Acquisition creates payroll challenges

A large manufacturer acquired a competitor, adding several new plants that had to be integrated under a single centralized payroll umbrella. The manufacturer's home-grown payroll system could not handle the job and had become too expensive to maintain

The challenges the payroll team needed to handle:

• Pay employees in almost every province of Canada
• Handle payroll rules from different jurisdictions
• Comply with union contracts in each of the different plants

The manufacturer wanted control of their data, so they were looking for a system that would enable them to continue running their Payroll in-house

How did StarGarden help?

• StarGarden consultants did an initial assessment and started deciphering the contracts, including pay and benefit obligations
• They worked with one plant at a time for mapping out all the rules and calculations required in a predefined template
• The approach StarGarden consultants used saved set up time and allowed for preliminary testing
• One at a time, the plants data was loaded into the central payroll system and tested starting with the most difficult group to ensure they would cover the complexities up front
• StarGarden even involved a retiring HR manager and her clerks in all the planning meetings in order to capture her knowledge before she left.

Despite the many complexities, StarGarden’s team got the manufacturer live with more efficient system within 3 months!

StarGarden was also able to:

• Build a set of pay and benefit templates in the new StarGarden system to help staff to accomplish their job functions more efficiently and effectively.
• Perform parallel pay runs since data was coming from a variety of sources.
• Enable learning for the payroll team while testing and streamlining payroll procedures - all of which saved valuable time
• Give complete picture of payroll costs and quickly implement base functionality