Broadband Infrastructure Company
How our client unified time, pay, and compliance across 30+ subsidiaries on a single platform.
Employees:
18,000+ across the WorkForce Suite environment
Location:
United States (49 states)
Telecom Infrastructure / Specialty Contracting
Time & Attendance
Highlights
30+
subsidiaries unified on a single workforce management platform
18,000
employees across the ADP WorkForce Suite environment
49
states supported by a single compliant configuration
The Challenge
Built through dozens of acquisitions. A single time and attendance platform runs them all.
Our client, a national telecom infrastructure contractor, builds and maintains the broadband and wireless networks serving the country's largest carriers. Each acquisition that built the company brought its own timekeeping system. By the time the enterprise had grown to 30+ subsidiaries, eight separate systems were calculating time and pay across the organization. Each was configured differently, none of them talked to one another, and none produced the data truly needed at the corporate level.
The pay complexity made it harder. A significant portion of the company's work falls under the Davis-Bacon Act, which ties pay rates to the specific craft, county, and contract on every federally funded job — with overtime and double-time rules that vary contract by contract.
Before this project, someone in payroll was looking all of that up by hand. Crew-based unit pay was a separate challenge: field teams earn based on production output, with pay distributed among crew members according to each person's role and experience. Calculating and processing those splits was an entirely manual operation, handled differently at every subsidiary, with no systematic way to automate or audit the work.
Eight separate timekeeping systems across 30+ subsidiaries, each with different configurations and no shared reporting.
Manual prevailing wage processing handled directly in payroll, with no systematic rate lookup or time evaluation rules.
Crew-based unit pay tracked on paper with no enterprise-level automation and no way to audit the work.
No unified visibility into workforce time data for corporate leadership — subsidiary payroll ran independently with no consolidated view.
Goals
What our client needed to achieve
1
Consolidate all timekeeping and pay calculation onto a single platform
2
Automate prevailing wage and Davis-Bacon compliance across all active jurisdictions
3
Replace manual crew pay tracking with a systematic, auditable unit pay solution
4
Create a scalable foundation for continued growth through acquisition
The Solution
A platform built for current complexity — and for the company yet to come.
New Entity HCM implemented ADP WorkForce Suite Time & Attendance across all 30+ of our client’s subsidiaries, configured to handle three distinct pay environments simultaneously: standard hourly pay, Davis-Bacon prevailing wage compliance, and crew-based production pay. Working directly with the client’s payroll team, New Entity HCM integrated WorkForce Suite with ReachNett’s CraftPay solution for wage determination data, built a custom event-driven integration with the client’s proprietary field application, and designed a group calculations framework — built entirely from native WorkForce Suite functionality — to automate crew pay distribution across field teams. The entire enterprise went live simultaneously in September 2025, with zero payroll interruption across 18,000 employees.
Unit pay automation required more than configuration work. Before any WorkForce Suite build could begin, the client’s crew pay management had to be standardized across 30+ subsidiaries — each of which had been calculating pay manually for years. New Entity HCM worked alongside the client through that two-year standardization process, reducing all existing approaches to two enterprise-approved methodologies. Only once that groundwork was in place could the system take over. The result is a configuration architecture designed not just for today's business, but for the acquisitions and new jurisdictions still to come.
Results & Impact
What changed
One platform. Every subsidiary.
Eight timekeeping systems replaced by a single ADP WorkForce Suite environment serving all 30+ subsidiaries across 49 states, with consistent configuration and a unified view of workforce data for the first time.
Prevailing wage compliance, automated.
Davis-Bacon rate lookups, time evaluation rules, and overtime logic are now applied systematically by WorkForce Suite, replacing a fully manual process that ran in the payroll system. California meal penalty calculations, previously requiring manual cross-checking and timesheet edits every week, are now handled without human intervention.
Crew pay on autopilot.
Crew-based unit pay, previously calculated on paper with no enterprise-level automation, now flows from the client’s field work management application through WorkForce Suite automatically. Pay is calculated, allocated, and auditable, with corrections propagating to all affected timesheets when source data changes.
Built to grow.
The configuration framework New Entity HCM built is designed for reuse. New subsidiaries, new prevailing wage jurisdictions, and new collective bargaining agreements can be absorbed into the existing architecture rather than rebuilding from scratch. The infrastructure our client needs to support future acquisitions is already in place.
Key Takeaways
What we learned from this implementation
Standardize the process before you configure the system.
Automated unit pay is not possible until the underlying business rules are agreed upon. Two years of enterprise-wide standardization work preceded the WorkForce Suite build, and it is what made a big-bang go-live across 30+ subsidiaries achievable.
Change champions change outcomes.
Finding the subsidiary leaders who saw the value early and letting them carry the message to the resistant ones drove adoption faster than any top-down mandate could have. Knowing who those people are before go-live is its own kind of preparation.
The integration is the implementation.
For a company where tens of thousands of field shifts flow through a proprietary tracking system every week, the WorkForce Suite integration had to meet enterprise IT standards from day one. The platform's native capabilities were the foundation. The custom architecture built on top was what made it production-ready.
Built for future acquisitions, not just the current footprint.
The documentation, templates, and playbooks New Entity HCM produced are not just records of what was done. They are the infrastructure that makes future growth less disruptive. Every implementation decision was made with that in mind.
Client Quote
Hear from the client
"WorkForce Suite was the shining star of our implementation. Of all the components we deployed, it was the one where we had the most interaction, the most preparation, and the clearest payoff. The automation we now have around prevailing wage alone — that is something we would never go back from."
Manager, Business Process
Ready to make your next implementation predictable?
Join the teams turning HCM implementations from controlled chaos into a repeatable advantage.
