Investing in a brilliant future

This global investment firm has been providing timely insights to their clients, keeping them informed on the markets, the economy, and the investing landscape for more than a century.

• two million individual, business and institutional clients
• 30,000 employees across the globe.

After a decade of rapid growth, one of the largest diversified financial service firms was operating from legacy human capital management (HCM) and payroll platforms, with their existing infrastructure relying on an extremely complex integration landscape. Numerous source systems created a fragmented employee experience, multiple engagement models, and inconsistent operations. The aging HCM and outdated workforce analytics platforms created obstacles to accessing decades of employee data for basic reporting, as well as long-term trending analysis and insights.

The firm also presented a unique HR challenge—it needed to maintain two separate payroll systems, one for its team of wealth advisors, who are accustomed to concierge-type service, and another for staff who preferred to utilize self-service functions. Realizing the need for one global platform and one source of truth, the company’s leadership called on KPMG.

The ability for KPMG to quickly mobilize a team and formulate a plan that accounted for multiple in-flight, dependent projects was integral to the project’s success. Our team was expected to lean in and assume traditional client roles, react swiftly to unplanned events (such as an unplanned divestiture), and manage multiple initiatives to completion while still achieving key success measures. Much more than technology, we also delivered research and findings from the KPMG Global HR Survey to all of the company’s HR practitioners worldwide. And we helped to share the strategy to their talent management team as they moved to embrace the capabilities of Workday.

We designed and swiftly delivered an enterprise-wide HCM cloud-based system by leveraging KPMG Powered Enterprise enabled by Workday’s technology to combine leading practices and prebuilt tools explicitly designed to generate rapid, measurable results. Powered Enterprise eliminates the need to “start from scratch;” it became the central focal point of the team’s project management and issue tracking, removing design risk, and providing both the testing framework and starting points for the delivery model and execution.

The KPMG Global Services’ developers led a large and complex global migration project of more than 140 integrations between the legacy system and Workday. And, our team delivered creative solutions that allowed for two distinct payroll systems, per the client’s unique needs, in a unified cloud approach. We were able to strike the balance of optimal service delivery, while still retaining the right level of concierge-type service that the wealth advisers expected.

Using the Workday Prism analytics platform, we built a historical data solution within Workday, enabling the consolidation and merging of 5 million individual worker records, including data going back almost 15 years, across disconnected legacy applications and an outdated analytics platform. Now, data for such insights as recruiting, turnover, and talent performance trends, as well as engagement survey results is easily accessible and in one place.

The combination of Powered Enterprise and Workday technology, including the deployment of the Workday Prism data analytics platform, enables our client to utilize a much fresher, more accessible and scalable cloud-based system. Workday represents that single source of truth as the company needed. Specific benefits included::

• A modern HR system with unified data across multiple platforms provides the work force and leadership with data-driven insights and analytics, such as the ability to quickly identify key trends or problem areas that were not available before, and remedying those problems via Workday’s actionable reporting and analytics framework.
• HR work streams were simplified and standardized where possible, providing efficiency gains through self-service and process automation that didn’t exist previously.
• HR self-service features were introduced for more than 30,000 company employees and advisers, including access from mobile devices, making work easier while on the go.
• Payroll accuracy was improved, and we introduced automated workflows into their daily HR transactions with transparency in terms of notifications and reporting.
• The KPMG knowledge transfer approach—having the company’s team members work alongside the KPMG team, specifically with reporting and integrations—led to an extremely smooth mid-quarter payroll deployment with a client team trained and ready to assume control of the system in production.

We go the distance

We build client-centric relationships based on a “we’re in this together” mindset and guide our clients through many stages of their journey—from the initial planning all the way through to postimplementation support. We go the distance with each client and that continuity provides value at each stage and for the client’s benefit overall.

We know Workday

KPMG has long experience implementing Workday solutions for the needs of financial firms. We use the insights gained from our 12-year alliance with Workday to help clients quickly navigate even the most challenging implementations. Tight timelines, divestitures in the middle of implementation, mid-quarter payroll go-lives, multiple coexisting payrolls, the most complex integrations—when the course is tricky, our clients can be confident that KPMG can handle it all.

We deliver more than technology

The KPMG team has reinvented how organizations achieve successful cloud transformations. For more than two decades, KPMG has conducted an HR Transformation Survey. We conduct an annual global HR survey as well, and deliver our findings from both to our clients’ HR practitioners in order to help shape their strategies.