Project Summary
After years of acquiring various brands and companies, a $11.3B global leader in the beauty industry was left supporting and maintaining dozens of different HR/payroll systems.
These systems were administered by the individual lines of business as well as outsourced third party administrators (TPAs). To increase productivity, and leverage resources across their entire enterprise, the organization initiated a multi-year Global HR Transformation project. This study represents the largest phase of the implementation, which encompassed the consolidation of the organization’s 22 EMEA business units and brands into a single instance of Oracle HCM.
“Fantastic job! A huge amount of effort, very much appreciated. Thank you.”
– HR Transformation Deployment Lead [UK/EMEA]
Client Challenges
The size, scope, and schedule of this project combined for several unique client challenges, including:
- Many of the databases underlying the disparate legacy HR systems were outdated, unsupported and/or highly customized.
- Legacy systems had poor data quality, with high frequency of missing, inconsistent, and invalid data.
- With almost 22,000 employee records across 22 different legacy HR systems, data duplication was extremely high.
- The different legacy systems were run by various third party administrators, therefore the team had limited access to the backend data. Data extracts had to be scheduled with ample notice in the cases where data was permitted to be extracted.
- Data extract files provided by the business and TPAs proved to be highly inconsistent, both in structure and in content, from one iteration to the next.
- The data structures of the various legacy systems were drastically different from the target Oracle HCM data structure.
- Due to the high number of legacy systems and the tight cutover time frame, the schedule did not allow for the Oracle HCM load programs to identify issues that would cause a record to fail; data quality issues needed to be found and addressed early in the process to ensure no data was lost.
Requirements
The overall data migration requirements for this phase of the Global HR Transformation were:
- The team had six months to complete the project, therefore an ongoing, collaborative process between Premier and the client needed to be developed to facilitate data cleansing and error handling.
- The data from 22 distinct and separate HR/payroll systems needed to be extracted, consolidated, harmonized, cleansed, and transformed before it could be loaded into a single instance of Oracle HCM.
- The data migration process needed to handle duplicate employees both within and across disparate legacy systems to only convert the most recent (“Top of Stack”) employment history.
- The conversion needed to correctly transform and consolidate data from 22 different systems to a standardized Oracle data model for all key fields.
- The conversion required complex logic to assign supervisor IDs for all employees and accommodate various levels of data integrity and quality issues.
- Since the project was focused on migrating sensitive employee and payroll data in a tight timeframe, the prioritization of data security was imperative to the project’s success.
Key Activities
- The team began by using Applaud’s robust, automated analytic capabilities to identify and report the high volume of data inconsistency between the disparate legacy data extracts provided by the business and the TPAs.
- A deeper analysis of the legacy data was done using Applaud’s integrated analytics/reporting tools. This allowed the team to proactively identify legacy data issues.
- Valuable time in the schedule was saved when Applaud’s automated profiling process clarified the data landscape for every field/source and assisted with the create of data conversion requirements.
- Cleansing tools provided in the Applaud software assisted the team in standardizing, consolidating, correcting, and enriching data quality as issues were uncovered as opposed to waiting for load programs to identify quality gaps.
- Applaud’s powerful data matching engine applied “Top of Stack” logic to identify duplicate employee/dependent data within and across the various legacy systems so that only the most recent employment history was converted.
- Applaud’s data transformation capabilities were leveraged to create separate data migration and harmonization processes for each of the 22 legacy systems.
- Before loading to the target Oracle HCM tables, Applaud’s built-in reporting tools were utilized to quickly develop robust and thorough error handling—preemptively catching and allowing time to correct load errors.
- The combined profiling and data transformation error reporting allowed the teams to create an efficient, traceable data quality improvement process to enhance and enrich data prior to the final go-live cutover.
The Bottom Line
The Results
After only six months, the project team was able to successfully harmonize and migrate the data from 22 different legacy systems into a single Oracle HCM solution. The repeatable data cleansing processes resulted in error free data loads, culminating in a smooth and uneventful go live that boosted the confidence in the overall data quality.
Despite the volume of data extracts from TPAs and the scope of data quality issues between the 22 legacy systems, the project was completed on time and on budget.
Furthermore, the work performed up-front identified data quality baselines, which allowed business requirements to be developed based on facts instead of assumptions.
Data transformation processes harmonized the employee information between 22 different EMEA sources, ensuring that the “Top Stack” data was migrated in the Oracle HCM solution. Combined with the limited number of test cycles, the time and effort saved were invaluable to the project timeline.
The Applaud® Advantage
To help overcome the expected data migration challenges, the organization engaged Premier International’s Applaud® data migration services to eliminate the risk from their data migration and ensure the overall success of their Global HR Transformation.
Three key components of Premier International’s Applaud solution helped the client navigate their data migration:
- Premier’s data migration consultants: Premier’s services group averages more than six years of experience working with Applaud, exclusively on data migration projects.
- Premier’s methodology: Premier’s EPACTL approach to data migration projects is different than traditional ETL approaches and helps ensure the project stays on track. This methodology decreases overall implementation time and reduces the risk of the migration.
- Premier’s data migration software, Applaud: Applaud has been optimized to address the challenges that occur on data migration projects, allowing the team to accomplish all data needs using one integrated product.
The combined aspects of the Applaud solution were leveraged to meet the challenges of the Global HR Transformation project.
