Making Strides with UKG Ready's International Strategy

Did you know that UKG Ready is an international product? In this episode, we are joined by Chris Kiklas, Vice President of Product Management for UKG Ready, to discuss the new Multi-Currency functionality and how it is helping make strides in the international space. We’ll also discuss many of the ways the UKG Ready functionality comes together in the overall international strategy.

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Did you know that UKG Ready is an international product that expands to employees in over 90 countries?  Ensuring that those organizations have the functionality they need to run their business is crucial.  Stick around to hear about the ways in which UKG Ready has continued to make strides for its international customers.

[Intro music]

0:00:32  KRISTEN:  Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Working Smarter Café Podcast.  I’m Kristen Hug and I’ll be your host today as we dive into a conversation around the importance of providing our features and functionality for all of our UKG Ready customers across the globe.  One new feature in particular has paved the way to open up more future enhancements to support our efforts.  That’s the MultiCurrency feature.  In our August release, you may have noticed that we introduced the ability for our Ready customers to define the currency that will be available within reporting and user data based on their EIN or country or legal division.

0:01:09  MultiCurrency solutions allow organizations to operate across different global territories to differentiate their currencies between employees in different regions.  This helps to provide our customers and their employees a better overall experience when seeing their pay in their native currency.  So today I’m joined by Chris Kiklas, vice president of product management for UKG Ready as we discuss the overall goal of bringing MultiCurrency and other global efforts to the Ready solution.  Welcome, Chris.

0:01:37  CHRIS:  Welcome [inaudible].  Thank you so much for having me.  I’m super excited to be talking about this.  I get such a thrilling, thrilling addition to Ready’s overall international products, so really, really happy to be here today.

0:01:50   KRISTEN:  Yeah, I’m excited you’re excited to be here because I want you to tell us a little bit more about the importance of this feature and where it’s going to take us with UKG Ready.

0:02:00 CHRIS:  Oh, really great question.  Thanks for asking.  You know, Ready has always been an international product, and a lot of people don’t realize that.  We’ve got sales teams around the globe selling Ready.  It’s an international product, international features, language support, like there’s just so many cool things about it, and we’ve always had MultiCurrency in the product.  We just did it in a way that wasn’t necessarily easy to use or to report on.  So one of the things that we wanted to do, and we’ve wanted to do it for years.  Like I got to UKG in 2016, and something that we were talking about even back then, is how do we make that reporting on MultiCurrency even easier.  And as time has gone by, one of the things that we’ve noticed is that more and more companies are starting to have an international component.  

            And really it started when we were looking at our European customers.  This is where we see this happen a lot more, like let’s say you’ve got 300 employees in the UK and then you decide to open up another small office in Germany, so now you’ve got 20 employees in Germany, and then maybe you open a small office in the Netherlands, you’ve got, you know, 15 people in Amsterdam, and the way Ready works is, I mean, it’s easy to do that.  You can have people cross-country like that, but we’re starting to see more and more people wanting to report across that, so that headquarters that’s in the UK really wants to have a global perspective and say, you know, what is it costing me in this location versus this location versus this location.

0:03:30  And it just wasn’t easy, so we knew we needed to do that.  And then something really interesting I think happened.  During the COVID time period, when people were able to work remote more and more often, one of the things that we saw even in the United States is we saw two things happen.  One, we saw employees leave the United States and move to other countries.  Like, I don’t know if you’ve seen it, like I look at CNN.com all the time, right, and they show things like, oh, buy this property in Italy for 10,000 euros, right.  Well, people actually started doing that and they started moving.  They found out that they could work in these remote countries.  So all of a sudden we had a lot of companies, even in the United States, that were suddenly multi-country companies that didn’t know what to do or how to manage or what are they going to do with these new currency challenges that they’re running into.

            So we saw that happen.  The other thing that we saw happen is, there was one study I read that said that within the first six months of COVID, technology advanced about 20 years.  Like when we start talking about, if you think about it, five years ago, no one used Zoom like this.

KRISTEN:  No, not at all.

0:04:40  CHRIS:  Yeah, and Teams wasn’t even a thing, right, and so all these technologies started to really accelerate, so now companies were starting to say, oh, hey, it actually is possible for me to have a company based in the United States and have five employees in Croatia and two employees in Prague.  Like it just opened up all these new possibilities that people never even knew existed and now was possible, right.  So we saw a really accelerated increase in demand in being able to report across all these different countries.  It just made it really, really important for us to be able to support, so we came together as a team.  We’re like, okay, so we’ve been thinking about this for years, and now it’s just time.  We’ve got to do it.  We’ve got to do it.  And so we did.

