Reorganization or strategic reorientation may well involve divesting companies or units. How do you handle this with your integrated HRIT system? In this white paper, Roel van Wanrooij, senior consultant at SuccessDay, takes a closer look at this issue and discusses the Clone & Purge method for Workday tenants. He explains how this was applied at Sharp and provides you with a step-by-step guide, so you know everything involved.
Illustration: Studio van Laar | Text: Ester Schop
What happens to your HRIT system in the event of divestment?
In divestiture, you are dealing with a parent (the parent organization) and a child (the part that is divested and continues independently or is acquired by another organization). If there is one integrated HRM package, the tenant must be split up. And that is less easy than it sounds. As a spin-off organization, you naturally want to have access to all relevant historical data in your HRIT system and only be able to view data on your own employees, former employees, and candidates—and not the data of the organization you have spun off from. In fact, this must be legally compliant. For example, you must comply with European privacy legislation GDPR and be AVG-compliant in the Netherlands.
In mid-2022, Sharp, a leading provider of clinical and commercial packaging services, asked SuccessDay to rebuild and refresh their Workday tenant after divesting from their parent company. As an independent company, Sharp employs 1,700 people in their manufacturing facilities in the U.S., the Netherlands, Belgium, the U.K. and in Ireland. “We were acquired by CD&R, but HRIS-wise we remained independent,” explained Paul de Lange, Head of Global HR Technology and HR Manager Europe.
Roel van Wanrooij and his team worked intensively over the past few months with both the parent organization and the spin-off to create their own new tenant for the child organization. Roel was Data Lead, but there was also a Functional Lead, a consultant working on integrations, and a consultant focusing on benefits.
Define your strategy
Regardless of whether you are on the parent or child side, there is much work to be done if you are part of an organization that is going to divest. Before any actual steps are taken, it is important to think about strategy. In the case of this organization, there was a Workday-to-Workday situation. This involved both companies staying with Workday, but the child moving to its own tenant. There could also be a situation where the child organization transfers to another system. Even then, as a parent, you have obligations to fulfill.
The parent is responsible for the data that remains in their tenant—at all times. In fact, there is only one adequate option for this organization to delete this data, and that is to use the purge functionalities in Workday. We discuss the necessary steps for purging data later.
Options for the divested organization
The child company has several options for the future of the HRIT system. In the event the organization wishes to stay with Workday, they have the choice of using a Clone & Purge approach, alternatively, the organization has the option of beginning with a clean tenant. Should they move away from Workday, the approach is like that of a clean Workday tenant. Whatever choice is made, each option has its advantages and disadvantages, according to Roel.
Whether choosing a clean Workday tenant, or when moving to another system, there will be quite a bit of work in bringing up all the data and configuration that the organization wants to take with it. Moving to another system will also require translating both the data and configuration so that it is in line with the operation of the new HRIT system. Workday Reporting plays a big role in this, especially if the organization wants to take historical data with them to the new tenant.
Advantages and disadvantages of clean tenant
The main advantage of a clean tenant, as the name suggests, is that it is clean. You have no configuration or data from the parent organization and can start with a clean slate. This can certainly be important for the parent organization, because otherwise it would be necessary to agree to certain restrictions regarding the Clone & Purge methodology. The other important benefit is that organizations can immediately set up the tenant based on best practices, while at the same time setting its own direction.
What are the main drawbacks to this approach? The transfer of historical data is particularly time-consuming, and the costs are in some cases higher than with the Clone & Purge approach. This partly depends on the extent to which the configuration is taken over from the parent organization. This can either be done with specialized migration solutions or through EIBs (Enterprise Interface Builder, a method used to load data). A modified Phase 1 is a possible interpretation for this.
Wat is Clone & Purge?
In the Sharp case, parent and child were in one Workday tenant together. To separate them, a Clone & Purge approach was adopted. But what exactly does this entail? “Workday can copy, or clone, the parent organization’s tenant to actually create two identical tenants. The idea is that one tenant contains only employees from the parent organization and the other tenant only employees from the divested component. We were hired to take care of the child-tenant and so we needed to make sure that only relevant things for the divested organization remained. You do that by purging. In fact, deleting in Workday is not an option for most of the data. It’s a transactional system. That means that data is linked through a transaction in which the data interacts back and forth. If you then want to delete anything you lose a lot of time to sort everything out properly.”
