European Payroll and Time Transformation

The Challenge

Our client was undertaking a strategic initiative led jointly by HR, IT, procurement, and finance to harmonize payroll and time & attendance systems across its European operations. Following multiple acquisitions, the landscape was fragmented across 18 countries. The client had five different payroll systems operating in their Germany office and outdated T&A solutions in France and other regions. Workday was the corporate HR platform but did not provide European payroll services, necessitating integration with external providers. Because of this, there were critical integration gaps between systems, operational complexity, compliance concerns, and expensive integrations. The organization needed a standardized strategy while maintaining compliance across 18 countries and integrating with Workday as the enterprise platform serving approximately 8,900 employees.

The Solution

Oxford partnered with the client to develop the strategic foundation for its European workforce transformation. Our team assessed the existing payroll and workforce management landscape, aligned stakeholders across HR and IT, led the vendor evaluation process, and created a comprehensive implementation roadmap. We also delivered an integration blueprint, governance framework, deployment strategy, RACI matrix, and country-specific migration plans to support a phased rollout beginning with France and Germany.

• We defined the program strategy and target operating model following a full current-state assessment of the payroll and T&A landscape, which included 75 application instances, 55 unique products, and $2.39M annual TCO.
• We helped lead the end-to-end RFP process: authored the main RFP document, technical and commercial annexes, consolidated Bidder Data Annex, and vendor response workbook.
• Managed vendor selection with shortlisted bidders.
• Defined multi-country deployment roadmap and Wave 1 prioritization
• Drove compliance and risk remediation on legacy time & attendance systems, addressing data-protection exposure and end-of-life platforms in the UK and France

The Result

Oxford successfully delivered every project milestone on schedule while maintaining budget, scope, quality, and resources throughout the engagement. The team developed and published a comprehensive RFP, evaluated seven vendor responses, and helped narrow the field to two strategic finalists, providing the client’s leadership with the information needed to make a confident investment decision. By project close, the client had a validated European payroll strategy, a shortlist of preferred vendors, an implementation-ready roadmap, and a complete governance and deployment framework to accelerate execution of its multi-year transformation program. Client stakeholders praised Oxford’s expertise, collaborative approach, and professionalism, citing the engagement as a key milestone in advancing Wabtec’s European transformation.