0:05:29  KRISTEN:  Yeah, so, I mean, it’s super important to be able to report on all of that across, like you mentioned, there are a lot of people that are moving to other countries.  There’s a lot of travel happening, too, so it’s forcing people to rethink their lives and kind of take that different approach.  But let’s talk a little bit about the different countries and currencies that are supported and how that feature, you know, in the reporting aspect works in Ready.

0:05:57  CHRIS:  You know, when we were trying to figure out how to do this and the best way to do this, we decided we didn’t want to reinvent the wheel.  So we went out and looked at other applications and, especially in Europe, and we said, okay, how do other applications manage reporting across currencies, because this is, while it may be new to a lot of smaller companies in the U.S., it’s definitely a problem that they face in Europe all the time, right, and, you know, even though a lot of Europe is on the euro, we’ve got the UK that’s not.  You still have other countries that are in the European Union that also use their own currency.  So other companies have already solved this problem.  We said, okay, how are they doing it, and it really came down to two different ways of handling it, and one is like if you’re an ERP, how ERPs handle it, and we’re like, okay, let’s let ERPs be our ERPs, but how do all the other products do outside of that business.

0:06:56  And what they do is they store the currencies separately.  So if I’m in euros then I’ve got euros stored separately than francs than pesos than, you know, whatever else, so that’s what we decide to do.  So we said, okay, in this currency we’ll store this one separately, this one separately, this one separately, and then when you are reporting on it, there is now a new column for every currency that is in your Ready instance.  So if you’ve got euros and you’ve got British pounds and you’ve got U.S. dollars, you’ll see three separate columns, so that’s how we do it.  And then you can total by each of those currencies, so you can see what your U.S. dollar total is, what your British pound total is, and what your euro column is at that point, too, so we separated it out like that.  Now in terms of what countries, you know, it’s really an interesting question to say, you know, what countries are supported.  We really could support any currency, but in general, Ready is focused on certain countries.  It doesn’t mean we have support outside of those countries, but we really focus on certain countries.  So of course the United States, you know, Canada, Mexico, the UK and Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Australia,  New Zealand, Germany, like those are really our focus countries, we’re really focused.

0:08:23  But we have thousands of customers headquartered outside of the United States, and those thousands of customers have employees that live in over 90 different countries.  So we had to build a solution that was really more configurable, customizable, that could handle more than just those focus countries, right.  So it’s not just a language thing.  It’s where are you and, again, the localization piece like this is, I think, really important.

0:08:51  KRISTEN:  Yeah, and I’m sure that this is a hot topic question that all the product team gets whenever anyone starts talking about MultiCurrency.  Do we do currency conversions?  Is that something that’s possible inside of Ready?

0:09:06  CHRIS:  So, you know, a few minutes ago I mentioned that we looked at two different kinds of companies.  The first one was an ERP.  So ERP solutions are designed to do currency conversions, and we decided to not take that approach, right.  You’ve got an ERP, you’ve got a finance system.  That’s what they’re made for.  That’s really the system of record for the currency conversion.  I used to work at another software company, and I was actually part of, believe it or not, part of the finance department because of what I was doing, and the person who sat next to me, it was her job to every fifth day of the month she would go out to a certain bank and she would write down what the currency-exchange rates were on the 5th, and then she would go into our ERP system and she would say, okay, on the date, this is what the currency conversion was, and that’s that we used as our official reporting throughout all of finance.

0:10:03  So it is really important for the finance system to have those conversions right, so that’s where they’re going to live, right.  That’s where it really makes sense to do it, so we didn’t want to do that because then you run the risk of there being discrepancies between your HCM system and your finance system and we didn’t want that.  We want the finance system to do all of those conversions.  Now, if you’re really interested in conversions and you really, really wanted to do it, we’ve got this amazing functionality in Ready reporting where you could create custom columns, so you could create your own conversions if you wanted to, so if you wanted just like a ballpark figure of what it was you wanted to do that, you could create those custom columns to do that.  But again, I wouldn’t recommend using that for finance reporting or whatever else.  There is a reason finance systems do it the way they do it and we should just let those systems be those systems.

0:10:55  KRISTEN:  Yeah, especially because that currency, the rate changes so often, you know, you have to constantly keep up with that, and even when you’re creating those custom columns, making sure that you’re adjusting your rate changes on there as well.  So, yeah, I mean, with hearing all this today, it sounds like Ready is really an important product in the international space, so kind of stepping a little bit away from MultiCurrency but how does everything we’ve been doing as a whole fit into that broader strategy and maybe what’s coming that will fit into that strategy?

