CUSTOMER STORIES
SD Worx Unlocks Scalable HR Insights Across Its Huge Employee Payroll Landscape Through a Unified Snowflake Data Architecture.
With Snowflake, SD Worx helps customers of all sizes keep HR costs under control, maintain compliance and make better-informed workforce decisions.
650kEmployees supported by insights from Snowflake data
7kCustomers served with actionable HR data
Industry
TechnologyLocation
Antwerp, BelgiumKeeping employees engaged and productive at thousands of businesses worldwide
A company’s most valuable asset is its people. But understanding how to keep everyone happy, healthy and productive can be a huge challenge. Valuable insights are trapped in spreadsheets and unintegrated tools, making it difficult to gain visibility into HR trends and processes. And without insight, key decisions are left to gut feeling, with consequences for compliance, productivity and employee wellbeing and satisfaction
That’s where SD Worx comes in. Founded in 1945, the company is a leading European HR, payroll and workforce management solutions provider. It delivers software, services and insight into roughly 6 million employees for around 105,000 customers across Europe and beyond.
“We exist to help organizations manage their people processes more efficiently, gain important insights faster and comply with changing regulations,” says Katrien Hesters, Product Manager at SD Worx. “Doing those things requires unified insights and streamlined processes.”
Since 2021, the company has used the Snowflake AI Data Cloud, running on Azure, to deliver a centralized source of HR data to its customers — replacing the disparate and disconnected tools that often slow time to insight. With a unified view of everything that’s important, those customers can bring simplicity to people management, gain in-depth insights into total reward costs, maintain compliance more easily and make better workforce decisions.
Story highlights
Providing HR departments with a complete picture of the truth: With Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud, SD Worx can accelerate time to insight and save countless hours by replacing numerous HR tools with a single, centralized source of insight.
Catering to 7,000 customers, from enterprises to SME’s: Snowflake’s secure data sharing and flexibility means SD Worx can easily provide different levels of service to meet the needs of any customer, regardless of size or data demands.
- Building a new business stream for more personalized insights: Using unified insights from Snowflake, SD Worx’ expert consultants can provide bespoke, specialist guidance to customers to help them turn insight into action.
Building a one-stop shop for every meaningful HR insight
Managing a business well means managing people well. You can’t do one without the other. But sometimes the insights needed to keep people happy and productive can be hard to come by.
SD Worx helps organizations turn HR and payroll data into clear, actionable insight. It combines HCM data with advanced analytics and its own expert interpretation to give customers a reliable, integrated view of their workforce.
“The need for the new data solution came out of a simple survey,” says Guillaume Van Delsen, Data Architect at Orange Business, SD Worx’s implementation partner. “It showed that having different solutions for HR, payroll, financial and business data was leading to cumbersome processes and restricted insight.”
This multi-tool approach meant HR & finance teams would have to explore, wrangle and combine data across multiple touchpoints to gain the visibility needed to make the right decisions for their people and organizations. It was a huge manual effort, and often led to inconsistencies, difficulty interpreting results and poor visibility into root causes and trends.
To overcome these challenges, the data team at Orange Business partnered closely with SD Worx to design a solution capable of unifying all HR‑related data into a single, accessible environment. The goal was clear: create a data platform that centralized data and provided users with all the information they needed in one place: a one‑stop shop for HR & Business intelligence.
“As we evaluated the data platforms market, it quickly became clear that Snowflake aligned perfectly with our target architecture vision,” says Van Delsen. “Its ability to seamlessly support BI and AI workloads at scale, combined with minimal infrastructure overhead and powerful native data‑sharing capabilities meant it ticked all the boxes.”
Providing data insights to 7,000 customers — from SMEs to global enterprises
Different HR organizations can have wildly different data requirements. While some simply want an overview of key processes to make operations more efficient, others will want to explore data in a more granular and detailed way. With Snowflake, SD Worx can meet the needs of every kind of customer, capturing the whole market.
