The road to execution excellence
March 15, 2022 | 5 Mins
David Daly
Last week, we ran our second webinar of 2022 as guests of the Global Payroll Management Institute (GPMI)-the topic was around how embracing automation and integrations can put you firmly on the road to execution excellence in global payroll delivery and management. You can view a recording here.
Integrate your relevant systems and automate your data flows-then the rest of it can fall into place a lot quicker than you might expect. Mary Holland (CPP), CCO joined as Payslipās guest speaker and our client Cloudera also attended in the form of David Nugent, Senior Manager Global Payroll.
Defining execution excellence
From our perspective, Mary talked about how this is essentially getting payroll processes working in a way that helps global companies free themselves of the huge amounts of complexities and challenges associated with global payroll delivery today.
Companies are growing at rapid rates, and this means there is a lot more to be managed in day-to-day global payroll delivery. More data, more systems, more local country providers, more compliance, more regulations, more unique pay elements associated with different countries. It’s a lot to manage and execution excellence is really about applying structure, discipline and control to payroll delivery. The way to make it happen is to automate the data flows from the various sources into the global payroll process while also integrating the key players in the global payroll ecosystem-specifically HCM systems and financial software.
When you make automations and integrations of this kind core to your payroll delivery process, then you are laying the foundations for execution excellence: smooth delivery of payroll across all of your countries, a strong transparent process and clear visibility over what is happening in each of your payroll countries-this is execution excellence in action.
āIt's about looking at the levels of efficiency we can get with automated workflows and what systems you have available to create thisā
Mary Holland
Pinpoint accuracy-accept nothing less
When it comes to automation, Mary also spoke about the manner in which robotic process automation serves to increase accuracy levels. Human error or data point failures are issues you can do without-global payroll is complex enough-so you should accept nothing less than pinpoint accuracy and the best way to achieve this is via automated data flows.
Automation ensures this accuracy while also hugely reducing the manual burden facing global payroll professionals at multinational companies around the world today. Many are still facing endless rolls of excel spreadsheets while transferring sensitive global payroll data and information via email.
This is slow, cumbersome, risky from a data security perspective and simply not sustainable in either large or growing organizations with multiple payroll countries on their books.
āRPA helps to ensure you have the necessary tools in place to be efficient as you build out your global payroll delivery modelā
Mary Holland
The steps to execution excellence
Mary also outlined a few helpful steps you can take when creating a roadmap for your journey to execution excellence:
- Have someone in place to own the process
- Define your goals and get leadership buy-in
- Ensure all stakeholders are in the loop and fully aligned- HR, Finance, Legal and Tax
- List all systems and processes currently in place for HR and payroll
- Prepare a list of vendors by location
- Identify current problems or issues- manual work, accuracy, etc.
- Look at what can be integrated- do you have a HCM? What is missing from payroll that requires an integration.
- Assess where you can automate any repeatable tasks
- Assess data security-can you apply user access and authorization rights
- Define how you currently manage your local country providers and then outline how you would like to manage them
Mary emphasized that looking at the discovery state and assessing how you deliver payroll right here and now is of crucial importance as this will immediately bring to your attention the things you need to prioritize.
The GPMI ran a poll during the webinar, and it was interesting to discover that in terms of current integration capabilities, 47% of attendees stated that they did have a HCM system but crucially did not have any form of integrated or unified process for payroll data flows into and out of this HCM.
Clouderaās need for execution excellence
David Nugent of Cloudera provided some excellent real life global payroll insight into the challenges faced by a busy global payroll team in a growing company. Cloudera had undergone a merger when David joined so he quickly found himself facing 40 payrolls to be processed.
Different processes, different systems, different data flows and separate working methodologies within the local country vendor network created a complex payroll environment to operate in! He needed to somehow keep track of 28 countries and multiple ICPs, all without global reporting and all processed via manual spreadsheets. They operated with Workday as their HR system and while it contained a wealth of useful data, they had no integration capabilities to extract this data and move it into their payroll process.
Integrations are so crucial, another poll question revealed that 39% of attendees stated that integrated data flows between payroll, HR and finance would make the biggest difference to their global payroll in 2022.
So, It was not difficult for Cloudera to see that they had a strong need to manage their global payroll in a different way leveraging a technology solution- the Payslip global payroll control platform. Being able to clearly articulate and prove the many challenges they were facing really helped David and his team create a business case for a process that could deliver execution excellence in global payroll.
Key to all of this was an ability to clearly define how this execution excellence would not only benefit global payroll but also human resources via the Workday integration provided by Payslip. Clouderaās finance team also stood to benefit from detailed, comprehensive and consolidated country cost comparison reporting that would provide essential bigger picture insights for informed decision making at leadership level.
āWe were able to demonstrate that there were cost savings associated with automations and integrations in the long term. There were also huge amounts of time saved for our internal teams when analyzing and reviewing reportsā
David Nugent, Cloudera
The benefits of execution excellence
David from Cloudera spoke about how much better their delivery and management of global payroll across all of their countries is today now that they are on the global payroll control platform with Payslip.
As soon as you standardize the data across all of your payroll countries, automate your data flows and extract consolidated multi-country reporting, you are operating with execution excellence. This is a process that works for global payroll delivery in the here and now, but also makes you growth ready as you scale into new countries- you have done the groundwork and now have a system in place to manage all aspects of your payroll inside a single cloud platform with a clear view of everything that is happening across countries.
The benefits of execution excellence in action include:
- a clear strategy for payroll delivery now and in the future
- integrated systems and connected departments aligned with payroll
- timesaving automated dataflows
- standardized data and a single way of working across countries
- the end of manual spreadsheets and the start of a zero-touch automated environment
- a process to respond to all compliance, regulation and audit needs
- local country provider management and visibility
- scale up control and growth readiness
There is a better way to deliver global payroll in 2022. If you make data standardization, automation and integrations core to what you want to achieve, then you are firmly on the path to execution excellence where you deliver and manage global payroll on a single cloud platform with the kind of visibility and control that has been missing from your process.
Our team is ready and waiting to describe to you further how to make this a reality-the good news is that it can happen much quicker than you might think-talk to us today.
Ā
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