0:11:29  CHRIS:  You know, I mentioned before that Ready is an international product, and I guess we don’t really talk about it all that much, but we’ve got this philosophy on Ready where we try to make things very flexible.  We believe in configuration over customization, right, so we, even within a company, let’s say you have two different locations and you want each of those locations to run a little bit different in terms of how you do workforce management or how you calculate pay.  We wanted to take that rules-driven approach to make things happen, and one of the things that we noticed really, really early on is if you start to watch trends in how businesses run, in terms of how they operate and things like how you calculate pay or how you calculate hours or leave of absence, things like that, we noticed that in Europe things tend to start in Germany or France with the new ways to calculate things, new ways that companies run.  Then it spreads out to the rest of Europe and eventually flows over to California, and then New York, and then, you know, Seattle, Chicago, and then over the whole U.S., right.

0:12:44  So we see these trends in workforce management kind of go in that direction, so we have product managers and engineering teams who are located in Europe who help us create these rules ahead of time.  Like, so we’re trying to stay up-to-date with things as they are in Europe, anticipating the needs that we’re going to have in the United States later on.  A great example of this is with GDPR, which was a privacy law passed, you know, several years ago in Europe.  When that was coming, we knew that this is something that was going to spread all over the world.  We just could feel that that was something that was going to happen.  So when we designed that, we designed it to be done in a flexible way, and we did it, we were ahead of schedule.  We were one of the first companies in Europe to be GDPR compliant.  It was before the law even went into effect.  But by the time California released their privacy laws, we didn’t have to change anything because we were able to just use the configuration in the way that we set up Ready to configure those privacy settings in Ready to match what was needed in California.  So if you think about it, everything that we do in Ready, including MultiCurrency, t he way MultiCurrency is set up is designed to, you know, for those needs in our European customers but done in a flexible way so that when we start to need then more here in the United States then they spread out and they’re already there, just, you know, configurable.  So that’s really how it fits into our broader strategy and that’s just kind of how we build everything, right.  We want to make it flexible enough that it can be applicable to the widest number of customers possible.

0:14:23  KRISTEN:  Yeah, that’s great insight, having known that we use kind of the pre-thinking over in Europe to really define a lot of our stuff, and it helps to be ready, like you said—

CHRIS:  Right, yep.

KRISTEN:  Nice pun, pun intended on that one.  So, kind of speaking to that, do we see any features that’ll be coming out specifically that will help with like an international presence in our product or, you know, what languages do we support or languages that we see coming?

0:14:53  CHRIS:  You know, again, because of the way we build things, we don’t build things specifically for any one country, right.  We don’t want to go into, let’s say we’re, I don’t know, I’m just going to pick a country, let’s say Italy.  Like we don’t go into Italy and say, oh, they’ve got this specific thing so let’s create an Italian version of Ready.  We’re not going to do that.  We’re going to say what, what is missing from Ready that needs to be there in order to handle the business in Italy, and if there is something that’s missing.  I’m not saying that there is, right, it’s not, because we’ve got people in Italy today, but, again, just [inaudible] example, if there was something that was missing, we would go through and add rules and try to make them as broad as possible, so that when we went into another country we may not have to add anything because we already had a rule that was configurable enough to add.  So that’s really kind of the way that we look at everything.  And you can see that throughout the system.

0:15:43  So I already mentioned GDPR, so GDPR is built that way, but if you look at our pay calculation engine or accruals engine, same thing, right.  It was really designed to handle the broadest amount of customers possible, which makes it easy for us to go in and adjust our time sheets.  One of the things I was really excited about is, you know, when we redesigned our time sheet, super configurable.  You can make it look and behave in so many different ways.  There are laws in Germany about what has to be on a time sheet.  Like, the German time sheet, there’s a whole law on the German time sheet, and our time sheet complies with that, right, because we can adjust our time sheet to look exactly like it needs to look in Germany.  So things like that are flexible, but we’ve also built some other things, like into Ready we’ve built the ability to handle work-time directives.  There’s a concept of annualization that you have to build in that was really big in France, so that, you know, our accruals engine, we had to spend a lot of time on annualization.  Same thing with spells of absence, that really, really important to be able to handle spells of absence.  Leave of absence, you know, in the U.S., leave of absence is typically very easy to handle.  And again, in Europe it’s a lot more complicated, but we’re starting to see in the U.S. more unions and employee groups have more sophisticated or complex leave of absence requirements.  Those are things that we can handle there.

