Success story:

Fenland District Council

Fenland District Council is a local authority serving the Fenland district in Cambridgeshire, delivering a broad range of public services to residents and businesses across the area. With approximately 350 employees – spanning office-based teams and operational services including environmental services – the Council manages services for over 100,000 residents.

Leading that internal transformation is HR Business Partner Marie Harley and HR and Learning Advisor Ross Potter, who have been driving the Council's shift to a fully integrated digital HR platform since going live with Access PeopleXD in April 2024.

Before Access, Fenland had been with a legacy HR and payroll system long enough that a retender had become unavoidable. While HR and payroll sat within the same platform, learning sat entirely outside it. Without an app in place, there was no digital access to employment information at all for a significant portion of the workforce. 

Around 100 of Fenland's ~350 employees (the operational and environmental services teams) were managing everything on paper: annual leave cards, printed payslips, and manual processes with no visibility or audit trail. The consequences of this weren't just inconvenient. They were materially affecting employees.

"We had paper annual leave cards, and by going through the app process, we actually found where some people were not getting enough holiday – it was just a legacy thing, being carried over from one leave card to another. We actually identified some errors along the way when we moved them onto being app-based."

Marie Harley, HR Business Partner

The old way of doing things created friction at every level. For administrators and managers alike, basic tasks were slow, clunky, and unforgiving.

"With our old system, you couldn't work in multiple records at the same time – it used to lock you out. You couldn't just click across the screen, you had to tab between different boxes. You had to save every screen, and if you didn't save it, you'd lose everything. Inputting sickness as a manager was an absolute nightmare; they’d have to create multiple absence records whereas with Access PeopleXD they can just update an existing record if it’s part of the same absence." 

Ross Potter, HR and Learning Advisor

As for learning and development, any training content had to be built entirely in-house on PowerPoint decks. This was a slow, resource-intensive process that produced outdated materials and offered little value to employees looking to develop.

When the retender process began, Fenland's priorities were clear: a cloud-based, fully integrated platform that could bring HR, payroll, learning and self-service together under one roof and extend digital access to every member of the workforce, regardless of role or location.

Access PeopleXD met those requirements. The suite now brings together payroll, people management, workforce management, talent and learning in a single, connected system – eliminating the data silos and manual handoffs that had defined the old way of working.

One Platform, Every Employee

The most immediate transformation was bringing the entire workforce into a single digital experience. Operational staff who had never had any system access before now manage their own employment information through the PeopleXD mobile app. They can book leave, access payslips, and access learning content without any involvement from HR.

"All employees now have access to the platform. The environmental services function didn't use our old system, but now because this one's app-based, they've all got the app. They can do all the normal things like booking holiday, access payslips – all of that has moved to a digital process. Before, they'd have done that on paper."

Ross Potter, HR and Learning Advisor

The move away from manual processes has not only supported compliance but reduced the burden on the HR team, and transformed the employee experience.

“We're able to offer a lot more to our managers and consequently they're able to offer a lot more to their employees. The feedback's always been really good from the employees. They definitely see the benefits of a transformed employee experience. Like Ross said, it's one platform, so all of our employee surveys go through it now as well. So it's just keeping people active on there and then they realise the benefits themselves.”

Marie Harley, HR Business Partner

The Learning Transformation

Before Access, Fenland had no e-learning suite to speak of. Any training content had to be built entirely in-house: a slow, labour-intensive process that produced outdated materials and offered little in the way of a modern employee experience.

Access LMS, Fenland has gone from having virtually no e-learning provision to having 290 courses available at the touch of a button. Mandatory compliance courses (covering anti-money laundering, data protection, cyber security and more) are now tracked centrally, with colour-coded completion reports shared with managers. And beyond compliance, employees are self-directing their own learning.

"It's not just the mandatory stuff – people will think, 'actually, this is really easy, I'll just go in and do a general search and see what crops up.' We've gone from having a real limited offering for learning to a really good offer now."

Marie Harley, HR Business Partner

Talent Management: Paper to Digital

The Talent module, launched in 2025 and now in its second year, has moved performance and development reviews off paper and into the system entirely. The team can now track who has completed what, identify learning needs at a service or organisational level, and use the data to drive meaningful action.

