Sysco: One Global Approach to Compensation
Sysco and Chapter Five Consulting replaced fragmented, country-by-country compensation planning with one global Workday-enabled pay review process - supporting 26,000+ colleagues across 14 countries and cutting the review timeline by 50%.
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, 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
For a global organisation like Sysco, annual compensation planning is anything but simple.
The starting point should be straightforward: who are our people, what are they paid today, and who is eligible for what? In practice, establishing a single, trusted snapshot across countries was challenging.
Changes to employee data continued right up to the planning cycle. Compensation, FTE, location, reporting lines and other employee information could all move, creating a constantly changing baseline from which to plan.
Eligibility added another layer of complexity.
Merit increases, bonuses and promotions could depend on a combination of country, employing entity, employee type, grade, hire date, leave status and other factors. Applying those rules consistently across a large international workforce required significant coordination and control.
At the same time, compensation itself remained inherently local. Salary review cycles, collective agreements, inflation practices, mandatory increases, allowances and local market conventions varied significantly between countries. Sysco needed to create global consistency without removing the flexibility required to operate appropriately in each market.
One global budget. Many local realities.
Budgeting introduced further complexity.
Corporate budgets could be established in one currency while managers planned in another. Foreign exchange assumptions, currency conversion and rounding created the potential for differences between local plans and consolidated corporate totals.
Budgets also needed to cascade through the organisation, from regions to countries, functions and ultimately individual managers.
As reorganisations took place and employees moved between teams, it could become difficult to determine who owned which employees and, therefore, who held accountability for the associated compensation budget.
The challenge was to create one controlled global compensation planning process that leaders could trust, while accommodating the very different rules, currencies, organisational structures and employment practices of each local market.
What They Needed
Sysco needed to move from multiple local compensation planning approaches to one global annual compensation process, enabled through Workday.
The ambition was to create a simpler, more controlled way to plan and execute annual pay reviews across the organisation, replacing disparate country processes and tools with a single global approach and one trusted source of people and compensation data.
Global consistency. Local flexibility.
At the heart of the programme was the need to establish globally consistent processes and eligibility rules.
Sysco needed a common framework for determining who should participate in annual compensation reviews and how pay decisions should be planned, calculated, approved and reported.
But global couldn't mean identical.
Countries still needed to accommodate legitimate local requirements, from employment legislation and collective agreements to market practices and specific eligibility rules. The solution therefore needed to create global consistency by default, with controlled local exceptions where they genuinely mattered.
One place to plan, decide and understand
Managers needed a simpler experience.
Rather than navigating different tools, spreadsheets and locally managed processes, they needed one place to understand their teams, see relevant compensation information, work within their allocated budgets and make informed pay decisions.
For HR and leadership, the same platform needed to provide powerful reporting and dashboards, creating visibility of compensation decisions, budgets and outcomes as the process progressed rather than relying on information being manually consolidated after the event.
Bringing the organisation with it
Technology and process design alone wouldn't make the programme successful.
Moving countries from established local compensation practices to a common global model represented a significant change for HR teams, leaders and managers.
Sysco therefore needed strong client-side leadership and implementation support throughout the programme, combined with change management that prepared the organisation for the new approach, built understanding of why it was changing and gave people the confidence to adopt it.
The goal was one global compensation process that was simpler to operate, easier to control and better for managers, while remaining flexible enough to work across Sysco's diverse international markets.
Our Approach
Chapter Five Consulting provided an experienced client-side team comprising a Project Manager, Testing Lead, Change Lead and Steering Committee Advisor.
Working alongside Sysco's Global Reward team and implementation partner, our role was to provide the structure, challenge and leadership needed to take the programme from design through to successful adoption.
Creating clarity and confidence in delivery
We established a governance framework that complemented the implementation partner's methodology while giving Sysco clear visibility and control of the programme.
Defined milestones, an integrated project plan and clear decision-making structures brought together the Global Reward team, country leadership, implementation partner and other stakeholders around one delivery approach.
Chapter Five also curated and led the programme's Steering Committee meetings. We worked with stakeholders ahead of each meeting to ensure the right issues were surfaced, decisions were clearly framed and leadership attention was focused where it could have the greatest impact.
This wasn't governance for governance's sake. It was designed to maintain momentum, resolve issues quickly and give Sysco's leadership confidence in delivery.
Testing with the people who would actually use it
Compensation is full of exceptions.
A process can work perfectly for the majority of employees and still fail when confronted with a particular combination of country rules, eligibility criteria, employee circumstances or compensation arrangements.
Our testing approach therefore focused heavily on process, eligibility and exception testing.
Rather than waiting until late-stage User Acceptance Testing to involve the business, Global Reward colleagues and selected pay planners participated in testing from the outset.
This meant the people who understood the process, and who would ultimately use the solution, were challenging it early.
Real-world scenarios and exceptions could be identified while there was still time to address them, helping to reduce defects emerging during the later stages of testing and building familiarity and confidence in the new process ahead of launch.
Understanding where change would really land
Moving to one global compensation process represented a very different degree of change across Sysco's countries.
