Urban Outfitters Case Study

3,000

Employees

Retail

Industry

UKG

Solution

Implementation

Service

About the project

A multinational lifestyle retail corporation, Urban Outfitters (namesake of the URBN portfolio) is dedicated to inspiring customers through a unique combination of product, creativity and cultural understanding. Found in 1970 in a small retail space in Philadelphia, Urban Outfitters now operates over 200 stores across the US, Canada and Europe.

In the UK and Europe, URBN employs around 3,000 people across their retail stores, distribution centres and head offices. They contacted Silver Cloud to implement new HR software for these teams, following an earlier succesful deployment across North America.

The challenge

With no central HR or payroll solution, the key drivers behind a new system were:

No centralised HR Information System (HRIS) platform in place and 12 different in-country payroll bureaus, leaving payroll processes fragmented
Poor quality of HR data due to these siloed processes
Increasing business complexity meant HR & payroll processes needed to be streamlined
They had recently merged accountancy functions which worked well so they wanted to replicate for HR & payroll.

After successfully rolling out UKG in North America, URBN were looking to replicate that success in their other markets but didn’t have the resource in-house to do so effectively. URBN also wanted to begin using a UK and EU payroll platform to streamline all payroll across their UK and Europe sites.

While they had the capability through their US teams, URBN recognised that they would need help navigating the UK and Europe markets including policies, legislation and terminologies. This is what led them to Silver Cloud for consultancy and implementation support.

The solution

Process mapping for success

After mapping the UK team's HR and Payroll processes and exploring the UKG platform, we advised that URBN's UK and EU teams take on its core HR functions but look to other UKG partners for recruitment and onboarding. Silver Cloud supported URBN in creating a RFI for recruitment and onboarding modules, ICIMS was ultimately selected globally rather than solely for the UK and EU.

The Client Transformation team at Silver Cloud also supported the UK HR Director in finding someone internal to act as Project Manaager by writing the job description and getting the new PM up to speed before configuration began.

Rapid roll-out and training materials

Since then, the project has gone from strength to strength, implementing UKG and the payroll platform within 6 months after struggling for a couple of years to make any progress.

UKG is now live with training materials created by our Silver Cloud team. These materials were created to help the UK and European teams familiarise themselves with UKG in an easy user-friendly way that fitted with URBN’s style. The training materials along with short videos have increased UK adoption so significantly to the initial rollout that they are now being replicated across other projects.

The future

Having rolled out UKG and the payroll platform in the UK, the URBN team and Silver Cloud are now excited about Phase 2 of the implementation, which will take these platforms to the EU.

In addition, the training materials created by the Silver Cloud team were such a success that URBN are now considering what other training materials Silver Cloud might be able to support on. We’re watching this space to see how this exciting fashion portfolio will be able to grow and support it’s team with their new systems. And we can’t wait to help them with what comes next.