Guillevin International Co. has come a long way since François-Xavier Guillevin first opened the doors to a general store in Old Montreal in 1906. From small beginnings to global expansion, today Guillevin is a Canadian powerhouse with 2,500 employees across 171 locations. The company has expanded considerably through acquisitions and the opening of numerous decentralized locations. It is now one of the largest electrical distributors and a major supplier of safety products and equipment and industrial goods.
For Christian Roy, Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, continued growth is reliant on two things—people and technology. But a legacy system with mainly paper processes made keeping up with the rapid pace of growth unsustainable. Guillevin needed a model that could support its business and employees at scale.
“We were probably 20 years behind at that time,” says Roy. “If I wanted to hire a new employee, I would fill out carbon copy paper and keep a yellow copy. It used to take me two, three days to retrieve an invoice.” Roy knew the company needed a solution to support finance, HR, and payroll.
A simple system for people and performance needs.
Guillevin wanted a platform that could not only support core operations like payroll, but could manage the full employee lifecycle, from recruitment to career development. “We saw the benefits of managing talent from the recruitment to onboarding, and learning path through payroll with Workday,” says Roy.
Guillevin deployed Workday Human Capital Management, Financial Management, and Payroll within eight months. This enabled them to shift from relying on people and paper trails to find information, to a self-service model where responsibility was given back to local teams. “Workday gave us the transparency and ability to let our people manage their business. What took two days to find before now takes a couple of clicks.”
For Roy’s finance organization, Workday was the only choice. “The key differentiator was the ability to reproduce our financial statement. The only system that could do that was Workday,” he says. Workday Financial Management enabled Guillevin to handle their specialized operations statement, which combines the P&L with working capital components.
Unifying finance and HR drives M&A.
Now Guillevin can manage more than a million invoices a year and issue 100,000 payments to 2,500 vendors. For a company focused on growth through acquisition - with the ambition of 2-3 acquisitions yearly - this is critical. Workday has become the engine for Guillevin’s growth-by-acquisition model. “When we do acquisitions, we keep the operation system in place, and we link to Workday. The integration is faster and we have total visibility into the results,” Roy says.
What’s more, the self-service abilities of the system are driving efficiency, time, and cost savings businesswide. “If you want to hire somebody, there's a workflow for that. If you want to approve an invoice, there's a workflow for that. As a CFO, I'm pretty happy about that,” says Roy.
Supercharging the business for the future with AI.
Perhaps the biggest success metric for Roy and team is the ROI he is seeing every month, across all 171 locations. Not only does this give a precise read of operational performance, it’s also what fuels the company’s profit-sharing model so it’s critical information for rewarding employees.
Looking ahead, Roy believes Workday AI will support Guillevin’s continued growth. “We are perfectly positioned to take advantage of AI and what it’s going to bring us. We have the right system in place with Workday for the future growth of the company.”
Workday gives us the ability to manage talent from recruitment and onboarding, to the learning paths that train our people to be the best they can be.
Vice President and CFO