Under significant time pressure, a global industrial group partnered with binder|consulting to design and implement a global job architecture that brought structure, transparency, and scalability to their Workday rollout.
- Manufacturing
- Industry
- EUR 10b+
- Annual Revenue
- 36,000
- Number of Employees
- 3 Months
- Project Duration
The Initial Situation
As a global leader in industrial truck and supply chain solutions began implementing Workday across the organization, urgency quickly set in. The project came with tight timelines and complex demands, leaving little room for delay — yet it also exposed a critical gap: while job families were structured, there was no consistent understanding of job levels and grades across the business.
Without this common framework, it would be difficult to configure Workday effectively or ensure that talent processes — from compensation to career progression — worked seamlessly on a global scale. The risk was clear: moving ahead without unified job definitions could undermine the value of the entire HCM transformation.
The organization recognized that the foundation for success had to be a robust, enterprise-wide job architecture — one that provided clarity, consistency, and alignment across all roles. But with the Workday project already underway, the new structure needed to be designed, validated, and implemented fast. Achieving this would allow the company to operate within a single, coherent framework and fully realize the value of its new digital HR ecosystem.
The Critical Challenges
The challenge was both ambitious and time-critical: to design a global job architecture and map more than 36,000 employees worldwide within a three-month period. The new structure needed to establish consistency across all regions and functions, while preserving the local flexibility essential to diverse operations.
Equally important, the job architecture had to go beyond structural alignment. It needed to enable effective career planning, support strategic workforce decisions, and create transparency across the organization. In short, the company required a scalable, future-ready framework that would connect people, roles, and business needs in one unified system.
How We Support the Client
To meet these ambitious objectives within the tight timeframe, we implemented a structured yet highly efficient approach. Leveraging the COLMEIA industry-specific standard job catalog and the proprietary Level of Work Matrix©, the team established a clear and consistent framework for defining seniorities, responsibilities, and decision-making levels across all functions.
A critical part of the process involved close collaboration with more than 150 HR Business Partners worldwide. Within just three weeks, these partners were guided through the initial mapping of existing jobs to the new structure, ensuring alignment and consistency from the outset.
The effort then expanded to encompass the entire workforce of 36,000 employees through an iterative mapping process. Each iteration not only refined the accuracy of job placements but also strengthened the quality and relevance of the job catalog itself, ensuring it reflected the organization’s real-world organizational nuances.
Throughout every stage, binder|consulting ensured that the core objectives — enhanced career planning, improved workforce transparency, and global coherence with local flexibility — were preserved. This disciplined yet adaptive methodology allowed the company to achieve a robust, scalable job architecture that was fully aligned with its Workday deployment and long-term talent goals.
The Impact Delivered
The project delivered a fully realized global job architecture of exceptional quality — one tailored precisely to the organization’s business structure, operational realities, and strategic expectations.
Within just two months, the team successfully mapped all 36,000 employees worldwide, creating a transparent and consistent view of the workforce. The resulting data set was structured and validated to meet Workday’s configuration requirements, enabling a seamless handover to the implementation team in time for the system’s go-live date.
Through this effort, the company not only accelerated its Workday deployment but also established a lasting framework for effective career planning, workforce analytics, and global governance — ensuring that the value of the HCM transformation would extend far beyond implementation.
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