Case study: Workday migration and global process design at Arrive

The challenge

Rapid acquisition had left Arrive with a collection of businesses on different HR systems, covering payroll, HRIS, and time and absence systems. Around half the group was already on Workday. The task was therefore not a standard Workday implementation. It was part migration, bringing the remaining populations onto a single Workday tenant, and part optimisation of the existing tenant.

Underneath the system problem was a process problem. Arrive had minimal global HR processes, a legacy of its historical organic growth and acquisitions. Policies and ways of working differed by country and by acquired company, and the HR operating model was not built to absorb future acquisitions. Designing the processes that Workday would run was as much of the job as the migration itself.

There was also limited Workday expertise inside HR and IT, and the teams affected were geographically dispersed and culturally diverse. Adoption was as much of a risk as the technology.

They asked our sister company, Preos, to manage their migration to Workday and optimise the legacy Workday tenant. Recognising that processes needed to be reviewed as part of the migration and that change management support was required to ensure effective adoption, they asked Change Associates to help.

What we did

We provided expert change management support to the programme for around a year, embedded within the technical migration team, covering change, process design and adoption.

1. Defining how the programme would run

We worked with Arrive to set out the options for how the programme could run, and the trade-offs in each, before anything was committed. Given that half the group was already live on Workday, the sequencing question mattered more than usual: what to migrate, in what order, and what to leave alone until later.

2. Change strategy and plan

We built and ran the change strategy: impact assessment across the affected populations, stakeholder engagement, a communications plan, learning guides and delivery, and go-live readiness assessments.

Because the affected employees were in different countries and had joined the group through different acquisitions, engagement had to be tailored rather than issued centrally.

3. End-to-end global process design

We mapped current processes across the regions and designed the global workflows needed to support go-live, including joiners, movers and leavers.

This is the part that is easy to skip on a migration and expensive to address later. Standardising the process gave Workday something consistent to run and gave Arrive a set of processes that the next acquisition can be brought onto.

4. Close support for the HR team

For much of the HR team, all of this was new. We worked alongside them rather than around them, so that the knowledge stayed in the business after go-live.

5. Adoption after go-live

We delivered tailored learning after go-live for the HR team and the manager community, on the basis that a migration is only finished when people are using the system properly.

6. Optimisation, deliberately phased

We partnered with Arrive to set the optimisation strategy and timeline: hypercare, stabilisation and then optimisation, with priorities agreed rather than assumed.

Phase one of that plan is live, and includes increased manager and employee self-service. More changes are planned as part of a phased approach to support adoption by the business.

The result

• Over 4,000 employees migrated onto a single Workday tenant, on schedule and with low disruption, by February 2026.
• Aligned global HR processes in place to support the Workday processes, including joiners, movers and leavers.
• Improved data integrity and global reporting across the group.
• Tailored learning delivered after go-live to support adoption in HR and among managers.
• Phase one of the optimisation plan live, with manager and employee self-service scoped to match current data quality and process maturity.
• Continuing support on wider HR strategy as maturity builds.

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