InterContinental Hotels Group boosts global reach and satisfaction with DXC

DXC Technology significantly increases HR efficiencies

InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), a global hotel company, headquartered in the UK, chose DXC Technology to manage its Workday HR Service Center.

As a result of consolidating and standardizing HR services, IHG is seeing lower service costs, reduced operational costs, greater efficiency, and increased employee satisfaction. IHG’s purpose is to create “Great Hotels Guests Love”, but making this a reality requires listening to both guests and colleagues, as well as nurturing a culture that caters to their needs. IHG understands that people who feel valued are more likely to provide great service to hotel guests.

To that end, IHG chose DXC to handle its critical Workday-based HR functions and equally important HR call centers for employees. Prior to its DXC engagement, IHG’s HR functionality was a complex mixture of 10 different systems; a result of cost driven strategy and a need to deliver payroll.

According to Leon Kenny, Director, Global HR Shared Services, IHG, it typically took several weeks to do a simple employee headcount report from these disparate systems, even after developing a data warehouse to speed up the process. There were no best practice processes or global standards, so IHG decided to implement Workday as a standard HR system, and then engage DXC to manage it. As a result, the same report can now be generated at the push of a button.

“As our company grew, we knew it was time to put in a standardized best-practice HR system,” recalls Kenny. “We evaluated a number of outsourcing vendor solutions and DXC was the ideal fit for what we wanted to achieve. We had just finished migrating our HR to Workday and were pleased to learn that DXC had a wealth of Workday certified experts and experience—a perfect match.”

At the time of IHG’s transition, DXC was at an advanced stage in its own implementation of Workday, to more than 150 countries. The size of this implementation proved DXC’s ability to achieve global scale and its team would be able to leverage their experience for IHG’s benefit.

DXC meets rapid go-live deadline

IHG required a vendor that could deploy a fully-functional Workday global call center, manage all HR transactions, implement best practice governance principles, and be highly flexible—within a three month deadline. One of the key requirements was flexibility and the need to ensure that IHG’s HR practices were responsive to employees’ needs. “Since DXC has a deep relationship with Workday it can be very responsive. DXC can also work directly with Workday when we have special case scenarios,” adds Kenny.

“We also found that DXC had the strongest quality improvement record, meaning they could take our business goals and do what was needed to meet, and constantly improve the quality of our processes and business outcomes.” DXC lived up to its promise and was managing global HR for IHG within three months.

Over 21,000 people supported

DXC currently manages Workday based HR for 180 IHG hotels and has implemented best practice, standardized processes, to create a platform to facilitate new hotels as they come into IHG’s system. Having HR rolled into one system has also resulted in significant savings and efficiencies for IHG.

Kenny added, “The real value-add for us, is the flexibility that DXC brings; the real ownership they take of outsourcing tasks. For example, if a colleague calls into the DXC-managed center with a non-standard HR question, they are able to provide an answer responsively on each occasion. We really want our people to feel valued. One year and 63,000 employee calls later, DXC is getting high marks doing just that.”

The scope of the DXC service includes 21,000 employees across three regions, with full scope support for six main countries and Workday support to corporate employees from nearly 70 more countries. IHG is one of the world’s leading hotel companies. It manages more than 4,900 hotels with 724,000 rooms in nearly 100 countries. The great majority of these are franchised properties that currently take care of their own HR.

DXC Technology now manages HR and call center activities, with a standard solution making it far simpler and more efficient to migrate new managed hotels in the US and UK. “DXC offers a true global reach,” explains Kenny. “Through DXC, we now have DXC best shore centers in Poland, Costa Rica, India and China, with the ability to handle each region and local languages. We know with DXC, we can offer support anywhere in the world.”

Building a standardized HR global delivery model

When asked about specific benefits achieved through working with DXC, Kenny emphasizes that standardizing and setting up flexible best practice processes has significantly cut costs while at the same time greatly increasing efficiency and productivity.

“IHG has received a lot of benefit from the DXC solution,” he concludes. “I consider the biggest benefit to be the ability of our DXC teams to understand, improve and streamline our business outcomes. DXC has really aligned itself with our business aspirations and challenges.”