When implementation issues clashed with business needs, Wyndham Hotels needed team players with real-world experience who knew how to use their technical expertise to achieve management's business objectives. Wyndham chose the CDG edge.

Situation: When they decided to migrate from ADP to an in-house HR information system, Wyndham Hotels & Resorts chose ADP's HRizon. They intended to manage the conversion in-house, but after a year's effort, project manager Robert Brunson decided expert help would be cost-effective. He called CDG. Then things really got interesting!

Back-to-back acquisitions radically changed the scope of Wyndham's project:

• Instead of converting from a single system, there were conversions from multiple incompatible systems!

• The number of properties to be converted increased 458%!
• The number of affected employees increased 312%!
• Product specialists told Wyndham that a phased implementation allowing free transferability was now impossible: as sites went live, employees could no longer transfer to non-live sites because records couldn't be integrated.

Solution: CDGers evaluated the situation and rejected "impossible." They focused on Wyndham's business objectives and made sure every phase of the implementation—timing, training, and transferring critical knowledge—meshed with management's business needs.
• CDG developed tools to automate data transfer from multiple legacy systems.
• Then they developed additional tools and procedures to do the impossible—transfer employees between live and non-live sites while managing all their records pending project completion.

When the conversion threatened to bog down because benefits data had to be loaded manually, CDG's on-site expert developed a tool—now a valuable addition to CDG's knowledge-base—that imported the data disguised as a type the system could load automatically. Then he taught the system to correctly identify the new data as benefits deductions.

The CDG team members streamlined training procedures, creating extensive materials that use Wyndham's actual codes and job information. This means trainees get immediate real-world experience. (Typically, trainees learn using "training" job codes. When they move to their installed system, they have to learn a completely new set of codes.)

" What distinguishes the CDG people from other consultants we've seen is their willingness to take a personal stake in the outcome . . . Wyndham's problems were their problems. They acted like they had a personal stake in achieving the company's goals."

" I treated them as part of my team. I expected the same commitment from them as I did from every other member of the team-and I was never disappointed."

" A big plus is the way CDG transfers knowledge. Rather than making the conversion seem like magic, they showed us how it was all done . . . They prepared Wyndham for their departure."

" We absolutely want to bring CDG back in the future."