A monster job, where you have to keep your head on straight
The alternative is to purge. In this method, all personal data relating to employees are removed. Roel: “The employee data does remain in the system, but that information is purged of items such as dates of birth, names or IDs, contact information, et cetera. All that kind of stuff is anonymized.” So, in this case, 15,000 employees, tens of thousands of former employees and hundreds of thousands of candidates were purged. “A monumental task, which requires a clear head,” Roel says. First you must get the logical order right because you don’t want to purge the wrong employee data. Because if you do need to get that data back, you lose a lot of time and energy. Time and energy you’d rather spend on other things. “A lot of this work is writing reports. I think we made a total of 60 to 70 reports to get the right data to surface.”
We’ll show you a step-by-step guide to the Clone & Purge process for your Workday system.
Step-by-step guide
As projects of this type are uncommon, there is little experience within the ecosystem. SuccessDay can unburden organizations in this regard. For this purpose, SuccessDay has prepared a step-by-step guide:
Step 1: Analyze your organizational chart
Check for changes/additions. Which locations, companies and business units belong to which organization after the divestiture?
Step 2: Analyze your overview of employees and former employees
Who works/has worked for which organization and what is their status after the divestiture? Using the findings from Step 1 will help with this.
Step 3: Analyze your candidate list and consider additional purge
Whoever applied for which organization and what data do you want/need to keep?
Step 4: Analyze your business processes
Map your business processes and do a hygiene check. Timely and frequent tenant maintenance is highly advisable; poorly set up business processes can lead to delays. This is especially true for open processes with employees who have been out of employment for a long time.
Step 5: Cancel ongoing business processes with employees of the parent organization who no longer work for your organization
Step 6: Purge “fired” employees
Delete data on employees from the parent organization who therefore no longer work for your organization. It is often practical to purge this group separately from the active employees to keep track.
Step 7: Cancel ongoing business processes related to employees of the parent organization
Before you purge employee information, you want to make sure there are as little open business processes as possible. Often there are certain processes still open with employees (for example, if they have not completed an aspect from the onboarding). Now is the time to cancel those. With anonymized data, it is nearly impossible to do this afterwards.
Step 8: Fire the active employees
When doing so, remember that there are also employees who are on non-active status due to certain leave types.
Step 9: Purge the parent’s “active employees”
The child organization does not need active employees (purged or not) who are part of the parent organization. The goal is to remove everything and leave only the employees of the child organization.
Step 10a: Check whether there are any employees with an end date that is after our intended date—revoke the processes for this group
Step 10b: Check if there are any employees from the parent organization whose appointment date is in the future and revoke the processes for this group
P.S. Don’t forget that all integrations need to be customized and tested and that a lot of (unintended) time is spent on this.
Always do a dress rehearsal
Roel’s advice is to always do a dress rehearsal in which you go through all the above steps. “During the dress rehearsal, you come across variables that you didn’t notice initially. See what did and didn’t go well or where the plan needs adjustment. Only after that can you do the real thing. After all, once you lose something it is really lost; you can’t easily reverse it.” Roel emphasizes that support from the parent organization’s knowledge and experience is essential. “They have the insights and know how the tenant is put together. A good relationship and cooperation are a must for things to run smoothly.”
Sharp is now live with its own Workday tenant. According to Roel, the main advantage over a brand-new tenant is that all historical data has come with it. “And in fact, very little has changed for the feel of the users: the look and feel has largely remained the same. Right now, most of the configuration is still related to the parent company, but we’re going to clean that up further over the next year.” To do that, Sharp is using SuccessDay’s Tenant Optimizer. In this blog, you’ll read how to get the most out of your HRIT system using Tenant Optimization. In addition, Sharp uses SuccessDay’s Smooth Landing and Workday AMS services.
Incidentally, SuccessDay can also unburden organizations looking to transition to another HCM package after a divestment, from software and vendor selection to a Phase 0, from support during implementation to after go-live support. SuccessDay is platform-agnostic and therefore provides independent advice and practical support before, during and after the transition to a new HRIT/HCM system.
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