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How CloudSculpts migrated Astellas Pharma from Kronos (UKG) to SAP SuccessFactors Time, across 48 countries
Astellas Pharma needed to modernise a fragmented time and attendance landscape built around Kronos (UKG), local systems and manual processes. Before moving to implementation, CloudSculpts assessed the available options, from retaining the existing landscape through to a hybrid SAP SuccessFactors (SF) and UKG Pro model to determine the best-fit approach for Astellas’ global workforce, compliance and operational requirements.
The assessment supported a recommendation to adopt SAP SuccessFactors Time Management globally, creating a single strategic platform while retaining the flexibility required for complex local requirements. CloudSculpts subsequently designed and delivered the solution across 48 countries, supporting approximately 14,000 employees, 2,000 people managers and 550 global managers.
Business challenges
Legacy Kronos (UKG) System
Astellas had been operating its global Time and Attendance landscape on Kronos (UKG), which was approaching engineering end-of-life in December 2026 and full product end-of-life in March 2027. This created a business continuity imperative and an opportunity to modernise the global time management landscape.
As SAP SF Time Management had matured to support a broader workforce, including both white-collar and blue-collar employees with fixed working patterns, Astellas saw an opportunity to move towards a unified employee experience, a single global application and a simpler landscape that could support future payroll consolidation.
The challenge extended beyond replacing legacy technology. Years of country-specific working-time practices, regulatory requirements, collective agreements and payroll-critical rules were embedded in the existing Kronos (UKG) landscape. These had to be understood, rationalised and translated into a scalable global design across 48 countries within an ambitious 18-month time frame, while maintaining payroll accuracy and uninterrupted business operations.
Extreme regulatory complexity across countries
Several countries in scope had statutory time and payroll rules complex enough to challenge any global template.
In the U.S., California required daily and weekly overtime thresholds, meal-break penalty calculations tied to overtime, and holiday-pay rules that split hours at midnight on overnight shifts. This was further complicated by a dependency on physical time clocks that had to interface reliably with payroll-critical data.
In Brazil, annual leave operates on a block-and-reset model with strict accrual and expiry rules. SAP was only releasing dedicated best practices for this area in the second half of 2026, placing Astellas ahead of standard product guidance at the time of design.
Similar complexity existed in Japan and Germany, where statutory working-time limits, rest-period requirements and works-council-driven approval rules added further layers that the global design needed to accommodate without creating excessive exception handling.
Inconsistent policy execution
The absence of a common global design for time rules, leave types and approval workflows meant policies were interpreted and implemented differently across countries.
This fragmented execution slowed change, increased governance overhead and widened the gap between global HR policy and the employee experience locally. It also weakened confidence in compliance and the “one HR” operating model.
Fragmented systems and limited visibility
Time and attendance data was spread across Kronos (UKG), local point solutions and spreadsheets, with no single source of truth. This resulted in:
- A fragile and difficult-to-support integration landscape, with duplicated data flows and no clean master record.
- Unreliable global reporting and slower audit cycles, reducing leadership confidence in workforce data.
- Inconsistent data structures across dozens of local systems that had to be reconciled before a single global model could be defined.
High manual effort and poor user experience
Routine activities such as leave requests, timesheet corrections and approvals depended heavily on manual HR intervention. This resulted in:
- HR capacity being consumed by transactional work rather than strategic workforce initiatives
- A user experience that had not kept pace with modern employee expectations
- A need to replace manual touchpoints with self-service workflows and automated exception handling without introducing additional compliance risk
Project overview
Astellas is a research-driven pharmaceutical company with operations across Europe, the Americas, Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Africa. Its time and attendance landscape had evolved country by country around Kronos (UKG) and local tools, resulting in fragmented systems, inconsistent rules and manual reconciliation across HR and payroll teams.
Astellas set out to replace this landscape with SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Time Management. CloudSculpts first evaluated the available solution options and assessed the suitability of each approach against Astellas’ operational, compliance and workforce requirements. This included consideration of maintaining the existing landscape, adopting a hybrid SAP SuccessFactors and UKG Pro model, and moving towards SAP SuccessFactors globally.
The recommended approach was to simplify and standardise underlying processes before digitising them, while using SAP SuccessFactors as the strategic global platform. This was designed to improve the employee and manager experience, reduce technology and process complexity, support greater standardisation of time rules, and provide a future-ready foundation while retaining the rostering and scheduling capabilities required for more complex workforce groups.
