Challenging Budget Decisions in Government

A group of small counties had been consolidated into one larger county. 600 employees.

The Challenge

Many counties today are amalgamating and this fact brings many payroll challenges. How do you merge legacy systems, paper systems and complicated collective agreements into one streamlined system? In this rapidly growing county, the new 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 for Year 2000…only 2 months away. The committee put together to run the amalgamation 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

The County relied on the expertise of StarGarden's consultants to guide their timepressured 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.

Result

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