0:17:16  Also in Europe, we realized a long time ago that you have to be able to handle access control.  You know, if you’re swiping a badge to get in and out of a business, we have an access control module specifically designed for our European customers, because a lot of times it’s required to be able to do business there for that.  We handle collective agreements really, really well inside of Ready, you know, with the way that we use profiles to manage things.  Collective agreements are really a breeze to handle.  Also we see the use of employment contracts in Europe is extensive, and employee contracts are built right into Ready.  We don’t use them so often here in the U.S.  You start to see them some places, again, that are very heavy unionized or employee group-based.  You’ll see employee contracts, but some, yeah, we probably don’t take advantage of as much as we could but really should.  It’s really a great functionality.  And then I’m super, super excited about something else, and that is, you know, earlier this summer we acquired a company called Amides, which is going to help us get into the international payroll space.  So you’re going to see within the next year a whole lot more with Ready in international payroll because of what we can do with Amides, which is also going to really up our game in the localization space, especially in terms of pay. 

0:18:40  That’s what language is.  You know, we do a ton with languages.  I already talked about a lot of countries that we support.  This fall we’re going to be adding eight more languages.  We’re going to be adding native Czech, Filipino, let’s see, what else, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, which is really exciting, Romanian.  We already had Spanish but it was South American.  We’re going to be adding Spain Spanish to the system and then also Turkish, so we really think that’s going to, again, we already have employees in over 90 countries, this is just going to help us even expand what’s possible beyond that, so really, really excited about doing that.

0:19:20  KRISTEN:  Yeah, that’s awesome, that many new languages that are being supported over, you know, the course of this next year.  I have also, you know, seen in the process a lot of HR compliance-related things, like superannuation form in Australia and using inventory profiles, locales, the translation pieces for custom fields in the HR space as well, so a lot of those things that, you know, we’re providing for our customers has been so great from the international space.  And I do appreciate, this has been such an insightful conversation, and I’m really excited to see what customers are interested in learning more out there, but before we wrap up, I wanted to see if you had any additional thoughts about the path forward. 

0:20:07  CHRIS:  I think there are two things, and it’s not just the path forward, but where we are right now, like where we, where Ready is positioned right now as an international product is really exciting, and you can start to see, like if you watch the news and you start to look at where our competitors in this market are, a lot of them are just dipping their toes in and saying, we’re full on, like we’re a big international product, we’re able to do all this stuff, but when you really dig in, all they’re doing is potentially adding some localization fields, like things that you could do in, I don’t know, Ready moves pretty fast, like we could do that in a couple months, and we’ve had it for, I mean, since before I was here, right, so that’s old news.  That’s stuff that is just really basic.  And there’s so much that Ready does that our competitors are not even going to realize they need to do until they start losing deals, right, or until they’re signing deals and people are like, oh, my gosh, here are all these laws you’re getting hit with that you never even knew were there, so I feel so privileged to be working with this team that has built so thoughtfully this international product so that it can really support our customers in a way that you would expect UKG to do, and that just is really, really great.  And that leads us to the path forward.  I think you can expect more of what you’ve come to expect from UKG and from UKG Ready.  The product will just become more robust as an international offering.  You’ll see us talking about it more because it is more important to our customers.  And yeah, I mean, just more great stuff from us, right.

0:21:48  KRISTEN:  Yeah, super exciting.  Like, I know I’m excited to see where Ready is going to keep going from an international standpoint, so thank you so much, Chris, again for joining me today.  I really appreciate all the insightful conversation about MultiCurrency, international strategy.  For our customers, if you are interested in hearing more about future enhancements, I would consider joining us at UKG Aspire coming up in November.  Chris and his team, they’re going to be speaking in our breakout sessions, connecting with customers in the expo hall.  You know, he’s more than willing to kind of connect with any of our UKG Ready customers out there.  So for, I do want to share a little bit more on some MultiCurrency information, you can check out our user guide that is available in your online documentation portal within Ready.  So yeah, Chris, thank you once again.

0:22:38  CHRIS:  Oh, thank you, this was so much fun.  And really, Aspire, oh, my gosh, that is my favorite time of year.  I love meeting customers.  It’s always so great to get everybody together in Vegas and I would love to meet each and every one of you.  It’s such a great time to connect.

KRISTEN:  Awesome.  Thank you again so much.  All right, everyone, I’m Kristen from the Working Smarter Café Podcast, and thank you for spending some time with us today. 

[End of recording – 23:00 in length]