Industrial Holding

A Right-Sized HR Operating Model for Current Scale

An industrial holding company whose HR function was administered out of finance by a three-person team.

We designed an HR function sized to the company as it is today, and its first workforce plan caught a skills gap before it became a hiring crisis.

Field-operations skills gap identified before it affected hiring

Situation

Most companies under-invest in HR relative to headcount until something fails, usually a hiring crisis or a compliance gap found late. This holding company had reached that point. A three-person team attached to finance handled payroll, benefits and hiring. It had no HR specialists.

Strategic questions had no owner. Nobody was responsible for succession, for capability gaps or for culture. Finance leadership was absorbing HR escalations on top of its own work, and both functions were suffering for it.

What we did

We treated HR as a set of separate capabilities, each with its own build-or-buy decision. That is the logic of the HR business partner model. It avoids the false choice between staffing a full department and outsourcing everything.

Capability	Decision	Reason
Workforce planning	Build in-house	Needs judgment specific to the business
Performance management	Build in-house	Tied to how the company develops its own people
Payroll processing	Keep outsourced	A commoditized task a specialist vendor does better

The company recruited a single HR generalist to anchor the function. That was the investment it could justify at its present size.

Impact

HR now exists as its own function with named ownership of each capability, and finance has its capacity back.
The new workforce planning process identified a skills gap developing in field operations. The company saw it early enough to act before it disrupted hiring.
The model sets out which capabilities come next, so HR can grow in step with the business.

What made it work

We sized the function to current scale, not to an ambition several years out. One generalist with a clear remit was easier to approve and quicker to show value than a department would have been.

Results

A dedicated HR function with a clear mandate, separate from finance

A first workforce planning process, which flagged a developing field-operations skills gap

A defined path for adding HR capability as the company grows

Engagement facts

Sector: Industrial Holding
Practice area: Transformation & Organization
Client profile: Industrial holding company; HR run by a three-person finance team
Services: HR operating model, workforce planning, performance management design

This case study is a composite drawn from multiple engagements. Client details have been changed and combined to protect confidentiality, and figures are representative rather than attributable to any single client.