Supporting Greenyard’s HR transformation journey

Over the past 40 years, global market leader in fresh, frozen, and prepared produce Greenyard has grown steeply both organically and via acquisitions. Not just in its home country of Belgium, but globally. Today, Greenyard buys and sells in more than 80 countries with over 10,000 employees. Previously listed on the stock market, Greenyard was subject to evolving legislations including the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the NIS 2 Directive, among others. To fulfil its obligations, Greenyard would need clear visibility of its people metrics across all operations. 

Greenyard took the opportunity to completely transform its HR operations. “Rather than start from an HR need, we were driven to transform by the need for compliance. This need and its solution offered us the chance to make HR more professional and more mature,” explains Sam Duchateau, Group HR Transformation Lead with Greenyard. To help it take on that challenge, it turned to PwC for help.

“PwC not only understood Greenyard and the context in which we operate, but has a strong track record in HR transformation experience—something we confirmed by talking with PwC clients who’d been through similar processes. The firm understood which challenges we’d face and how we could best tackle them,” Sam Duchateau notes.

Greenyard’s HR operations are highly fragmented with 120 different HR systems in 22 business units across 44 legal entities. Not only are there different systems, but different ways of working and different levels of maturity. As a result, “data quality was a real issue,” Sam Duchateau recalls. He adds, “Which meant that auditing our numbers, which would be required by CSRD—Greenyard’s now back in scope for the legislation in two years—was next to impossible. We decided to realign and rethink our ways of working.” To enable that, Greenyard opted for a Workday implementation.

“The assignment was as much about change management and functionality as it was about implementing a new HR system. PwC proved to have the right cultural fit for Greenyard. With a global network, we had PwC boots on the ground, so to speak, in physical workshops, in the countries we needed it. Importantly, given the tight deadline we had, PwC brought in best practices from previous Workday implementations with clients in similar contexts and helped us implement what would work for Greenyard,” Sam Duchateau recalls. “The team was very pragmatic and adaptable to our needs,” he notes.

Previous client experience tells us that improving data quality is often a challenge in assignments like this. Something that Sam Duchateau admits Greenyard underestimated. “The PwC team was very open, honest, and clear on the challenge we’d face when it came to data quality. And they were right. We brought in extra resources and PwC helped us put a strong governance structure in place to gather data that would work in the vast majority of places. It was important not to get bogged down in the nitty-gritty and making sure it’d work everywhere so we could drive the project forward,” Sam Duchateau says. “Taking a phased approach, initial data collected was used in the first workshops to gain buy-in from Greenyard users in different entities. Meaning that rather than working with intangibles, participants were working with meaningful information, which helped make it much more real.”

Today, while it still has the same number of systems, Greenyard enjoys a single vision of HR across all its locations, significantly increasing efficiency. And the foundations have been set for a single system in the future. Sam Duchateau says, “it’s also helped us enhance our people experience by being able to introduce self-service, something previously unknown in many entities.” Now, when Greenyard makes an acquisition, with Workday and thanks to PwC’s implementation, it can integrate the company much more quickly and have visibility on its structure straight away. “With PwC, it was a true partnership. It wasn’t just about delivering a project, the team thought along with us and was really in it for the long run to help us get maximum value from Workday. We look forward to PwC continuing to support us on our transformation journey,” Sam Duchateau ends.