Manufacturer - Growth through Merger

Food manufacturer of candy, cookies and crackers with 1000 employees.

The Challenge

This manufacturer had acquired a competitor with several new plants that had to be integrated under a single centralized payroll umbrella. In addition, the manufacturer paid employees in almost every province. Each jurisdiction had different payroll rules and each plant had different union groups with separately negotiated pay and benefit packages. By late 2000, it had become a struggle to handle and integrate all of the complexities of the various systems. To add to the frustration, the manufacturer's home grown payroll system could not handle the job and had become too expensive to maintain. The payroll department needed an easier more functional system to use, and the company needed to streamline operations and cut costs.

The Solution

The payroll department did a formal search for a HR/Payroll solution. The debate at the time was whether they outsource the payroll to ADP or Ceridian or continue to run inhouse payroll. As the payroll department still wanted complete control of their data, they decided to continue to run in-house. Of the in-house systems they looked at, they felt StarGarden was most able to handle all the complexities in the most cost effective way. Once initial installation and assessment was complete, StarGarden consultants set to work deciphering the contracts and pay and benefit obligations of the manufacturer at each of their plants.

StarGarden consultants decided that the best approach was to work with one plant at a time by mapping out all their rules and calculations into predefined templates. This method would save setup time in the long run and allow for solid preliminary testing. One at a time, the plants would be loaded into the central payroll system and tested. They took the most difficult group first to ensure they would cover the complexities up front. The process was not without its stresses. At one site, the HR manager decided to retire because of the amount of change in the system. In order to capture her knowledge before she left, StarGarden involved this manager and her clerks in all the planning meetings. It was crucial that the knowledge that she carried with her be reflected in the system rules and setup tables.

Result

StarGarden was able to build a set of pay and benefit templates to help staff to migrate from what they used to do to what they would in the StarGarden system. In a standard implementation, parallel pay runs are crucial for testing purposes. Because the data was coming from a variety of sources, StarGarden had to utilize the pay and benefit calculation templates it created as well as the payroll registers to reconcile and balance the results. The Payroll team was able to learn while testing and payroll procedures were streamlined saving valuable time. Senior managers now had all of the payroll information in one system and were able to get a complete picture of payroll costs. Implementation of base functionality occurred quickly and the manufacturer was live with their system within 3 months