Viva Energy completes greenfield HR setup in time for Coles cutover

Viva Energy has gone live with a greenfield HR and payroll system powered by Dayforce, enabling it to move off systems run by Coles inside of an allotted two-year window.

The company is home to 700 former Coles Express locations, and another couple of hundred OTR Group sites.

The combination of the two retail footprints has created “Australia’s largest fuel and convenience retailer”, general manager of retail technology, digital and transformation Jason McNamara told a recent Dayforce summit in Melbourne.

Under the Coles Express acquisition, Viva had two years to stand up its own core systems and “cut the cord” with Coles Group under the transition services agreement.

“We had a two-year window … to effectively separate what was a very highly integrated business that been part of the Coles Group for 20 years, unpicking that and standing that up as a standalone retail capability, particularly when a lot of the shared services – including finance [and] all the HR components – are all a single platform within Coles,” McNamara said.

“We didn’t get any of those systems as part of the separation.

“We had to build greenfield payroll, HRIS, workforce management, talent management, and a capability at that stage because no people came across with the acquisition, from scratch within two years.”

With the OTR acquisition also occurring in about the same timeframe, it was decided to migrate OTR’s operations from its HR stack onto the new Dayforce-based platform as well.

“When we acquired the OTR Group, we looked at the systems and processes they had there, and it’s fair to say the OTR Group had already recognised that they were coming to the limit of the processes and [the] seven bits of systems that constituted [its] HR landscape. There was no true HRIS,” McNamara said.

“When we looked at all of that, we said the only way to go forward is to go in boots and all, put the whole lot in [to Dayforce].”

Prior to being acquired, Coles Express had been running a HR stack that included SAP SuccessFactors and Kronos time and attendance for about four years.

However, McNamara said that despite the presence of the systems “within the stores, there were still a lot of manual processes that centred around manual forms being filled in by store managers.”

“The opportunity to [put a] digital capability in every team member’s hands with self-service was also a key [goal] for both parts of the business,” he said.

Given the project timeframes, Viva opted to stand up a minimum viable product (MVP) for Dayforce, tested with selected sites, before being expanded across the former Coles Express store network.

OTR was then brought onto the Dayforce system before the end of the last financial year.

McNamara noted that one of the complexities the transformation team faced was the people and culture (P&C) upgrade was one of six concurrent programs of work.

At the same time, the company was standing up other new systems for enterprise resource planning, point-of-sale, its data lake, and cloud services, among others.

For the P&C work, Viva worked with Dayforce and partner Pinpoint HRM, noting that everyone in the project team adopted a “one-team” mentality and singular focus to achieve cutover by the required deadline.

The project had an ‘amber’ rating for its entire duration, McNamara noted, “just because of the timeframes”.

“It was never going to be anything more than amber, because of the amount of stuff we were doing,” he said.

“The pivotal moment that put our mind at ease was when we actually processed that first payroll with the first pilot sites, and everyone got paid on time and compliantly.”

McNamara said that payroll also ran a lot more smoothly than it previously had.

He said that for site managers at retail locations, Mondays were formerly a “big panic day because [they] had to sign off all the timesheets for the previous week [to] close the payroll and do the test run by 4pm on the Monday.”

“What we can do with Dayforce now is that those timesheets can actually be signed off by the site managers during the week,” McNamara said.

“That was one thing we didn’t really realise the impact of until we went live. 

“The panic of signing off 700 stores’ worth of timesheets all on Mondays just went away. The only things that were being signed off on the Monday [related to what] happened on the weekend if they were working. 

“That in turn had a huge impact on our payroll team because instead of having this massive team that had to go and chase up and run around, all of that went away. 

“When you then multiply these productivity benefits by 700 stores… and then for stores in the OTR side of the business, this is a huge benefit.”