Stagecoach has selected Workday for its new HCR, payroll and recruitment solutions. The news comes only a few days after Infor announced that Stagecoach would invest in its EAM solution. This massive investment in digital transformation was probably enabled after Stagecoach sold its US bus division to Variant for £271 million.
Stagecoach has been going through some changes over the last few months. It was disqualified from participating in three rail franchise competitions: East Midlands, South Eastern and West Coast. That signalled an end to the railway business for Stagecoach with Stagecoach chief executive Martin Griffiths said: “We continue to focus on driving growth at our core high quality bus and coach operations in the UK, but we have no intention to bid for new UK rail franchises on the current risk profile offered by the Department for Transport.” (source Sky.com)
The company still has a majority of the UK bus and Coach market including Megabus. It is now looking to invest in the future with an eye to possible expansion overseas. Lesley Ashman, Group Change Director, Stagecoach commented: “Last year we kicked off a large transformation programme and we see Workday as the enabler. We are hoping to simplify a lot of paper-based processes, centralise recruitment, and reduce the complexity of our payroll, which currently prints over 1 million payslips each year. Workday will change that. It’s where we’ll capture everything in terms of how we want our business to operate; the structure, the processes, and who should be doing what.”
Why Workday?
The company still has 24,000 employees in the UK and operates 8,300 buses across 100 depots. It also provides tram and coach services across every region of the UK. Just as it plans to look after its fleet of vehicles with Infor EAM, Stagecoach is addressing the needs of its employees with Workday. With a single cloud solution spanning its entire workforce and HR operations it can standardize its HR operations. This will bring a consistency of approach across the organisation. Expansion overseas means it now has a platform that is easily expanded and already localized.
Ashman added “Workday was the obvious choice. One of the things that influenced our decision was the attentiveness of the vendors we shortlisted. We wanted to move quickly, and Workday stood out in terms of their confidence in the product, the depth of support, and the level of responsiveness.”
Who lost out?
This will be a blow to The Access Group, whose aCloud Recruitment Applicant Tracking System was implemented in 2017 at Stagecoach. Access this week strengthened its presence in the HR sector with the acquisition of CoreHR, too late possibly to compete on this bid.
It also sees the company move away from Oracle Payroll and, presumably, HCM which it was using in 2017. This will be a bigger blow to Oracle. Oracle seems to lurch from positive to negative news recently. Despite analysts predicting earnings growth of 1.5% year over year in Q3, The Irish Times reported that the company is looking to layoff 1300 people across Europe.
Peter Gamble, regional vice president, UK and Ireland, Workday commented: “We’re excited to be partnering with Stagecoach to help it adapt to a changing and demanding market. We’re helping Stagecoach to transform its operating model by removing complexity and unlocking the power of data across the business so it can make better and faster decisions based on real-time insights about its people.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
This is yet another win for Workday displacing Oracle in the private sector. The wins are mounting up. The momentum that it is gaining is something that Oracle and SAP may find hard to stop. Stagecoach is yet another well known brand to select Workday. Once implemented it will be an interesting case study. It has a lot of mobile staff. How they interact with the Workday system and the benefits the company gains could be significant.
There is, as yet, no obvious interaction between the Infor EAM solution and the Workday one. Both companies may now consider an alignment. There are some hurdles though especially if Stagecoach also looks to replace its finance solution. Both Infor or Workday will want to bid. However, whoever wins will need to integrate with the other. It presents an interesting coopetition situation. Both will argue that their integration is more important. It should make for an interesting bidding process.
