[At the request of our client, this case study will remain anonymous]
Company A (name we will use to refer to this client), is a large biopharmaceutical company with over 20,000 employees and operations in over 60 countries.
Managing payroll across such a large number of people and countries is understandably complex, and Company A does so by working with various payroll providers, each handling a different region.
Company A’s payroll operations are highly sophisticated, with a great deal of importance placed on aggregating and analyzing payroll data from across the organization to inform decision-making at the executive level.
However, it wasn’t always like this. Before working with Payzaar, Company A had some issues with its payroll reporting capabilities, and these even spilled over into the realm of compliance, creating large potential problems for the organization.
The Challenge: Having truly global payroll reporting capabilities
As is the case with most large multinational organizations, Company A’s payroll processing was outsourced to a variety of providers around the world, each handling a different region.
The quality of payroll delivered was high, and Company A was satisfied with the service, but the fragmentation of providers meant that payroll data was regionally siloed, in different formats.
This created a problem for the global payroll team, because it was impossible to do high-level global reporting without substantial manual data preparation work. Under this setup, the team was unable to satisfy all stakeholder requests, as some were impossible to fulfill within a reasonable timeframe.
“We were doing hours and hours of manual labor with requests that we couldn’t serve or that would take very long to serve.” – Senior Payroll Manager, EMEA
There was a second problem as a consequence of Company A’s payroll data being highly fragmented: lack of visibility of compliance-critical pay elements across the entire org.
Specifically, Company A’s global payroll team detected that due to an oversight, the organization had been undercounting its vacation accruals in one of its largest population countries. This meant that, should the company have a large batch of leavers at any point, there would be a 7-figure hole in the budget.
“One of the problems with payroll data is that there is too much data, and sometimes the people looking at it have no localized expertise” – Senior Payroll Manager, EMEA
Thankfully, the issue was caught and corrected before it could cause any real problems, but the fact that it happened underscored the need for Company A to have much better visibility and control over its payroll data.
The Solution: A modular, reporting-only payroll solution
Given that Company A already had payroll providers for its entire landscape, what it needed was a way to aggregate the data from each of them and make it actionable, so the global payroll team could better deliver on the needs of the organization’s different stakeholders.
Unfortunately, none of the market’s traditional payroll providers offer the sort of functionality required to do this. Their reporting solutions are locked into their own network of vendors, and generally they only offer a limited number of pre-built reports.
What Company A needed was a stand-alone reporting solution that could sit on top of its existing payroll landscape, consume data from its different payroll providers, and unify it into a single data stream.
Following a rigorous analysis of the market, Company A selected Payzaar to provide a stand-alone global reporting solution delivered through our fully-modular, cloud-based payroll management platform.
“We didn’t see the flexibility and capabilities of Payzaar in anybody else. We didn’t see any other vendor who could integrate that easily.” – Senior Payroll Manager, EMEA
Decision Drivers
The key factors why Company A selected Payzaar as its reporting technology partner are:
- The ability to deliver a stand-alone reporting solution. The Payzaar platform’s modularity allowed Company A to deploy only the functionality they needed to solve a specific problem.
- Interoperability with a fragmented payroll landscape. Company A’s payroll is processed by multiple different providers, so they needed a solution that could integrate and consume data from all of them.
- Platform flexibility and configurability, which gave Company A the ability to generate as many custom reports as needed with no added cost.
- Collaboration enablement by centralizing all data management and reporting tasks for the entire organization in a single platform in the cloud.
“It’s an immense collaboration booster within our team. It’s the first time we’ve collaborated worldwide like this. It makes the other regions visible.” – Senior Payroll Manager, EMEA
If you want to find out more about how Payzaar can transform your payroll operations, check out our case study 'How Mercury Engineering Halved Processing Costs While Increasing Accuracy and Reducing Cycle Time By 10 Days'
