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White Cap: driving efficiencies through standardization and simplification with Workday

White Cap at a glance

  • Industry: Retail & Wholesale
  • Founded: 1976
  • Headquarters: Georgia, US
  • Employees: 8,900+

White Cap is one of the nation's largest suppliers of power tools and specialty materials to professional concrete contractors. They were founded in 1976 with one store in Santa Ana, California, but they now have more than 215 locations across the United States.

In October 2020, White Cap divested from HD Supply and merged with Construction Supply Group (CSG) to broaden their product offering while bringing more convenience and better customer service.

Challenges faced

The challenge for White Cap was twofold. Not only did they need to establish operations in becoming a new organization, but the current HR technology landscape was disparate with several different systems including Kronos, PeopleSoft, HRMS, VIBE (CSG) and multiple spreadsheets.

White Cap had important goals in establishing the HCM solution for their new organization:

  • Standing up the solution to exit the Transition Services Agreement (TSA) with their former owner on time
  • Creating a strong employee experience for the new organization by streamlining technology
  • Establishing the framework and nimbleness for future M&A activity

Being successful in these goals would allow them to reduce operational risk, improve productivity and support organizational growth objectives.

“Because of Alight’s guidance and expertise, we were able to build things into Workday that White Cap didn’t even know was possible.”

Ajay Patel
Senior Director, Talent Acquisition, HR Planning & Operations

Our partnership

White Cap’s parent company was already midway through deploying Workday when the divestiture took place. Since the deployment was underway, Alight already had a deep understanding of the company’s processes and operations and a strong relationship with the White Cap team. This helped Alight to partner with the HR team in the early stages of divestiture to review how best to approach the separation of the HR function and which elements of the existing Workday deployment project could be leveraged.

“We would not have been able to adopt Workday without Alight — every bit of what White Cap has adopted in Workday is because of the recommendations from Alight based on how well they know us and the Workday technology. They provided insight on capabilities and gaps with our current processes and working as partners through the deployment allowed White Cap to address these process gaps.”

Ajay Patel
Senior Director, Talent Acquisition, HR Planning & Operations
Over $100k

of costs avoided

The solution

After careful consideration the team chose to clone a copy of the Workday tenant currently in deployment which would simplify the approach. This enabled White Cap to proceed from the point of cloning to configure the deployment for their needs — and proceed faster — while also allowing the parent company to continue their own deployment path. Post-clone, Alight completed the deployment for both organizations in parallel.

Immediately after deploying Workday for the White Cap population, the CSG population was converted into the White Cap tenant concurrent with the deployment of several additional Workday SKUs.

By partnering with Alight to deploy Workday, White Cap now has a single system of truth for their entire global workforce and the core foundation for success both now and long term. Not only did the project help to drive efficiencies through standardization and simplification, but the timely delivery also meant White Cap could complete the TSAs on time without the need for extension, avoiding over $100k of costs.

Workday SKUs

  • HCM
  • Compensation & Advanced Compensation
  • US and Canadian Payroll
  • Recruiting
  • Learning
  • Time Tracking

Ongoing support

White Cap knew that go-live was just the start of their journey and having access to a team of Workday experts as well as a trusted advisor post deployment was very important to them. To leverage Workday expertise and enable focus on supporting business and HR objectives, White Cap therefore continued their partnership with Alight for Workday Optimization, Workday Release Management and Managed Payroll services.

The HR team is already realizing the benefits of Alight’s continued partnership with the deployment of resources in other areas of the business with value added roles such as talent acquisition and M&A. In addition, from knowledge transfer provided by Alight both during deployment as well as in quarterly governance forums, White Cap’s HR/IT is moving towards self-sustaining in the long-term. The team is also looking forward to approaching their first Workday release with the support of a partner, saving them time while also ensuring more of Workday’s innovation is adopted by the company.

Alight services

  • Workday Deployment
  • Workday Optimization
  • Workday Release Management
  • Payroll Services
  • Data Quality Management (DQM)

Alight also helped to reduce the operational risk in payroll by converting and standardizing payroll delivery for the companies acquired by White Cap since becoming its own company, while also future proofing payroll operations for future acquisitions by developing an acquisition playbook framework.

“Alight provided expertise of the Workday platform and used this as a catalyst to share process advice and improvements within functional areas providing options and best practices for us to consider. This was critical to our success with Workday.”

Ajay Patel
Senior Director, Talent Acquisition, HR Planning & Operations

The Results

  • The successful delivery of Workday enabled White Cap to effectively separate operations and become their own company and quickly incorporate future acquisitions
  • Reduced the number of HR platforms from 9 to 1
  • After several acquisitions, all payroll platforms and operations are consolidated with Alight fully managing payroll operations
  • By using Workday Recruiting and Workday Learning, the recruitment and learning teams now have a solid foundation for hiring and training talent across the organization
  • Workday Payroll’s automatic tax deductions reduce risk of payroll and compliance errors
  • Corporate compliance is now standardized within Workday
  • A single consolidated platform enables rapid onboarding of acquisitions, further mitigating acquisition risk.
  • User satisfaction has increased because employees no longer require access to multiple platforms with multiple logins
  • White Cap now has confidence that their processes are standardized across their entire organization, and optimized for maximum efficiency providing an enhanced user experience
  • Employees are now using a modern, mobile enabled, personalized technology that makes solving their HR needs a more engaging people experience
  • Paper-based processes such as merit planning and compensation planning have been removed with more paper-process replacements possible as the team’s confidence with Workday grows
  • Significant improvements in reporting and analytics capabilities
  • With Workday Optimization Services, business problems are solved quickly and velocity of business operations is much faster
  • Using Alight’s guidance, White Cap was able to adopt more features and functionality than they realized was possible. This included the ability to automate actions within Workday, saving time and driving efficiencies

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