Australia
Atlas Professionals at a glance
- Industry: recruitment and HR services in the energy and marine industries
- Founded: 1982
- Headquarters: Netherlands
- Employees: 2,500 in 18 countries
Atlas Professionals, specialist recruitment and HR service provider in the energy and marine industries, partnered with Alight and Workday to support its global expansion.
Since its inception in 1982, the business has grown exponentially and continues to expand with its recent acquisition of Next Wave Partners, hence the need to find a finance solution that could keep pace. Alight’s deployment of Workday Financial Management has been transformational, bringing together payroll, accounting, and finance into a single place to better support strategic business decisions and the rapid expansion of the organization.
Working from our Netherlands HQ, it can prove impossible to keep up with the everchanging financial intricacies of each region. Throw multiple languages into the mix and it becomes a very big challenge. Working with Alight and Workday means that our team in the Netherlands can easily handle global finance and are safe in the knowledge that all regulations are met. Our financial data has never been so streamlined and easy to access, and we are already seeing the return on our investment.
Atlas Professionals
The challenges of going global
Managing payroll and finance for thousands of employees and contractors across the world is no mean feat. Atlas Professionals handled all financial processes from their Netherlands HQ, using a restrictive, legacy system that was built to service just one country. With the complexities of different regulations, legalities and languages for each region, and invoice volumes reaching new heights, Atlas Professionals needed to find an international finance solution that could handle these new challenges.
“Our rapid expansion highlighted the inadequacies and limits of our existing finance system,” says Andre Secrest, Finance Director at Atlas Professionals. “We knew we had to migrate to the cloud and looked for a finance system that could handle the evolving global financial landscape, strengthen our existing markets, and support our merger and acquisition activities.
Workday implemented by Alight
Atlas Professionals chose Alight and their technology partner Workday to build an allin-one, global finance platform. The solution unifies processes from different countries in the cloud, bringing together international payroll, invoicing, financial processes, and period-end close.
Global finance reimagined
The solution gives business leaders access to organization-wide data, facilitating easier analysis and decision-making. “Bringing together global core financial management, the central visibility has massively increased. The visibility on customer accounts, working capital insights and having one harmonized set of management information has brought massive advantages for our business. It just proves that having timely and reliable information, consistently presented in a way that information expands from ultimate parent level to divisions, to teams, to clients and professionals, all in the same way, enables constructive business discussions, instead of debate on what the number should be” Secrest explains.
“We have recently onboarded a lot of new senior staff, so being able to access data and create reports quickly has been essential to get new recruits up to speed and power more informed decisions. The solution also opens opportunities for our new acquisition and joint venture, with scope to expand into Australia, but potentially also in other countries, which would have been more challenging with the provider that we used.”
“Unifying our finance data exposed areas for improvement. Localized ways-of-working and analyzing our numbers had become cumbersome due to local approaches. We used these insights to drive greater efficiencies, develop better career opportunities and identify new ways to upskill our staff.”
This project was the first of its kind, being the first Netherlands-only Workday Financial
Management project at the time. We worked closely with the finance team to build a Foundation Data Model (FDM) that would allow Atlas Professionals to accelerate their growth, facilitate opportunities for joint ventures, and allow more investors to have insight into core data points.
EMEA Workday Director
The results say it all
By partnering with Alight to leverage knowledge, expertise and guidance, the company has transformed the way they use Workday.
Check out these significant operational outcomes:
- Direct realized savings in Finance: over 430K EUR on an annual basis
- Direct saving in qualitative improvements: Freed up controllers’ time by 17 working days to spend on topics that matter
- Direct savings from next year onwards: onboarded Taiwan onto Workday (approximately 26K EUR on external services, now in-house)
- Savings to come: over 259K SGD on integrations with full
About Alight
Alight is a leading cloud-based human capital technology and services provider that powers confident health, wealth and wellbeing decisions for 36 million people and dependents. Our Alight Worklife® platform combines data and analytics with a simple, seamless user experience. Supported by our global delivery capabilities, Alight Worklife is transforming the employee experience for people around the world. With personalized, data-driven health, wealth, pay and wellbeing insights, Alight brings people the security of better outcomes and peace of mind throughout life’s big moments and most important decisions. Learn how Alight unlocks growth for organizations of all sizes at alight.com.
Download the full case study.
Please fill out the form to access the content.
.jpg?width=560)