Chapter Five conducted a detailed change impact assessment across seven countries in EMEA and APAC, identifying who would be affected, how their experience would change and where the greatest adoption risks sat.
That gave the programme a practical view of change at country and audience level rather than treating the organisation as one homogeneous population.
We worked closely with country HR leads, Global Reward, the global change and training teams and programme sponsors to translate those impacts into targeted actions.
One global change approach, delivered locally
Our Change Lead worked with Sysco's global change and training teams and individual countries to ensure adoption activity aligned with Sysco's corporate change methodology while being delivered consistently and effectively in each local market.
We developed the communications strategy and supporting communications for leaders, pay planners and the wider impacted population, ensuring different audiences understood what was changing, why it mattered, what was expected of them and when they needed to act.
We also supported the global training team with audience identification, scheduling and attendance tracking, helping ensure the right people received the right preparation ahead of the compensation cycle.
Making readiness measurable
As go-live approached, we brought delivery and change together through a structured go-live readiness assessment and checklist.
This created a clear view of whether the technology, process, countries and people were ready to operate the new compensation cycle.
Where adoption risks remained, they weren't simply recorded and left behind at go-live. Each was handed to a named owner with clear accountability through hypercare.
The result was an approach that treated successful delivery and successful adoption as the same thing, because a global compensation process only works when the people responsible for making pay decisions understand it, trust it and use it.
What Changed
The transformation gave Sysco something fundamentally different: one consistent global approach to annual pay review.
Countries that had previously operated through different processes, tools and timelines could now work within a common framework, creating greater accuracy, consistency, visibility and control for Reward, HR, leaders and pay planners across the organisation.
One process. Half the time.
The impact on the annual cycle was significant.
By simplifying and standardising the process through Workday, Sysco reduced the overall pay review timeline by 50%.
A single annual cycle with defined milestones meant approvals and pay-effective dates could be managed to a known schedule rather than being coordinated country by country.
A shorter, more predictable cycle meant less time administering the process and a clearer, more focused period for managers and Reward teams to make, review and approve compensation decisions.
One source of compensation data
Compensation data now sits within one system rather than being repeatedly re-keyed and transferred across spreadsheets.
This created a more accurate and controlled flow of information from compensation recommendation through to payment, reducing the opportunities for manual error along the way.
It also created a process that could be repeated year after year without rebuilding and reconciling complex spreadsheets, with an auditable record of decisions providing stronger governance and control.
Greater confidence in budgets
The new approach created much greater clarity around compensation budgets and how they were allocated.
Countries could understand the budgets available to them, while the structured process provided clearer accountability as those budgets were cascaded through the organisation and ultimately allocated by pay planners.
This gave local teams greater confidence in the numbers they were working with while providing Global Reward with stronger oversight of the process.
Seven countries. One language.
All seven countries now followed a common process and used consistent compensation terminology.
That meant recommendations could be made on a more comparable basis across EMEA and APAC, while genuine local requirements could still be accommodated where necessary.
Clearer global eligibility rules also reduced the number of exceptions that needed to be managed outside the standard process, making annual compensation planning easier to understand, administer and control.
Visibility while it matters
Reward and HR leaders gained visibility across countries during the compensation cycle, rather than waiting for locally managed files to be completed, consolidated and reconciled.
That meant leaders could understand how the cycle was progressing, see emerging outcomes and identify areas requiring attention while there was still time to act.
Better pay transparency
The transformation also created greater transparency around how compensation decisions were made.
Managers had clearer information, budgets and processes to support their decisions. HR and Reward teams had greater visibility of the overall cycle. And a more consistent approach created greater clarity around how colleagues participated in the annual pay review process.
The result was a compensation process that was faster, more accurate, more consistent and more transparent, giving Sysco a reliable and auditable process that could be repeated year after year, and giving global and country teams greater confidence in one of the most important people processes of the year.
The Impact
Sysco successfully created a single annual compensation process at significant international scale, supporting 26,000+ colleagues across 14 countries and markets.
The programme combined global process design with extensive testing, data assurance, country engagement and change management to create a compensation cycle that was faster, more consistent and repeatable year after year.
Impact at a glance
More than a faster pay review
The impact wasn't simply that Sysco could complete its annual compensation cycle in half the time.
A single process gave Global Reward greater visibility across countries while providing local teams with clearer budgets, consistent eligibility rules and a more predictable annual cycle.
Extensive testing helped ensure the solution worked not just for the standard process, but for the country-specific rules and employee circumstances that make global compensation complex.
And with compensation data, recommendations and approvals managed through one platform rather than repeatedly transferred between spreadsheets, Sysco created a more accurate, controlled and auditable process.
For managers and pay planners, that meant greater clarity and confidence when making compensation decisions.
For Reward and HR leadership, it meant greater visibility while the cycle was happening, not after it had finished.
And for Sysco, it created a global compensation process that could be repeated, governed and improved year after year.
26,000+ colleagues. 14 markets. One global process. 50% faster.
Get in touch
Have a transformation project you'd like to talk about? Get in touch to talk about your project.