CloudSculpts then led the solution design, configuration and global rollout, with particular focus on complex and compliance-sensitive markets, especially the United States while maintaining payroll continuity.
| Client | Astellas Pharma |
| Industry | Pharmaceutical / Life Sciences |
| Countries in Scope | 48 |
| Employees Covered | ~14,000 |
| People Managers | ~2,000 |
| Global Managers | ~550 |
| SAP Module | SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central – Time Management |
| CloudSculpts (SAP Silver Partner) | SAP SuccessFactors Implementation Partner |
| Rollout Model | Phased MVP → MVP+ |
| Program Duration | Dec 2024/2025 – Jan 2026 core rollout, continuous improvement through 2026 |
Project objectives
- Simplify before automating
Assess and challenge existing processes before migration, removing unnecessary complexity and redundant process variants so that automation supports a simpler, more efficient global operating model rather than reproducing historical inefficiencies. - Establish one global system of record
Replace fragmented legacy and local solutions with SAP SF Time Management as the strategic global platform, creating a consistent and auditable source of time and attendance data across 48 countries. - Harmonise globally, comply locally
Standardise time policies, processes and design patterns wherever possible while retaining the flexibility required for local legislation, collective agreements and payroll-critical requirements. - Transform the employee & manager experience
Give employees and managers a consistent, intuitive and mobile-enabled time management experience, reducing dependency on HR and manual intervention. - Unlock global workforce visibility
Provide consistent and actionable time, absence and attendance reporting, giving people managers, HR and leadership greater visibility and confidence in workforce decisions. - Deliver a scalable, future-ready Global Platform
Transition fully from the legacy landscape to a standardised and scalable global architecture, reducing technology fragmentation and creating a foundation for Astellas’ future HR and payroll strategy. Transition time and attendance activity fully from local tools to the new global system.
Solution offered
Safe migration from legacy Kronos (UKG) system
CloudSculpts established a structured migration approach to transition from Kronos (UKG) to SAP SuccessFactors Time Management across 48 countries. Rather than replicating legacy configurations, existing time rules were assessed, simplified and redesigned into global standards and reusable patterns, with country-specific variations retained only where required by legislation or business needs.
The migration was sequenced and validated to protect payroll accuracy and business continuity, enabling Astellas to progressively retire its legacy time landscape while establishing a scalable global platform.
One global SAP SuccessFactors Time Management platform
CloudSculpts designed and configured a single Employe Central Time Management instance to serve as the system of record across all in-scope countries, replacing local time tools with one consistent data model, approval structure, and reporting layer.
Right-sized time management by country
Rather than imposing a one-size-fits-all solution, CloudSculpts aligned each employee group and country to the simplest time-management model capable of meeting its regulatory, payroll and operational requirements.
Countries requiring detailed working-time capture adopted positive time recording, including clock-in and clock-out where required. Countries with less complex requirements used a deviation-based approach, recording only exceptions to planned working schedules. This avoided unnecessary complexity for employees and managers while maintaining the controls required for local compliance and payroll accuracy.
Mobile-enabled employee and manager self-service
The solution extended time management to Astellas-issued mobile devices, enabling employees to record time and request absences, while managers could review and approve transactions wherever they worked.
This created a more consistent and accessible employee experience while reducing routine HR administration and accelerating approvals.
Compliance by design: global scale, local depth
CloudSculpts established a global design framework with embedded local compliance to accommodate complex working-time regulations without creating separate country solutions.
In California, the design addressed daily and weekly overtime, meal-break penalties and payroll-critical time calculations. Brazil required complex annual-leave block, accrual and reset rules, while Japan and Germany introduced additional statutory working-time, rest-period and works-council requirements.
These requirements were incorporated through reusable global design patterns with controlled local extensions, allowing Astellas to standardise globally while maintaining statutory compliance, payroll accuracy and local business requirements.
Auto-submit and self-correcting workflows
Timesheets were configured to auto-submit and auto-approve on schedule wherever required, with weekly reminder notifications and a two week retroactive self-service correction window, even after a timesheet had already been approved.
Results at a glance
| Area | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Time and attendance systems | Multiple disconnected local systems and manual tools | One global SAP SuccessFactors Time Management platform |
| Country coverage | Fragmented, country-by-country tooling | 48 of 48 in-scope countries live on a single system |
| Employee self-service | Limited; HR-dependent for corrections | Mobile self-service with auto-submit, reminders, and a two week retroactive correction window |
| Time Payroll Integration | Fragmented integration with manual files | Automated integration with global payroll provider |
| Time clock integration | Standalone hardware, manual reconciliation | Live Dormakaba-to-SAP SuccessFactors integration feeding payroll-critical data directly |
| Global reporting | Inconsistent, region-specific | Standardised manager and global-manager reporting across all live countries |
CloudSculpts and Astellas established a formal measurement strategy alongside the rollout so that adoption, manager experience, and efficiency gains continue to be tracked as the platform moves into its continuous-improvement phase.
Program scale: 48 countries live on a single platform. 40 sprints. 1,031 time types configured. 1,719 business rules. 40,138 time valuations. 129,041 rows of data migrated. 200+ drop-in training sessions
Lessons learned
- Simplify before you customise
Be prepared to challenge and simplify existing business processes rather than automatically replicating them through custom solutions. Customisation may address an immediate requirement, but it can significantly increase Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) through ongoing maintenance, testing, upgrades and support. - Design with data migration in mind
Consider data migration from the outset, rather than treating it as a downstream activity. Historical time and absence data can directly influence payroll calculations and recalculations, making migration accuracy critical.
