Explore Purolator’s journey with SAP
Integrated freight, package, and logistics provider Purolator Inc. is dedicated to the people who have helped it deliver on its mission for more than 60 years. To create greater organizational agility and better employee experiences, Purolator is on the way to a complete digital transformation of finance and HR with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition and the SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central solution.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Travel and transportation | Mississauga, Canada | 15,000 employees |
finance system on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, consolidated from three systems previously.
organization-specific processes automated.
HCM Lead, Future ERP Transformation Project, Purolator Inc.
Moving legacy ERP and core HR to the cloud for business transformation
Purolator Inc. is Canada’s largest courier, freight, and logistics company. For more than 60 years, Purolator has continuously raised the bar for supply chain solutions. Today, it relies on a network of 15,000 employees to meet the increasing needs of the country’s businesses by delivering packages to, from, and within Canada.
“Our executive staff and president are passionate about the people in our organization,” Tennyson Devoe, vice president of talent, learning, and safety at Purolator, says. “They are focused not only on creating opportunities for growth and development within our company but also on serving a higher purpose, which is to make Canada stronger by helping businesses deliver on their promises and be successful.”
People are at the heart of Purolator’s mission and success. The company wanted to strengthen its commitment to employees with a transformation of its finance, HR, and employee experience technology. Purolator’s leaders believed a new, modern HR strategy would better reflect the company’s values and culture.
Specifically, Purolator was increasingly challenged by an aging and sprawling technology infrastructure that could not keep up with the rapid pace of change in the industry and growing employee needs. To change any business process, Purolator would need its experts to spend countless hours creating custom solutions. These experts became the only employees who could understand the company’s complicated technology, and their expertise could not be easily transferred to other workers – a challenge that put the business at risk. Eventually, the company wound up with three different systems for core business processes.
So, Purolator planned to upgrade from its on-premise finance and HR systems with a move to the cloud. It hoped that connected, cloud-based ERP and HR could drive business transformation forward for the sake of employees and the future of the company.
With the right cloud technology, Purolator’s leaders imagined that the possibilities were endless.
Chief Human Resources Officer, Purolator Inc.
Streamlining digital experiences across the employee lifecycle
Purolator chose SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition and SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central to create a foundation for its new cloud-based business and HR strategy. Four main drivers led the company to this decision: establishing data centricity, improving time to market, integrating and streamlining business processes, and enabling business continuity by mitigating technological risk.
SAP and Purolator are both dedicated to people sustainability, a growing trend among responsible enterprises. People sustainability requires that businesses treat people and their potential as their most precious resource. With SAP SuccessFactors solutions, Purolator is better prepared to support people sustainability by building a diverse and inclusive workforce. The solutions help the company collect important metrics for reporting and empower it to train employees on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Purolator can continually monitor DEI information for new hires through performance management, succession, and development, as well as analyzing turnover data for trends.
Purolator has chosen SAP solutions since 2003, when it implemented its on-premise finance system. The company began its journey with SAP SuccessFactors solutions in 2008 and has implemented several SAP SuccessFactors solutions spanning employee learning, recruiting, onboarding, performance and goal setting, as well as other aspects of the employee experience. The ongoing transformation project will introduce SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central as an upgrade from the SAP ERP Human Capital Management solution. The company will also implement the SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Service Center solution, SAP Time and Attendance Management application by WorkForce Software, and SAP Enable Now solution. SAP Enable Now provides self-guided help for users directly in SAP solutions.
Using SAP Business Technology Platform, Purolator is building two applications to eliminate manual processes and further smooth experiences for employees. These include a vacation bidding application and a wage determination app that helps determine an employee’s rate of pay based on several employment factors that can change from day to day.
All along the way, SAP Preferred Success services provide the company with access to SAP experts during the planning and implementation of its new solutions.
“There have been numerous cases when we’ve called on SAP Preferred Success services, and they’ve been critical to the project. Our regular meetings with the team keep us on top of new releases and help with issue resolution,” says Doug Patzelt, HCM lead for the future ERP transformation project at Purolator.
The company’s new and existing SAP SuccessFactors solutions will integrate with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition to enhance the employee experience with a powerful range of self-services. At the same time, SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition provides intelligent ERP for core business operations, including finance.
Vice President Talent, Learning, and Safety, Purolator Inc.
Bringing HR, IT, and finance together for the future of work
Purolator’s digital transformation brought together the company’s HR, IT, and finance teams to establish a new software foundation that works across the entire organization. By working together, these teams were able to help make the transformation a success, and their partnership will continue to support Purolator well into the future.
After the transformation, the company will use SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central as the common people data model, serving as a single source of truth for all downstream systems. SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central will provide a single access point that eliminates the need for multiple logins and passwords. The single access point helps the company gather reporting information from virtually any system across the organization, providing tremendous reporting possibilities not easily available in the past. It also empowers the company to quickly grant or revoke access when employees are hired or leave the business.
Employees will be able to take advantage of new HR self-services as part of this harmonized experience. By moving to the cloud, Purolator is reducing its HR systems to just one integrated system across operations in Canada and the United States. This provides employees and managers with better self-service tools, reduces dependence on internal IT resources, and increases reporting and analytics capabilities.
“The industry has rapidly changed, and we want to be able to evolve with the times,” says Patzelt. “SAP SuccessFactors solutions will help us stay ahead of the curve and outperform with our employee experience.”
The digital transformation will build upon improvements the company has already made to the employee experience with other SAP solutions, such as Employee Experience Management (XM) solutions from SAP and Qualtrics. Pulse surveys from XM solutions from SAP and Qualtrics empower Purolator to gain real-time insight into employee sentiment and support DEI goals.
Want to know more about Purolator?
Purolator: Enhancing Employee Experience by Moving HR to the Cloud (Purolator Video)
Enabling Rapid Growth by Supporting Workers Across the Employee Lifecycle (Online Customer Story)