Rentokil Initial kills off on-premise HR systems

It may be trying to market itself as a facilities management company, but Rentokil Initial remains committed to its core function: tackling public health issues by eradicating marauding creatures from domestic and commercial properties across the globe.

To keep all those rats, wasps and other pests in check, the firm currently employs 68,000 people in more than 50 offices worldwide – a huge challenge for the multiple, local human resources (HR) departments responsible for hiring, firing and distributing pay.

Such a large, distributed company has few centralised IT systems to support its activities, and this is one reason for it beginning to migrate many of its applications and services to the cloud.

Rentokil will soon deploy Workday's software-as-a-service (SaaS) human capital management (HCM) application for its human resource (HR) department, rolling it out to 400 managers by the end of March 2012 and 3,500 users across 17 countries during the next 18 months.

"Technology aside, this is a big change for us so we are taking a cautious approach," said Fergal Harkin, group HR operations director.

"From the HR perspective we are pretty light on [on-premise, licensed] apps – we have one standard, global database for the top 2,000 around the organisations, and the rest tends to be manual HR processes and an external payroll service provider."

Rentokil is not new to cloud services or SaaS, having previously migrated 20,000 employees across the globe to Google Apps and a works procurement application to Ariba.

"We are not doing SaaS because it's new, it was an independent decision made in a HR context," said Harkin.

"Rentokil had not invested in IT infrastructure over a number of years – we do not have integrated global networks able to host the apps ourselves and that was the trigger for Google Apps. Plus in HR, we have small, immature HR systems and SaaS helps us with both of those hurdles."

It was especially crucial that Workday could integrate with Rentokil's local payroll systems, many of which are proprietary and differ from one country to another; the systems included the Ariba payroll system used in the UK and Spain.