, which helped make it much more real.
On time, on budget, and built for the future.
Greenyard executed its year-end Workday rollout with high operational confidence, on time and within budget, and approximately two months later opened the system fully to all managers and office employees.
“Self‑service in Workday is a big cultural shift for us,” notes the Group HR Transformation Lead, “Managers can act on reliable data themselves instead of waiting for reports, and employees finally have a simple, consistent experience wherever they are.”
By maintaining that discipline throughout, the team built a shared foundation for how HR operates, and achieved many important milestones.
For the first time in more than 40 years, we have one trusted view of our workforce across 16 countries, 4 divisions, and 44 legal entities. Workday has been a key enabler of that shift, and this harmonization is just the beginning.
Group HR Transformation Lead
A journey, not a finish line.
The transformation has landed differently depending on where you sit in the organization. At the top, the change has been significant: for the first time, Greenyard has visibility into nearly the full scope of the business, insight that simply didn't exist before.
At the local level, the picture is still evolving. Many entities continue to run their own HR systems day to day, and the value of Workday there will build over time, as further modules roll out.
“That foundation is what lets us keep building, module by module, until every part of the organization feels the same benefit,” says the Group HR Transformation Lead.
Workday has also changed how Greenyard approaches acquisitions. When the company brings a new entity into the group, the HR team can now integrate it faster and gain visibility into its organizational structure much sooner, something that was extremely difficult prior to this transformation.
For the global leader, the Workday and PwC Belgium journey is not a one‑and‑done project. It is the foundation for continuous improvement.
“With PwC Belgium, it is a true partnership, and with Workday we now have a platform we can keep expanding on. We look forward to continuing this journey together,” shares the Group HR Transformation Lead.