Sysco: Creating One Global Foundation for People
In just 11 months, Sysco and Chapter Five Consulting delivered a complex global HR transformation across countries, functions, systems and time zones - creating a single foundation for the next generation of Sysco's people agenda.
Client Snapshot
Sysco Corporation is the world's largest distributor of food and related products to the food-away-from-home industry.
Founded in 1969 and headquartered in Houston, Texas, Sysco supplies restaurants, hotels, healthcare and educational facilities, and other foodservice businesses around the world.
At the time of our engagement in 2024, Sysco:
"Connecting the World to Share Food and Care for One Another." Sysco's purpose
Why They Are Awesome
What makes Sysco awesome is that every day, Sysco helps hundreds of thousands of restaurants, hotels, hospitals, schools and other organisations put food on the table. Behind that seemingly simple task sits an enormous global operation connecting suppliers, colleagues, distribution centres and customers.
At the heart of Sysco is a deep passion for its customers and a vibrant "foodie" culture that celebrates food, service, and the people who make it all happen.
That combination - huge operational complexity, a clear purpose and a genuine passion for food, service and people - made this a particularly exciting organisation for Chapter Five Consulting to work with.
The Challenge
Sysco was a global organisation, but its HR landscape was largely local.
Over time, individual countries had developed their own HR technologies, processes and support models. This created a highly fragmented environment, with a multitude of integrations across global and country-specific systems.
The impact went far beyond technology.
Employees in many countries had limited ability to self-serve or take ownership of their own data. Managers lacked consistent visibility of their teams. And HR and business leaders couldn't easily access an instant, reliable view of the organisation - whether globally or at a country level.
That made some of the most important people questions difficult to answer. Where is our talent? What skills do we have? Where are the gaps? What are our recruitment priorities? And what capabilities will we need for the future?
The fragmentation was also a barrier to Sysco's wider HR ambitions. Delivering a consistent colleague experience, introducing leading global processes, strengthening security and data privacy controls, and advancing the talent and future-of-work agenda all depended on having a stronger common foundation.
Growth added another dimension. When Sysco acquired businesses, bringing new colleagues into the organisation could be complex. Existing roles, jobs and pay grades within local systems weren't always visible ahead of an acquisition, making it harder to understand the people landscape and plan for integration.
The challenge wasn't simply to replace HR technology. It was to create the global foundation that would allow Sysco to better understand, support and develop its people, wherever they worked.
What They Needed
Sysco needed a global transformation that could bring its international businesses onto one common HR platform, Workday, while successfully taking people, processes and technology through the change.
The ambition was to create a simpler, more connected HR environment: replacing multiple in-house and third-party systems with a single global platform, consolidating integrations, and significantly reducing the complexity of the underlying technology landscape.
Sysco also wanted to create a leading colleague experience, giving employees greater ownership of their information and managers better access to the information they needed to lead their teams. HR and leadership needed powerful reporting and dashboards that could provide a much clearer view of the organisation, its people and its talent.
Processes also needed to become globally consistent without losing the ability to operate effectively in different countries. Common processes would provide the foundation, while role-based workflows and carefully designed local variations would accommodate genuine country requirements.
And with employee information increasingly held within one global environment, robust data management, security and GDPR compliance needed to be designed into the solution from the outset.
Most importantly, Sysco needed to bring its people with it.
Moving from established local ways of working to a global model represented a significant change for HR teams, managers and colleagues across multiple countries. Success would depend not only on designing and implementing the solution, but on preparing the organisation for what was coming, building confidence in the new model and driving adoption.
That required a genuinely global programme, combining strong client leadership, disciplined implementation and change management to turn the ambition into a solution that would work in practice.
Our Approach
Chapter Five Consulting provided an experienced client-side transformation team to support Sysco with the programme, including a Transformation Director, Testing Lead, Cutover Lead, Hypercare Lead, Data Lead and Integration Lead.
Our role was to create the structure, discipline and confidence needed to take a complex global transformation from design through to successful deployment.
Creating one integrated programme
We established a governance framework that complemented the implementation partner's methodology while giving Sysco clear ownership and visibility of delivery.
We created defined milestones, an integrated project plan and clear governance across the programme, with strong engagement from the CIO and CHRO through to the Steering Committee, global HR functional leaders, country leadership teams and third-party vendors.
Governance was designed from the outset to align with Sysco's internal and external audit requirements. Rather than treating assurance as an activity at the end of the programme, the necessary controls and evidence were embedded into the way the programme operated from the outset to ensure end of project audits were performed smoothly.
We also worked directly with Steering Committee members ahead of key meetings, providing coaching and guidance to help leaders understand the decisions required, challenge effectively and maintain momentum.
Connecting design to the colleague experience
Throughout design and build, the project team maintained a clear line of sight between technology decisions and the experience Sysco wanted to create.
Processes and requirements were continually tracked back to the relevant user journeys and change initiatives. This helped ensure the programme wasn't simply recreating existing processes in a new system, but designing towards the colleague, manager and HR experience Sysco wanted to achieve.
