Diana Volkova
Senior HR Specialist
SFD
Case study Worksmile & SFD
How smooth benefits and Perks & Benefits Marketplace administration opened the door for SFD to a single tool for all HR matters?
Managing benefits in one place
SFD is an e-commerce company specialising in dietary supplements, sports nutrition and sports accessories, with its own product brands in its portfolio. 350 users work on the Worksmile platform.
The partnership with Worksmile began in April 2023 in a single area: benefits. For over three years, that’s where SFD tested how the platform holds up in everyday work – with a real number of employees and a real volume of cases to handle.
SFD – details:
- Industry: dietary supplement production
- Scale: 350 platform users
- Partnership with Worksmile: since 2023
Administering subscription benefits within the platform
A sports card, medical care and group insurance – three types of benefits, each with dozens of packages across different variants, co-payment thresholds and enrolment rules. All of them are handled from a single panel.
Employees enrol, change their variant or opt out themselves, and the HR team works from one up-to-date record instead of declarations collected by email. Billing with providers is generated from reports produced by the platform – in the same format every month, regardless of how many changes happened in between. In 2026, that’s 95 subscriptions handled, each meaning a separate enrolment, verification, activation or deactivation of payment that HR didn’t have to do manually.
Perks & Benefits Marketplace and budgets for important moments
Alongside subscription benefits, SFD runs a Perks & Benefits Marketplace, where employees decide themselves what to spend their budget on. Occasion-based budgets are awarded separately – for the birth of a child, a wedding, or a work anniversary such as a ten-year milestone.
For the employee, this means an independent choice instead of an application to HR and waiting for a reply. For the HR team, it means a single panel where rules and budgets are configured, instead of tracking in a spreadsheet who is entitled to what and when. Launching a new benefit doesn’t require a new process or a new tool.
We’d already used Worksmile in the benefits area before. So it wasn’t a completely new platform for us.
Diana Volkova
Senior HR Specialist
SFD
Key Findings
96,6%
activated accounts
264 (74,7%)
of employees with at least 1 subscription benefit
95
subscription benefit orders/cancellations handled automatically (Jan ’26–Aug ’26)
Worksmile internal data, January–August 2026.
The bigger the organisation, the more systems – and the less they added up to
The rest of the HR processes grew separately over this time. Internal communication, employee documents and applications, time tracking and schedules – each area had its own tool, its own access, and its own place in an employee’s day-to-day work.
The bigger the organisation became, the clearer it was that the tools supported individual processes, but not the company as a whole.
Diana Volkova
Senior HR Specialist
SFD
Scattered tools started costing SFD in three places at once:
Manual work on the HR and payroll side. Data gathered from across the organisation had to be manually transferred, verified and updated between systems.
Duplicated work with every change. A new hire, or a change to data, department or permissions meant updating information in several different places.
A blurred employee experience. Separate access to separate tools meant employees had to remember where to handle which matter.
Diana Volkova
Senior HR Specialist
SFD
Once one tool works, it's easier to decide on the next ones
For over three years, benefits administration in Worksmile ran smoothly, and the platform itself kept adding new features. Over time, SFD began to notice that a tool known from one area could cover a lot more.
So when the organisation started looking for a way to bring order to the rest of its HR processes, it had a rare comfort: it could judge the solution based on its own experience, not a sales pitch.
We used a lot of the available features ourselves, and only over time did we start to notice how many processes we could bring into one place.
Diana Volkova
Senior HR Specialist
SFD
One information layer for the whole organisation
SFD sees the expansion as more than just adding further modules side by side. It’s an opportunity for data about the organisation and its employees to live in one place, shared by everyone who handles HR matters day to day. Employees find everything in one tool, managers get visibility into what concerns their team, and HR works from a single, consistent data source instead of several scattered ones.
The biggest challenge, though, was that the systems weren’t integrated with our HR system. In practice, that meant a large part of the information gathered from the organisation later had to be manually transferred, verified or updated by HR and payroll.
Diana Volkova
Senior HR Specialist
SFD
The decision to expand, together with integration
Part of this decision is integration with the HR system. Thanks to it, employee data will feed all automated processes, instead of being entered manually and separately for each one.
Account manager's perspective
We’ve been working with SFD since 2023, all along in the benefits area. When the conversation about expanding came up, we didn’t start by learning about SFD’s processes. We already knew where we could genuinely help.
Worksmile account manager
The biggest challenge, however, was that these systems were not integrated with our HR system. In practice, this meant that a large portion of the information collected from the organization had to be manually transferred, verified, or updated by HR and staff.
Diana Volkova
Senior HR Specialist
SFD
It was about bringing order to the whole HR ecosystem and moving away from a situation where technology supports individual processes but doesn’t support the organisation as a whole.
Diana Volkova
Senior HR Specialist
SFD
Benefits for the company and employees
Scale without extra work
Dozens of packages from a single panel, with billing ready to send. Each additional benefit doesn't mean another manually run process.
Access for the whole workforce
The platform works regardless of location or way of working. Employees check what they're entitled to and submit a request themselves.
A reason for employees to keep coming back
Choice in the Perks & Benefits Marketplace and budgets for important moments give employees a reason to return to the platform on their own. For HR, it's a ready-made tool for building organisational culture.
A foundation for further growth
Further processes move to where the team is already working. Instead of a rollout from scratch – an expansion of an environment proven over more than three years.
See how Worksmile could look for you
We’ll show you how the platform works with your processes—benefits, communication, and requests.