Orica to set new workforce systems live in Australia in July

Orica will go live with a new payroll and workforce management system in Australia in July, the “biggest and most complex country” being migrated under a multi-year transformation.

(L-R) Matt Stewart and Stacey Brewer , both Orica, with Deloitte's Mark Bateson. (Image credit: Dayforce)

The ASX-listed mining and infrastructure solutions provider chose Dayforce as the foundation of its new global HR system in early 2023, with Deloitte engaged to assist with the implementation.

It was live in 13 countries by this time last year, and has since doubled that to 26 countries out of 48 that will ultimately move.

A further three countries are on track to go live in July, including Australia, where Orica is headquartered, senior manager of project delivery Matt Stewart told the Dayforce Summit in Melbourne.

“This is not just a systems implementation,” Stewart said.

“For us, this is a full-blown HR transformation. We’re transforming our processes, our operating model and the way that the entire payroll function really operates day in and day out. 

“We’re also introducing really significant changes for our business. [Payroll] was an incredibly manual and paper-based process that we had across our business from a workforce management perspective, and now we’re digitising and systemising that in a really significant way.”

Success after three attempts

The global program is about two-and-a-half years in, with 15 months or so left to run.

It’s the fourth time in a decade that Orica has tried to standardise its global payroll, albeit this time it is being touted as a success.

Vice president of HR operations Stacey Brewer said that previous attempts had built a business case around cost savings, whereas the Dayforce program is more about mitigating risk.

“What was really obvious to us is this is totally a risk story,” Brewer said.

“It's not to say we weren't compliant or that we weren't paying accurately: we just have no idea whether we were or we weren’t, and it was really hard to try and get a sense of that quickly to give the rest of the business peace of mind that that was happening.”

Prior to Dayforce, the last attempt at a payroll consolidation business case was attached to Orica’s 4S program to set up an SAP S/4HANA core, supported by SAP add-ons.

“They were in the middle of a big SAP implementation when I first joined,” Brewer said.

“They had tried to push for a payroll consolidation business case as part of that - unsuccessfully - and ultimately broke that up into a regional attempt at different business cases to do it. 

“What they succeeded at was one of those getting up, which was [for a consolidation] across Asia Pacific.”

But Brewer said when she joined, Orica tasked her with establishing consistent controls across the global payroll landscape, spanning “34 different systems and vendors across 40-plus countries.”

“My job was really trying to work with every single one of those to bring some control and compliance into that landscape because it was just so unruly.”

This led to a resuscitation of the business case for a global standardisation program, which in turn led to the selection of Dayforce to provide the technology and Deloitte as the systems integrator.

Key results so far

One of the design features of the new platform is a “unified employee experience”, so that regardless of the country or its backend payroll software, all employees and their line managers are presented with “the same experience” for payroll processing, booking leave and other HR-related requests.

As more countries are brought onto the global system, the ability for HR to understand and report on various metrics is vastly improved.

“Some of the benefits we’ve seen are around data transparency,” Stewart said.

“We can now at the click of a button go in and see where people are clocking in, what time they’re clocking in, get overtime reports and leave liability reports anywhere in the world at the click of a button. 

“That is just a huge paradigm shift for Orica. Before, we couldn’t even get that information for most countries.”

Change lessons from 4S

The project is running to schedule - something the project team has particularly stayed very focused on.

"I’ve never worked on a project that’s stayed as close to schedule as this project has, and it’s been so important to the success of this project because people fatigue," Brewer said.

"There’s a long leadup to these go-lives, there’s a lot of energy that goes into it, and if it moves out, that pushes that energy to its absolute limits and there’s a point where it has diminishing returns from that. The money factor also starts to play on [the project] as well.

"As people come onto the project in different countries we’ve been really clear: we don’t move the timelines. We try and look at everything else that can happen in and around that.

"Obviously, we’re not wanting to go live at all costs, but it’s the last possible option to move a timeframe."

Another factor in the company's success is owning and running change management internally, a lesson from previous technology projects.

“As an organisation, we learned a lot from the SAP implementation. There was a lot of criticism of the SAP implementation that the change management had been outsourced,” Brewer said.

While the scale of the HR transformation meant partners were still required, the company made a call that “change management … was better owned by us.”

“We set up our own change management team. They drive all of the change within the organisation, and I think that has helped a lot credibility-wise. It feels like there’s ownership of what’s been rolled out,” Brewer said.

“I think the criticism of what had happened previously was that it felt like something was being thrown at the business and all care and no responsibility was the critique of that. 

“We’ve managed that through owning the change management and I think that’s been really successful.”