Testing earlier with the people who knew the business
We deliberately involved country and HR testers much earlier than a traditional testing approach.
Rather than relying primarily on the central project testing team before handing the solution to the business for User Acceptance Testing, local teams helped validate the solution as it developed.
This brought real operational knowledge into testing sooner, identified issues when they were easier to resolve and created greater familiarity with the solution before deployment.
The result was a reduced dependency on traditional late-stage UAT, fewer last-minute change requests and fewer defects emerging during the later stages of testing.
Treating cutover as a business event
Our cutover approach extended beyond the technical activities required to switch systems.
We considered the complete functional cutover: which existing HR services needed to start, pause, stop or change; when those changes needed to happen; who was responsible; and how the organisation would operate during the transition.
This created an integrated technical and business cutover plan designed around continuity for colleagues, managers and HR teams, not simply the moment the technology went live.
Getting the data right
Data quality was critical to trust in the new global platform.
The data workstream established the controls, validation and reconciliation required to migrate colleague information accurately into the new environment.
The production colleague hire load achieved 100% accuracy, providing a strong foundation for launch and confidence in the information colleagues and leaders would see from day one.
Building confidence in delivery
Across every workstream, Chapter Five Consulting's role was to connect the detail of implementation with the outcomes Sysco's leadership wanted from the transformation.
We brought together the implementation partner, internal teams, country stakeholders and third parties around one delivery framework, surfacing risks early, creating clarity around decisions and maintaining focus on what needed to happen next.
The result was not simply stronger programme governance. It gave Sysco's leadership confidence that a complex global transformation will be delivered successfully.
What Changed
The transformation created something Sysco hadn't had before: one global foundation for understanding, managing and developing its people.
For the programme itself, bringing Chapter Five Consulting into the team created greater confidence in delivery and clarity around every stage of the journey - what needed to happen, when it needed to happen, who was accountable and what successful delivery looked like.
For the wider business, the change went much further.
From line managers to people leaders
Managers now had the information, processes and tools to take greater accountability for their people.
This wasn't simply a different way of doing HR. It enabled a different way of being as a people leader.
With greater visibility of their teams, access to people insights and talent data, and clear ownership of people processes, managers could make better-informed decisions and take a more active role in developing their people.
People insights, now
The move to a common platform transformed Sysco's access to people information.
Instead of relying on fragmented systems, manual consolidation and locally held data, leaders could access live people analytics and reporting, creating a much clearer view of the organisation and enabling faster, better-informed decisions.
Recruitment pipeline visibility improved. Grades and pay bands could be better aligned. And Sysco gained the foundation needed to run succession planning, talent management and annual compensation planning in a consistent, digitally enabled way.
From individual countries to a European collective
Bringing Sysco's European countries onto a common HR foundation created an opportunity to think and operate differently across the region.
The organisation had the foundations to operate as a more connected European collective, while retaining the local processes required by individual markets.
That opened the door to European-wide transformation initiatives that would previously have been significantly more difficult to design and execute across a fragmented technology and process landscape.
Making change easier
A common view of people, roles, jobs and organisational structures also changed how Sysco could approach future acquisitions and divestitures.
Organisational changes could be modelled more quickly and with greater visibility of their people implications, creating the potential to reduce the time and complexity associated with integrating new businesses.
Compliance built into the process
Digital workflows, records and audit trails replaced many manual and paper-based processes.
Global standards could be embedded into common processes, while local requirements could be accommodated where necessary. This strengthened Sysco's ability to manage employee information appropriately, demonstrate compliance and respond to global and local HR regulatory requirements.
Reporting and remittances could also be produced more quickly from a stronger, more consistent data foundation.
A platform for what comes next
Perhaps the biggest change was what the programme made possible.
Sysco now had the foundation for a much more connected people agenda: better talent visibility, succession planning, compensation planning, recruitment insights, stronger people leadership and a more consistent colleague experience.
The transformation wasn't the end of the journey.
It created the platform for Sysco's next one.
The Impact
In just 11 months, Sysco and Chapter Five Consulting delivered a complex global HR transformation across countries, functions, systems and time zones, creating a single foundation for the next generation of Sysco's people agenda.
Impact at a glance
More than a successful go-live
The numbers tell an important part of the story, but the real impact was what they represented.
Sysco moved from a fragmented international HR landscape towards a common global foundation, while migrating 40,000 colleagues and 2.3 million records, simplifying the technology estate and delivering go-live with no outstanding critical, high or medium defects.
And it was delivered at pace.
In 11 months, the programme coordinated activity across 18 countries and 21 time zones, seven HR functions, local and global leadership teams, technology teams, implementation partners and third-party vendors.
For Sysco, the result was a simpler technology landscape, better access to people data, stronger global processes and new capabilities for colleagues, managers and leaders.
For Chapter Five Consulting, success meant something equally important: Sysco's leadership could have confidence in the journey, confidence in the data and confidence that the organisation was ready to go live.
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