Particular attention is required for scenarios such as employees terminated within the go-live year, historical time-account balances and retroactive recalculations triggered within the go-live year. Designing for these scenarios early helps protect payroll accuracy, reduce cutover risk and avoid costly post-go-live corrections. - Map complexity early, before design begins
Identify regulatory, workforce and country-specific complexity upfront rather than discovering it during configuration. Differences in legislation, employee populations, work patterns, collective agreements and payroll rules can influence the solution architecture and should be understood before the global design is finalised. - Establish strong governance for open design decisions
Maintain a single, centrally governed decision and open-item log from the beginning, with clear ownership and target dates. Unresolved design decisions can quickly become dependencies across configuration, integration, testing and payroll. - Control late changes through formal impact assessment
Once the global design is agreed, new requirements should undergo a structured impact assessment covering business value, architecture, regression testing, payroll impact, timeline and TCO. This protects the integrity of the global template and prevents unnecessary complexity from being introduced late in the programme. - Design integrations as part of the core solution
Design and test payroll, physical time clocks and other downstream integrations in parallel with SuccessFactors rather than treating them as activities that follow configuration. End-to-end validation is particularly important where time events ultimately determine employee pay. - Plan for regulatory complexity, not just country count
Implementation effort should not be estimated simply by the number of countries or employees. Countries such as the U.S., Japan, Brazil and Germany can require significantly greater design, configuration and testing effort because of complex statutory, payroll and working-time requirements. Programme planning should therefore be driven by complexity and risk, not geography alone. - Test the exceptions, not just the happy path
The greatest payroll risks often sit in edge cases and rule interactions rather than standard scenarios. Complex situations such as shift premiums during leave, overnight shifts crossing midnight, holiday calculations and call-in payments require dedicated end-to-end test scenarios and formal business validation to protect payroll accuracy at go-live.
Why SAP SuccessFactors?
Following the solution assessment, SAP SuccessFactors Time Management was recommended as the strategic global platform because it enabled Astellas Pharma to:
Standardise workforce time management across multiple countries.
Improve employee and manager self-service capabilities.
Provide a scalable cloud platform to support future business and payroll strategy.
Support country-specific compliance requirements within a global framework.
Simplify reporting and workforce visibility across different employee groups, including blue-collar, white-collar and flexible work patterns.
Why CloudSculpts?
Astellas selected CloudSculpts because of their exclusive focus on SAP SuccessFactors, specifically their depth in Time Management, complex compliance configuration, and time terminal integrations.
Unlike generalist system integrators, CloudSculpts had already delivered multi-country SuccessFactors Time programmes at comparable scale, with a certified team experienced in translating complex local labour rules into a single, consistent global design. Their blended UK-India delivery model gave Astellas specialist expertise at programme scale, without the overhead of a large SI.
Frequently asked questions
Is a Global Template Possible for Time Implementation?
Time requirements are inherently local, shaped by legislation, organisational policies and working practices. Even a common requirement such as maternity leave is treated differently across the UK, USA, India and Germany. A single, one-size-fits-all global Time template is therefore rarely practical.
CloudSculpts Approach:
We work with organisations’ global People teams and country stakeholders to determine what can be standardised across the business and where genuine local variation is required.
Drawing on extensive experience delivering multiple SuccessFactors Time implementations across more than 140 countries, we use our standardisation and simplification rulebook, pre-built packages and streamlined workbooks to accelerate delivery.
This approach aligns global and local People teams, policies, processes and technology. Creating a solution that is globally consistent, locally compliant and practical to operate.
How long does a global SAP SuccessFactors Time implementation typically take?
The Astellas programme ran across approximately 54 weeks from initial design through to all 48 countries live, delivered on time and on budget.
Timelines vary depending on the number of countries, compliance complexity, and the state of existing time data, but CloudSculpts’ MVP-first approach is specifically designed to get the highest-priority markets live faster without holding up the full programme.
Can SAP SuccessFactors Time handle country-specific labour law without a separate system per country?
Yes. The Astellas programme supported 48 countries on a single global instance, with country-specific compliance rules, leave types and approval workflows configured within the platform rather than managed through separate local systems.
What happens to existing time data when migrating from a legacy system like Kronos (UKG)?
Data migration is a critical part of a time system transition. For Astellas, more than 129,000 rows of data were migrated into the new SAP SuccessFactors environment, including time types, business rules and time valuations from the legacy landscape.
Does CloudSculpts support the platform after go-live?
Yes. CloudSculpts provides Application Management Services (AMS) and continuous optimisation support after go-live. For Astellas, the programme transitioned from rollout into a continuous-improvement phase covering policy simplification, leave-type rationalisation and platform optimisation.
One Global Time System. 48 Countries.
Find out how CloudSculpts can design and deliver your SAP SuccessFactors Time programme, on time, on budget, and combining global standardisation with local compliance.