Amalgamating Local Governments in Canada

Haldimand County, Ontario

In late 2000, several small counties in Ontario, Canada merged to form two larger counties, Norfolk County and Haldimand County. Haldimand County now had 600 employees to pay and needed a new system up and live by Dec 31, 2000. StarGarden was chosen by the Amalgamation Board to provide the HR/Payroll solution to the 2 new Counties. StarGarden was selected because it was able to provide the functionality needed to pay employees working in different jobs and union groups and the complicated benefits and deductions that went along with that. StarGarden was also able to meet the aggressive timeline and budget that other companies could not.

The Challenge

Many counties today are choosing to merge and this fact brings many payroll challenges. How do you integrate legacy systems, paper systems and complicated collective agreements into one streamlined system? The newly formed Haldimand County was growing rapidly. The payroll team had the usual pressures of combining multiple sites’ data and verifying its accuracy but there was also the added pressure of having the new system up and running by December 31 2000…only 2 months away. The committee put together to run the merger project also kept changing the boundaries and the number of people that the new County was responsible for. The Payroll implementation team also did not have permanent office space and were placed in a temporary office until the County buildings were setup for them.

The Solution

With user requirements and scope changing weekly, the County relied on the expertise of StarGarden’s consultants to guide their time-pressured process. StarGarden consultants moved in to ensure the County would meet the deadline and pay their staff throughout the changeover. Pay and benefits templates were created to keep the calculations for the various groups in order. Groups of employees were entered into the system one by one and a lab was setup for the users to test the employee data for accuracy. Adding to an already complicated situation, the County was in the midst of a reorganization and new employees were being added and moved around the system as part of new labor pools. In some cases, the groups the employees were joining had already been tested and thus a re-test was required.

The Result

Despite the constant changes, StarGarden helped the County meet their implementation deadline and was live by December 31, 2000. StarGarden was able to accommodate the pay and benefit calculations required by the various groups with very little customization. After going live, StarGarden’s payroll team was able to transition their knowledge to the core user team and do some more in depth training once the pressure was off.

The Future

The county’s agreement with its union will be up for renegotiation in 2008. “Dealing with the effects of the changes to payroll as a result of the new collective agreement will be much easier now that we are using the daily time entries in StarGarden”, according to Heather Scott. “Being able to view unlimited amounts of employee information is one of the best aspects of working with StarGarden. We found the time to set up the modules and then put in the data the way we needed it. Now we can build our own history for analysis purposes.”

Adds Heather “I am really glad we followed StarGarden’s recommendations with investing the time to add our history into the database”,

“We look out for the long term interests of all our clients,” says COO Marnie Larson “Helping them prepare for the future is part of our client promise and partnership focus. Now StarGarden will be able make the changes for Heather and her team and it will be a lot less time intensive for everyone.”