Ross has also built a structured management development programme within the system. Reflective questions answered at the start of the programme and revisited at the end have created a trackable development arc. 

"It's 100% better for the individual as well, because they can go and update progress and make notes throughout; they're not having to wait for a specific set time to catch up with their manager. They can do that at any point."

Marie Harley, HR Business Partner

The platform's recognition feature has also been a welcome addition, enabling employees to leave feedback for colleagues and award badges directly within the system. Ross has been actively promoting this, and engagement has grown each time it's highlighted, with more employees using it to acknowledge their colleagues' contributions.

Recruitment: From Email Inboxes to an Integrated ATS

Recruitment had previously been managed without an ATS. Applications arrived by email or Word document, with no tracking and no candidate management. The integration of Access Volcanic with PeopleXD changed that completely.

"We had nothing before in terms of an ATS. It was paper-based, email-based. Now people are able to register an interest online, track their application, save applications, send them over – we can send them to managers without having to print them all off or save them individually. And the website looks so much better; it’s a completely new experience for candidates."

Marie Harley, HR Business Partner

Managers can now access applications directly without HR acting as an intermediary, and the manual work of collating and distributing applications has been eliminated entirely. Data flows directly from the recruitment website into PeopleXD, giving the team visibility of candidate trends and a connected experience from application through to onboarding. 

Empowering Managers – Reducing Pressure on HR

With everything in one place, Fenland has been progressively shifting responsibility for people processes to managers directly. This journey has meaningfully changed how the HR team spends its time.

The recent launch of the return-to-work form within PeopleXD is a good example. Previously, it was a paper document that had to be filled in, signed, returned to HR, processed, and filed manually. Now managers complete it within the platform, adding fit notes and other documents directly to employee records. This has removed double-processing entirely. 

Overtime submission has seen a similar improvement. Because managers now submit overtime directly in the system, nothing gets missed. HR can see when overtime has been submitted but is awaiting approval, and proactively follow up with the manager to get it signed off. 

A dedicated comms plan, monthly HR newsletter and PeopleXD training embedded in the management development programme have all helped bring managers on board gradually. And channelling less through HR has freed up the HR team to focus on higher-value work.

"It's given us the luxury of being able to pick up other strategic work."

Marie Harley, HR Business Partner

The support bot has also made it easy to resolve queries quickly and independently:

"It's the little quick things. Today I needed to change someone's pay group, so I just popped that into the chat. It's those quick things that it's quite handy for so I can get it updated and respond to people quickly."

Ross Potter, HR and Learning Advisor

Reporting and Insight

The breadth of standard reports available in PeopleXD, combined with Insights, has given Fenland access to real-time workforce data that was either impossible or impractical to extract before.

“The reports in our previous system were pretty clunky so the PeopleXD platform has transformed reporting too. It’s now a lot easier to pull together data. We can track processes that were previously manual. With the Talent module for example, we can now pull that data out, see who's completing what in terms of their performance reviews, and then target areas to say: these ones haven't been completed, these ones have."

Ross Potter, HR and Learning Advisor

Since going live, Fenland's relationship with Access has continued to grow and deepen. With dedicated account management and proactive customer success support, the team now has a genuine partnership that actively drives adoption of new features and ensures they're making the most of everything the platform has to offer.

"One of the main changes we've seen is that the Access team won’t just let us sit and use the basics – there's a constant need to drive and improve and look at what's new, or ask: are we fully utilising what's available to us? Access has a lot more functionality than we've ever had before. Now it's up to us to drive that forward. It's been a real transformation."

Marie Harley, HR Business Partner

The Access Group's HCM division, Access People, offer an unrivalled suite of solutions for businesses, including HR and Payroll, Absence Management, Workforce Management, Compliance, Recruitment, Talent, Learning, Employee Benefits and Engagement, Health & Safety, all of which are underpinned by the powerful Access Workspace platform. 

The Access Group is one of the leading providers of business management software to small and mid-sized organisations in the UK, Ireland, and Asia Pacific. We help over 100,000 customers across commercial and not-for-profit sectors become more productive and efficient.