Case Studies
A defensible, market-grounded compensation architecture that unified three countries under one framework.
Engagement: Multi-Phase Compensation & Leveling Review
Industry: Specialty Minerals / Industrial Manufacturing
Services: Job architecture alignment, market benchmarking, salary range consolidation, pay structure design, executive advisory, deliverable production
Written by
Carmen Olmetti
A global specialty minerals producer with salaried employees across the US, Canada, and the UK had built real operating strength, but its compensation structure had not kept pace with that growth. Years of acquisitions, country-specific decisions, and incremental range additions had left the organization without a common job architecture tying roles together. The same work was often graded differently depending on where it sat in the organization or which legacy structure it had come from.
With leadership focused on modernizing the commercial and people infrastructure, the moment was right to build a defensible, market-grounded pay structure from the ground up. The opportunity was clear once the underlying conditions came into view:
Overlapping salary bands and inconsistent leveling created an opening for a single, clean framework.
An unusually high number of narrow grades was contributing to title inflation, giving consolidation a clear structural purpose.
UK roles operated under collective bargaining agreement constraints that required precise, defensible handling rather than reinterpretation.
A strong underlying data foundation set up the organization for rigorous, market-grounded benchmarking.
Radford-anchored job architecture
RevEng built a job-code-to-sub-family map covering the full salaried, in-scope population across all three countries, aligning every role to the Radford global job architecture. Roles were organized under a clean Job Family and Sub-Family hierarchy, giving the organization a single, benchmark-ready leveling framework where none had existed before.
Benchmark first, then consolidate
RevEng treated benchmarking and consolidation as separate, sequential disciplines rather than a single step. Benchmarked like-for-like market ranges by role, level, and location against the Radford grids. Only then did consolidation begin: the deliberate collapsing of near-identical bands within a single country to shared ranges, never across countries, and never where it would raise cost for the lower band.
Consolidation without cost lift
Consolidation ran in structured, additive passes, surfacing net-new opportunities without re-litigating prior decisions. Ranges were collapsed only where midpoints were close enough that combining them would not inflate cost, with practical headcount realities weighted more heavily than academic percentage thresholds.
Country and CBA discipline
US, Canada, and UK structures were held separate throughout the analysis and presentation. UK collective-bargaining levels were preserved exactly as documented, so union commitments were never obscured or overwritten, keeping the structure defensible to works councils and employees alike.
Source discipline and verified data
Every figure was traced to its authoritative source before it entered a deliverable, with a designated cost model and reconciliation file governing the numbers. Formula logic was validated against known-correct values to catch data errors before they reached client-ready output.
A defensible architecture, built from scratch.
The organization gained a unified leveling framework mapped to Radford, with every salaried in-scope role assigned to a job family and sub-family. Roles that had been graded inconsistently across legacy structures now sit within a single coherent architecture that the compensation team can benchmark and govern.
Three countries unified under one framework.
US, Canada, and UK populations were brought under a single architecture while keeping each country's structures and constraints intact, giving leadership one consistent view of levels and ranges across the global salaried population.
Aligned to market best practice.
By anchoring the structure to the Radford global job architecture and benchmarking before consolidating, the design reflects external market norms rather than legacy internal habits, giving the framework durability as the organization evolves.
A single source of truth for levels and ranges.
Consolidation reduced structural clutter without inflating the cost base, and every level and range now reconciles to a single governing authority, backed by verified data that leadership can act on with confidence.