Ceridian has announced that Boston Market has selected Dayforce HCM. The solution will transform the management of the Boston Market workforce. The key benefits that Boston Market hopes to realise is in the complex scheduling and pay requirements that it has across its 450 locations and 10,000 staff. Boston Market is a food restaurant based on three fundamentals a fire, a spit and a chicken.
The solution will be rolled out across the US. It appears that the new Middle East branches, a restaurant recently opened in Kuwait are affected. This may be because that is part of a larger joint venture with Al-Ghunaim Trading Co. This partnership will develop Boston Market restaurants in Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Qatar, and Jordan. The hope is that at least 30 restaurants will open in the next few years.
So who lost out?
This is a good win for Ceridian as it was almost certainly a competitive tender. A blog by Rob Preston at Oracle covering the Q3 2016 financial results, cited Boston Market as an ERP cloud customer. There is an assumption that they didn’t selected Fusion HCM at this time. Even so as an Oracle ERP customer it might have expected to win further business.
Another loser was Infor, Boston Market use Infor Talent Science already and they may have hoped to expand their footprint at the company. The implementation is unlikely to replace either Talent Science or another application that the company uses: TalentReef. TalentReef is used for its recruitment and application tracking solutions (ATS). The cloud software is still in use to advertise the jobs available at Boston Market and it seems unlikely that Dayforce will replace it. It aims to deliver a personalised service with home cooked food.
So what are they using it for?
HCM teams strive to spend more time of assisting business leaders with strategy than administrative tasks. It is for this reason that DayForce HCM was selected. Boston Market hope to automate as many of the HCM tasks that they can. This will improve efficiency and should also ensure that the data collected is more accurate. In turn this data, when reported on, can deliver better insights in real time to the management team. DayForce will also assist with the complex pay and benefits system that has evolved at Boston Market. For employees it should make life easier, the advantage of a cloud based solution will ensure that access is anyplace anywhere using a mobile interface.
Boston Market is clear on some of the metrics they will use to measure time to value. They hope to reduce payroll processing time. With a single solution any legislative change is quickly implemented and its impact can be measured. The cloud based solution will also enable real time scheduling. With this they will no doubt hope to improve some of the Glassdoor scores. The current rating is 3.1, though this has been increasing over the last two years. Boston Market and Ceridian will hope that the implementation will further push that value higher.
Jason Lessman, Vice President of Human Resources, Boston Market commented: “Our commitment to our guests requires an equal commitment to our employees. We selected Ceridian as a business partner because Ceridian understood our business and our needs, and because the Dayforce HCM solution will help us to enhance our employee and guest experience.”
What does this mean
For Ceridian it is a significant win, especially considering the company has 10,000 employees. Larry Dunivan, Chief Revenue Officer, Ceridian commented: “Boston Market is the latest in our growing family of customers to recognize the benefits and efficiency of Dayforce’s integrated, single solution. By investing in usability, data fidelity and real-time HCM analytics, we’re helping organizations across the world reduce their administrative overhead, navigate complex compliance landscapes and make informed human capital management decisions that positively impact their business.”
The hard work is only just beginning though. It will be interesting to see what the case study on Boston Market reveals about the success of the solution. What is never clear is what an alternative vendor would have provided. As part of the procurement process it would be interesting to know whether Ceridian committed to delivering specific levels of savings in time. It’s unlikely, but in theory software vendors should be able to commit to doing so, especially if they have a significant number of customers in the same market.
While the Middle East Franchise is not using Ceridian, it will be interesting to see what they choose. As they build to 30 restaurants they will face similar challenges around scheduling. It will be interesting to see what solution they select. Ceridian do not list Middle East as a country they have a presence in, but it may be an opportunity to move into that market. They will face competition from companies the likes of Ramco, Infor, SAP and Oracle though in that region.