Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/124894
Payroll to necessarily get all of the other advantages that may otherwise be offered. Thus, it's quite hard to do an apples-to-apples comparison in these sorts of arrangements." He noted the example of a potential client examining an RFI that might argue that the solution in one country is too expensive; therefore, it should purchase a direct solution in that country— even though this is what the company is currently doing. "It's so complicated because you're going to have to arrange all these different providers around the world, [making it] tricky to always get to a pure, hard ROI that's done purely on financial grounds alone," Woodward said." "These are relatively new services that are provided. We're still figuring out the ways of articulating why there's real value in the services that are being offered." The Compliance Conundrum For Groupon, a client of CloudPay, this value was indeed risk compliance, said Pearson. "We're a couple months into a 12-month roll-out for 12,000 people across 48 countries for Groupon, and if you know anything about them you know it's a relatively new, young company," he explained. "It's gone from nothing to 12,000 to 13,000 people in two or three years, and so control is a fundamental driver (for a multi-country payroll solution). They didn't really look too closely at the costs, other than to ensure that they were in line." He explained that fiscal control, and the risk compliance that stems from this, "was the fundamental overriding business driver for a company that has exploded to life in a short number of years." By contrast, Pearson cited the example of another client, a 20-year-old European telecom concern that came to CloudPay with a cost-only agenda: "They simply said, 'I wonder if we can make some money by doing this? Let's go and find out.' " And, he added, even the simplest of challenges in this realm carries complexity. "What tends to happen next that makes the business case process ineffective in this case is that they don't fully quantify all of the hidden costs of doing payroll today in all these different countries—the individual in a far foreign country spending three or four hours of their time, across two or three evenings, because they've got another role as well. How effective is that?" Fernandez introduced another issue that she said impeded more widespread acceptance—clients that sign a transaction and then remove something from it, thereby degrading the value of the deal. "We've had clients like that," said Woodward, citing a company that had promised to roll out a global payroll solution across 45 countries. "Then, a number of things happened, some of them out of everyone's control, such as a couple businesses that closed down. Other times we've had clients that just decide 'You know what, we don't want to do that anymore in that country, we can get a better deal direct, and we've decided to let the local manager make that decision.' Frankly, contracts have to work for both parties." Down the line, the providers predict growth, despite continuing "toe in the water" testing. "We've certainly seen a lot of organisations coming to us," said Woodward, "but there is a little bit of people knocking on the door, thinking maybe the primary thing is that this will be a price-based play." He added, "That's probably the third or fourth item down the list of things that really matter." Russ Banham can be reached at www.russbanham.com WINTER 2013 | www.hroglobal.com [17]