The gap between central vision and local reality
After decades of growth through acquisitions, a major European food processing and supply chain company was operating with a fragmented HR landscape. Fifteen autonomous entities managed employee data and HR processes independently, resulting in limited workforce visibility, low transparency, and inefficient workforce planning, talent management, and resource allocation. Onboarding and offboarding employees and contingent workers also required extensive manual coordination across teams.
To address these challenges, the organization embarked on a transformation toward a mature, integrated HR function by implementing Workday as its new Human Resource Information System (HRIS). The objective was to create a single source of truth for employee and external workforce data and to standardize HR processes across all entities.
Beyond the HR transformation, the organization aimed to redesign user onboarding and offboarding around this new foundation, establishing future-proof processes aligned with the Network and Information Security 2 (NIS2) requirements. Lander Coene from TriFinance led this initiative as project manager, designing the new operating model and embedding it into daily operations.
His appointment reflected both his proven track record within the organization and his pragmatic, people-centric approach. By engaging directly with the teams executing the processes, he bridged the gap between group and local entities, ensuring that process redesign, implementation, and change management progressed hand in hand. An important element that was missing in previous IT-driven projects.
Establishing the HR foundation as a strategic prerequisite
The objective was clear: centralize employee records, unify HR processes, and establish an accurate, real-time view of the workforce. Implementing Workday was the baseline for two urgent external directives. Specifically, the organization needed to satisfy the cybersecurity mandates of the NIS2 directive, and prepare for mandatory Corporate Sustainability reporting.
Yet, previous group-led standardization attempts had consistently failed. The main barrier to improving HR maturity by implementing Workday and rolling out more mature onboarding and offboarding flows was not technological, but cultural. Local entities were strongly attached to established ways of working. They often saw central initiatives as impractical ‘mandates’ that disrupted their daily operations.
To fully land the change, it takes a pragmatic, people-first approach that grasps the local reality & concerns before further aligning it with the groups vision and strategy.
Change management as an architectural starting point
Overcoming this resistance required a fundamental shift in project execution. In the past, change management from the IT perspective was merely interpreted as traditionally Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) change frameworks to protect system stability. Now, the focus now had to shift to the people managing daily operations to have a successful implementation.
Lander recognized this friction from previous engagements with the organization. Under his guidance, the team fundamentally redesigned the project’s approach. Rather than imposing a corporate blueprint, the operational reality of the local entities became the starting point. Lander established a collaborative structure where local HR and IT managers were engaged from day one as active design partners.
Through joint workshops, the team mapped existing onboarding and offboarding workflows. This exposed differences in maturity, while creating shared ownership of standardized onboarding and offboarding processes.
Co-creating the joiner and leaver architecture
After mapping the fragmented onboarding and offboarding processes, the organization designed future-state workflows that leveraged Workday's centralized HR data to enable automated Identity and Access Management (IAM) and support NIS2 compliance. The new processes were developed based on the existing landscape, regulatory requirements, and architectural dependencies.
With guidance from TriFinance, local managers assessed the impact of the proposed Joiner and Leaver (JL) processes within their entities, identifying potential challenges and defining local implementation requirements. This collaborative approach ensured that ownership remained with the business, with entities actively shaping rather than merely adopting the new processes.
The assessments were used to resolve barriers and define licence access models, hardware provisioning rules, and approval workflows. These requirements were translated into detailed user stories covering all onboarding and offboarding scenarios and validated through local testing before deployment.
To minimize risk and build confidence, Lander Coene introduced a phased rollout approach. In February 2026, the solution went live as a Minimum Viable Product (MVP): Workday-generated events triggered service desk tickets for account creation and deactivation, while automated workflows generated requests for access rights, software, and hardware. This semi-automated setup allowed the organization to validate the new Joiner-Leaver (JL) processes in a controlled environment before progressing toward full automation.
Streamlining onboarding and eliminating compliance vulnerabilities
Following local validation of the MVP, full end-to-end automation was rolled out entity by entity, directly connecting Workday with local Active Directories. This sequential automation yielded immediate operational and compliance benefits.
Managers or HR colleagues no longer had to remember manual requests for joiners. Standardized onboarding forms were sent automatically. This gave IT teams early visibility of new hires. They could prepare the required access, hardware, and software before day one.
On the offboarding side, the automated workflow systematically eradicated the group's most critical NIS2 compliance vulnerability: former employees retaining system access after departure. Accounts and rights are now automatically revoked on the employee's exact last day of work. At the same time, software license management was fully optimized: software licenses are now dynamically allocated and revoked based on active roles, eliminating silent license accumulation.
A semi-automated MVP enabled local validation and built the trust needed for full end-to-end automation.
The true metric of successful integration
By prioritizing HR maturity and building automated compliance upon that solid foundation, the organization achieved a transformative milestone: establishing its first single source of truth for workforce data.
Today, the group maintains a consolidated, real-time dataset encompassing 8,000 employees and contingent workers across all 15 international entities completely in sync with their Active Directory. This accurate workforce baseline not only streamlines daily on- and offboarding operations, but also directly supplies the verified data required for CSRD reporting.
The ultimate takeaway from this transformation is that technical compliance and group-wide integration in a decentralized enterprise succeed only when human adoption and local ownership are cultivated with the exact same rigor as the IT architecture itself.
