As part of Quest Experience Week Cloud Day, Mike Urgo from Sinclair Broadcast Group and Mike Spalding from Yum! Brands shared their Oracle HCM Cloud customer success stories. They spoke about their companies’ journeys with Oracle HCM Cloud, benefits they’ve noticed, and advice that they have for other customers who are interested in transitioning to HCM Cloud.

Sinclair Broadcast Group

About Sinclair Broadcast Group

Sinclair Broadcast Group is one of the largest and most diversified television broadcasting companies in the country. They have 191 television stations, 601 channels, and 89 U.S. markets. The company currently has 9,000 employees and is always growing. Sinclair Broadcast Group was on Oracle EBS from 2003 to 2017 but decided to make the move to Oracle Fusion Cloud. They went live with HCM, Finance, Payroll/Time and Labor, and Supply Chain in July 2017. They later went live with Performance and Talent in April 2018.

Why Oracle HCM Cloud?

Oracle HCM Cloud stood out to Sinclair Broadcast Group because of its value, versatility, future capabilities, and the fact that it provided a single, unified platform for the organization. The benefits of Cloud that Sinclair Broadcast Group has noticed after implementation include the consistent improvement, single, unified platform, and easy employee access—making this a true Oracle Cloud customer success story.

Advice for Others

Mike shared a few pieces of advice that Sinclair Broadcast Group wanted to share with other customers who are interested in transitioning to Oracle HCM Cloud.

• Have a realistic understanding of your employee, technical support team, and functional support team’s capabilities.
• Take the time to plan out your change management, and know what you can do to help immediately vs. long-term.
• Be open to changing processes and configurations to meet the needs of the business and get the most out of the product.
• Have patience.

Yum! Brands

About Yum! Brands

Yum! Brands is the parent company to KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. The company is based in Louisville, Kentucky and has over 45,000 restaurants in more than 140 countries and territories. Yum! Brands has approximately 20,000 active, salaried and hourly employees at their U.S. brand restaurants. Yum! Brands’ corporate team consists of roughly 1,000 active, salaried and hourly employees and 1,500 active, global, non-US employees.

Yum! Brands first implemented PeopleSoft in 2005. Their on-premises system, running on 8.8, became highly customized over the years. In late 2014, the company made the decision to retire their legacy mainframe system. Quest members can read the full Yum! Brands whitepaper here.

Project Scope

The decision to move to Oracle HCM Cloud came around early 2016. Its modern functionality and continuous improvement model have enticed Yum! Brands. The project kicked off in April 2016. Phase 1 of the project was implemented in July 2017, and Phase 2 of the project just went live this month. The decision to split the project into two phases was in hopes of increasing buy-in in Phase 1 and ensure the success of the initial project.

Phase 1 of the project was to implement Oracle HCM Cloud for Yum! Brands’ U.S. corporate team. Those 1,000 active, salaried and hourly employees and 1,500 active, global, non-US employees are a smaller, more controlled group to test the project on in comparison to the 20,000 active, salaried and hourly employees at KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. Phase 2 is when the Cloud project is implemented for all of the restaurant employees. In addition to the 20,000 active employees, Yum! Brands is converting all terminated employee, anyone who has received compensation since January 1, 2018, data as well.

Initially, the plan was for Yum! Brands to roll out Oracle Cloud for both Financials and HCM. However, they later decided to transition to JD Edwards for Financials and move to Cloud for only HCM. There are still a few Financials modules that are being implemented in the project to support the Payroll module. They are also one of the first customers to implement HCM Cloud Help Desk. The Oracle Cloud modules that Yum! Brands chose to implement include:

• Core HR
• Payroll
• Compensation
• Benefits
• Time and Labor
• HCM Cloud Help Desk
• Absence
• Expenses
• Accounts Payable
• General Ledger
• Cash Management

Why Oracle HCM Cloud?

Yum! Brands decided to move to Oracle HCM Cloud for several reasons. The PeopleSoft system that they had implemented in 2005 became highly customized, and it was hosted on unsupported mainframe hardware. Their platform didn’t support key security requirements like data encryption around people and finance data.

Moving to Oracle HCM Cloud seemed like the best choice because of Yum! Brands’ business need for an agile, shared compute solution to support their organization. Cloud also offered a significant cost reduction and improved system agility and health.

Benefits of Cloud

Yum! Brands noticed several benefits after implementing Oracle HCM Cloud that makes this an Oracle Cloud customer success story. Some of these benefits include:

• A continuous improvement model for business that puts patching and releases on a known schedule
• Continuous roadmap development from Oracle
• Oracle’s significant current and future investments in the product
• Reporting functionality
• Ground floor of Cloud growth—SaaS solutions are the future
• Modern look and feel for users
• Mobile functionality
• Redundancy reduction through system functionality

Keys for Success

Mike identified several components that lead to the success of Yum! Brands’ Oracle HCM Cloud project.

• Executive buy-in/sponsorship established: A strong sponsorship leads to faster buy-in from customers and functional partners. That buy-in is a crucial part of project success.
• Challenge consultants: Consultants have a lot of knowledge from past experience, but every company is different. Engage and partner together to help them understand your business. At the end of the day, you are the one who owns the system. If you don’t agree with something a consultant suggests, don’t be afraid challenge them or get a second opinion. Once the consultants are gone, you’re the one that has to answer to your customers.
• Know your data and data owners: It’s important for you to understand what data you need to take with you into Cloud. Consultants may suggest that you don’t need something, but you might disagree. You know what’s necessary to make your employees and organization work best.
• Plan accordingly: It is better to configure rather than customize. Remain future-focused, and refrain from rebuilding your current solution when you have the opportunity to create new solutions with Cloud.
• Resource functional partners: There will be times when things are tight, and you need answers or completed actions. If you don’t have properly resourced functional partners, it’s going to put you behind. As you put together your team, make sure you have functional partners that are dedicated to your Cloud implementation project.

Read abut eight more key lessons Yum! brands learned working with Oracle HCM Cloud.