The company uses DBT, Azure data factory and Airflow to ingest and orchestrate customer data in a centralized Snowflake data warehouse, removing barriers to exploration. It then analyzes that data to provide daily insights into key issues like wage cost anomalies and absenteeism, enabling customers to make better HR and business decisions, boost productivity and reduce costs.
For some customers, this data is combined with SD Worx’ comprehensive catalogue of industry benchmarking data, which is updated weekly so users can track their progress against best practice and emerging trends.
The service is delivered through two models, ensuring it can accommodate the needs of smaller companies and large enterprises. First is a web application that allows anytime, anywhere access to insights through Power BI embedded dashboards based on Snowflake data. The second is the company’s Insights Cloud. This provides direct access to a Snowflake account and shares data through a private Snowflake Marketplace, so customers can explore payroll and HR trends in more detail using their preferred toolsets. Those customers can also integrate their wider operational data, to see how HR decisions impact overall business performance.
“Our goal was to provide the right solution for everyone,” says Van Delsen. “Whether they need to see trends or use the data themselves, we wanted to meet customers’ individual needs. Snowflake’s data sharing capabilities and security made it easy to provide the different options at the heart of our customer offering.”
Powering a personalized consultancy to elevate customer value
Having data at your disposal is one thing, but knowing exactly what to do with that data can be a different challenge entirely. It’s the difference between understanding what needs to change and understanding how to change it.
If used effectively, the consistent, timely and trusted data SD Worx provides can help customers move beyond static reporting toward truly data-driven decision-making. They can monitor key workforce trends, identify risks and spot opportunities early, while understanding the impact of HR policies on cost, productivity and compliance.
This empowers HR and business leaders to make more informed choices, improve operational efficiency and support strategic workforce planning. But the value of that data is upheld by the company’s expertise and experience in helping clients navigate the sometimes complex world of human resource management and data analytics.
With SD Worx Insights making it easy for customers to explore and analyze their data, the company has built a bespoke consultancy service that is now a significant part of its offering, helping customers with pre-made reports, co-creation and expertise based on their specific requirements.
With data at the ready, our consultants help customers turn insights into impactful actions, sparking success at the heart of their business so they can truly thrive.”
Katrien Hesters
Product Manager at SD Worx
Lower costs, recouped time and a solution fit for the future
With SD Worx, global organizations have reduced the time and cost spent gaining visibility into the full employee lifecycle. Companies of all sizes can use up-to-date insights to easily maintain compliance with evolving legislation and make actionable changes to HR policies to benefit individuals and the wider organization. For SD Worx, the benefits are also clear, as the solution generates additional recurring annual revenue.
“Snowflake has helped us to build an all-encompassing HR solution, thanks to its easy functionality and data sharing capabilities,” says Hesters. “It’s a key factor in how we deliver value to our clients."
In the coming years, SD Worx plans to expand the functionality and geographical reach of its offering. The company is in regular contact with its Snowflake account team, where experts showcase new features and help SD Worx optimize performance to reduce costs.
One new feature SD Worx is keeping a particular eye on is Cortex AI, excited about the opportunity to innovate natural language AI solutions for its customers and consultants to explore data more easily. It’s also considering moving several more internal processes to Snowflake, including its DBT workflows and data pipeline orchestration, for the added simplicity of having everything in one place.
All these features and more will continue to help SD Worx apply huge amounts of data to improve the working experiences of hundreds of thousands of employees — and, of course, the HR teams that support them. In doing so, Snowflake will continue to play a key role in the company’s ultimate goal of becoming Europe’s number-one HR platform, removing barriers to insight and helping organizations of all sizes take better care of their most important assets.
Snowflake has become a major technology asset. It enables us to provide what our customers need in the way they need it. But Snowflake isn’t just a provider; it’s a real partner.”
Katrien Hesters
Product Manager at SD Worx
