Stephanie Ball speaks to Galliford Try to hear of the company’s shift from EBS to Cloud HCM and payroll with Oracle and eAppSys.
As Oracle users gathered to network at the UKOUG conference, ERP Today met with construction goliath Galliford Try to hear about its ERP, HCM, payroll and finance upgrade with Oracle – shifting from an EBS instance to the cloud.
Part of the FTSE 250, Galliford Try is a UK housebuilding, regeneration and construction group, pushing revenues of £2.7bn.
Upgrading a legacy partnership
Beginning the two-phase program, Dilpesh Patel, Oracle Cloud HCM and payroll program manager at Galliford Try, shares that sticking with Oracle was a “no brainer”, with Oracle APEX, EBS and sales cloud already in place from a decade-long partnership.
The HR and payroll upgrade started originally in 2021, and was ideally meant to complete in twelve months, before kicking off a more complex, full-core ERP shift.
However, this had to reset 17 months in, and the projects were delayed and converged due to SI switch-ups and internal acquisitions amongst other challenges.
In HR there were several complexities, such as different pension schemes, inconsistent employment terms and benefits, acquisitions and multiple payrolls. Even the method for calculating annual leave allowances also varied across systems – jumping from hours in the cloud to days in Oracle EBS.
As a result, the large volume of historical data also needed cleansing and completing from multiple sources including EBS, Taleo Learn and Recruit, as well as supplementary offline spreadsheets. Integrations with third parties additionally had to be considered, including BACS, HMRC, Fleet Management and Active Directory.
Combining the right resources
Galliford selected Inoapps as its implementation partner for ERP, due to its construction industry-specific product. While, for upgrading HCM and payroll, the implementation was shared between Oracle Consulting and eAppSys, as its data migration partner.
The project went live in September 2023, with Patel admitting the initial, “12 months was probably quite ambitious when you see what we had to do, with the finance side too.”
Now, going from recruitment through to onboarding in one system, the Galliford Try team says the experience is much better.
On the HCM and payroll upgrade, Patel says, “It’s been successful. Has cloud been adopted? Yes. We’ve had a lot of benefit, a lot of positive noise from our HR, from the business, through engaging in self-service. We’ve moved from manual timecard entry to self-service.”
A data management win
We’ve taken a huge leap forward in moving to the cloud – Sean Doherty, Galliford Try
One key win with eAppSys and Oracle Consulting was the application of the Data Management One tool for mass data cleansing and transformation.
Sean Doherty, Galliford Try’s HR process lead, worked on data migration during the project and explains: “For our Oracle Time and Labour, Oracle doesn’t have a mass upload facility that we needed to go live where we used spreadsheets. eAppSys developed that as part of their toolset and built it quite quickly – they saved the day for us. A brilliant partner to work with, they listened a lot and supported us.”
Migrating into multiple environments simultaneously, validating data and developing a configurated version control, Galliford has seen an over 97 percent success rate in data loads. The business can run multiple iterations to identify data issues and, for its payroll hours cutover, has brought two-week early iterations down to two days.
Next, Galliford will be utilizing that cloud data to gain business insights through analytics and reporting.
On the project as a whole, Doherty notes, “The whole user interface is much more modern, people can see that we’ve taken a huge leap forward in moving to the cloud.”
