10 companies. 500+ new employees. Two weeks to make it happen.
What happens when ten companies, ten sets of HR processes and 25 dealerships across six states merge into one company — all in just a couple of months?
Just ask Neal Opatkiewicz, Director of HR. As the largest single-day John Deere acquisition, United Ag & Turf needed to unify workflows, re-sign critical employee documents, and get their I-9 forms in shape.
And with the ink on the merger barely dry, Neal and his team faced a huge challenge: to get all of that done in less than two weeks.
The clock was ticking. That’s when Neal came to WorkBright.
"We saved two months of admin time. We really took HR from pen and paper to the level we’re doing with WorkBright."
Neal Opatkiewicz
Director of Human Resources, United Ag & Turf
The challenge: Navigating compliance processes amid a ten-company merger
Merging ten companies into one organization was no small order for United Ag & Turf’s HR team.
First, they had to contend with managing the workforce dynamics of integrating employees across all the different companies. Second, they had to navigate a labyrinth of different documents that made up each company’s HR and compliance processes.
“We brought ten different companies together in one fell swoop and had 500+ employees merging into one organization,” Neal says. “From January to July, I was the HR department. Everything [across each of the companies] was done very manually. We were building the HR structure while trying to onboard hundreds of people.”
With no centralized system in place, each small delay in the paperwork for any one of those incoming employees could quickly snowball into a compliance risk. And when their existing software provider overpromised and underdelivered, Neal knew he needed to find a more reliable provider.
The solution: Scaling a secure, compliant I-9 process in under two weeks
Bringing all of the companies together under the same umbrella was as much of a people and process challenge as it was a logistical one. United Ag & Turf needed to centralize HR processes for all of the separate companies — each with their own approach to what HR should look like.
Neal knew WorkBright was the right provider to get all of these disparate processes in line and make compliance make sense. But he was up against some challenging odds to pull it off. He had three key criteria in mind in a new software partner:
- Quick to scale: With a tight timeline to get new hire compliance in order, United Ag & Turf needed a product that could go from implementation to launch in weeks, not months.
- Intuitive user experience: Simple for all new employees to use, no matter their role or location.
- Secure partner access: A system that enabled external consultants to safely view and upload only the driver qualification files relevant to them, without exposing sensitive data.
Once United Ag & Turf had settled on WorkBright as their provider, the team got to work fast. WorkBright centralized and automated key new hire documentation, including a 39-page document packet for drivers — and gave United Ag & Turf’s consulting partner secure access to manage and upload driver qualification files directly through the system.
“To automate working with a consulting partner, we were able to take all the information from WorkBright, and give them access to specific driver files,” Neal says.
“We wanted to make our new onboarding system as easy and simple as we could. We had 500+ employees that we were onboarding the same day. [WorkBright's] E-signatures and Kiosk Mode helped out a lot.”
Neal Opatkiewicz
Director of Human Resources, United Ag & Turf
Estimated I-9 risk reduction
Of admin time saved
The impact: 100% I-9 accuracy and avoiding seven-figure liability
Onboarding 500+ employees in a matter of weeks isn’t easy any way you swing it. Doing it when everyone has a different level of tech-savviness is even harder.
One of the biggest wins for Neal was WorkBright’s Kiosk Mode.
WorkBright’s I-9 software helped standardize I-9 completion across all dealership locations. Meanwhile, Kiosk Mode gave distributed staff a fast, accessible way of completing and signing their forms securely onsite on a shared device.
Together, both features were a powerhouse in ensuring accuracy, reducing manual tracking across regions, and making sure critical compliance documents like Form I-9 were verified.
For Neal and his team, this translated into some big wins:
- Unified and modernized HR systems: Brought together ten disconnected platforms across 25 dealerships in six states, including revamping and centralizing the entire I-9 completion process for consistency and compliance.
- Reduced costly I-9 risk exposure: Industry research shows that 60–80% of paper I-9s are missing, incomplete, or contain errors. For United Ag & Turf’s 500 I-9s, that translated to hundreds of risky forms—exposing the company to up to a million dollars* in potential penalties. Digitizing the process eliminated this compliance risk.
- Accelerated onboarding during a major merger: Replacing manual I-9 processing compressed two months of onboarding work into just two weeks—freeing up 300+ hours of administrative time and lowering onboarding costs during one of the largest single-day John Deere acquisitions.
WorkBright turned a potential landslide of new hire paperwork into an effortless, streamlined process. And whenever Neal and his team needed to make changes or add documents to their workflow, WorkBright’s intuitive interface made it easy to roll out across all of their systems.
*I-9 risk calculated using 2025 USCIS I-9 fine rates.
“We were looking for a one-stop solution that would make it easy for people to fill out forms. WorkBright was able to set up in a very short order, and meet all of our requests — and then some!”
Neal Opatkiewicz
Director of Human Resources, United Ag & Turf
Looking to simplify compliance like United Ag & Turf? Learn how WorkBright helps operational teams enhance compliance and get their workforce up and running quickly.
