An HRIS decision shapes how an organization operates for years. The difference between a good decision and a costly one comes down to the quality of the evaluation process. Our client, a financial services company operating across 19 legal entities wanted to make the right call, and ensure the investment would pay off for years to come.
- Financial Services
- Industry
- Industry
- 19
- Impacted Legal Entities
- ~ 2,000
- Number of Employees
- 6 months
- Project Duration
The Initial Situation
Our client's existing HRIS had reached end of lifecycle, and the clock was running. What made this situation different was that the end-of-lifecycle announcement had already prompted a prior engagement: before the software selection began, we had been brought in to analyze the client's HR IT architecture from the ground up. That project produced a clear picture of the existing landscape, its fragmentation, its missing integrations, and its structural risks - along with a concrete set of guiding principles that defined what a future-proof HR IT setup needed to look like.
The picture that emerged was sobering. The fragmented landscape and missing system integrations had created significant manual effort across core HR processes. A complex authorization concept had grown organically over the years, adding administrative overhead that was difficult to manage and even harder to unwind. Beyond the day-to-day operational challenges, the organization also faced the additional pressure of pending SAP component changes that needed to be considered as part of any future integration design. At the same time, only very limited internal resources were available, leaving little room to absorb additional risk.
By the time the software selection project started, the architectural thinking had already been done. What remained was to translate that clarity into a structured, objective selection process - and to find the solution that best fit the client's specific requirements within that framework.
The Critical Challenge
The challenge was not simply to replace an old system, but to identify the right HRIS/ HCM solution. The existing solution had reached end of maintenance, and finding a new system was extremly urgent. But the urgency of the situation could not come at the cost of precision. As the client's processes were highly specific, standard solutions needed to be able to address those at the very least through viable workarounds. That meant requirements needed to be thorouhgly understood, sharpened, and exactly documented to address the organization's need before any vendor conversation could be held.
The bar for the right solution was therefore high. It had to be a modern, SaaS-based cloud system capable of genuinely addressing the underlying issues - reducing manual effort, enabling proper integrations, and delivering the standardization and scalability the organization needed for the long term. Not a quick fix, but a deliberate step forward.
How We Supported the Client
We built the selection process on the foundation established in the prior HR IT architecture project. Starting from the guiding principles already defined, we ran stakeholder workshops with HR and IT to understand what the organization expected from the future software on a day-to-day basis and at a strategic level - and used those insights to draft an initial requirements catalog. This draft was then systematically enriched: Drawing on the binder|consulting service catalog, we mapped the client's complete HR process landscape, categorized every process by business relevance through an ABC analysis, and derived the functional requirements from the processes that mattered most. Alongside this process catalog, we also analyzed automation potential, augmentation opportunities, and likely AI-in-HR use cases to ensure the future HRIS would support not just today's processes, but the next wave of HR digitalization.
The catalog was then extended with technical and non-functional requirements - covering areas such as integration capability, performance, and security. This step ensured that the evaluation captured the full picture of what a modern, enterprise-grade HRIS would need to deliver in the client's specific environment.
An initial round of market discussions narrowed the field before three vendors were formally shortlisted. Those three were then evaluated in detail against all customer-specific criteria - covering functional fit, integration complexity, implementation effort, scalability, and long-term strategic sustainability. Based on that analysis, we developed three concrete scenarios, each transparently showing how the respective solution would integrate into the existing HR IT landscape and what the technical, functional, and organizational implications would be.
The Impact Delivered
The project delivered a clear, decision-ready scenario analysis and a concrete recommendation for the future HRIS/ HCM direction. From the outset, the work was consistently oriented around the client's four central objectives: efficient processes, standardization, automation, and a modern HR workspace. The resulting requirements catalog and vendor evaluation fully mapped the entire HR IT landscape and accounted for all strategic requirements.
The three scenarios developed gave leadership a clear, traceable decision-making basis - making the real trade-offs visible and linking each option directly to the client's operational needs, integration requirements, and long-term goals. The outcome was not just a software recommendation, but the confidence to make one of the most consequential HR technology decisions in years with clarity and conviction.
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