For over 160 years, Valvoline has driven innovation in automotive care. Its success is built on quick, easy, trusted customer service, with oil changes and crucial preventative maintenance completed in 15 minutes or less. In 2023, Valvoline pivoted, selling its global products business to emerge as a high-growth, pure-play retailer.
With 2,100 service locations across the U.S. and Canada, Valvoline set an aggressive goal to expand to 3,500 stores by 2030. This expansion put the spotlight on the company’s most valuable assets: its technology and its people, affectionately known as the ‘vamily.’
The digital foundation driving success.
Critical to Valvoline’s growth plans is having the right technology in place to scale. Its core HR system was at its end-of-life and no longer supported, and the existing time tracking system was, as Chief People Officer Jon Caldwell says, "cumbersome, and not very user friendly.”
To successfully scale its operations while maintaining its deep-rooted “promote from within” culture—where 95% of managers started as hourly technicians—Valvoline needed a modern, automated, and single-system solution.
Valvoline selected Workday Human Capital Management, Payroll, Absence, Time Tracking, and Scheduling. The mobile capabilities were paramount in this decision, especially for the 11,000 frontline, hourly workers who do not sit at a desk. "The user experience of the mobile app was the largest reason why we chose Workday. It was critical, especially as we grow,” says Caldwell.
“We're hiring around 12,000 people a year, and we want them to be able to leverage a tool that doesn't require a lot of user guides or training. Workday allows us to bring talent and technology together in an incredibly powerful way."
Optimizing operations and amplifying manager focus.
Valvoline was an early adopter of Scheduling and Labor Optimization. By leveraging AI through Demand Forecasting, Valvoline was able to quickly generate accurate labor forecasts based on three years of historical data, down to 15-minute intervals.
Before Workday, it would take managers more than two hours to build weekly schedules. Now it’s done several weeks out, in as little as 15 minutes. This gives managers time back to focus on employees and customers. Not only has this helped ensure the right volume of employees are available, but also that they have the appropriate skills for the work - which is essential for a business like Valvoline which has a tremendous amount of seasonality.
“We have a good understanding of the volume of cars that are coming into the store, but also the services on any given day or time of day. That precision is going to generate significant savings and allow us to serve our guests even better,” says Caldwell.
“The fact that we can get down to 15 minute increments is huge. That allows us to optimize our schedules, even down to starting someone at 8:30 instead of 8 a.m. When you apply that saving across a thousand stores, it’s significant.
Fueling the future.
Looking ahead, Valvoline's strategic focus involves continuing to leverage Workday Illuminate™ and its AI capabilities to support its growth goals and elevate the employee experience. Caldwell sees AI automation as key to freeing employees from mundane, routine tasks so they can dedicate themselves to higher-value activities—including delivering exceptional customer service and focusing on career development.
Caldwell believes this intelligence will be supercharged by Prism Analytics. "Our ability to combine that employee data with customer, financial, and operational data to derive insights is going to be a game changer for us as we grow," he says.
By connecting talent strategy and technology directly to precise business outcomes enables Valvoline to be in the driving seat for growth, with human-centric ‘vamily’ at the heart of its success.
That precision driven by Workday is going to generate significant savings and allow us to serve our guests even better.
Chief People Officer