Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/94708
HRO Today Forum Europe The Battle Continues By Julie Fernandez When it comes to payroll buyers' trends, evidence indicates that the age-old history of local sourcing and control is giving way to corporate and regional initiatives. Furthermore, many different parts of the organisation can be found "leading the charge," all aspiring to revisit the laundry list of payroll systems and providers in search of a more rationalised approach to payroll delivery and outsourcing. And yet, few regional and global companies have reached a point where they can declare victory over their global payroll chaos and have reached a logical handful of provider relationships for payroll across Europe and beyond. Still, there are a number of emerging techniques being used by multinational clients to zero in on a solution and, more important, to improve their ability to make progress despite the challenges of local buy-in, suitable providers, a payroll business case, and funding the investment. Can some or all of the trends below be applied to your global organisation or whet your appetite to explore sensible ways to tackle your own proliferation of payroll providers? 1) Appoint an owner. Ownership for the payroll function presents unique challenges to a global payroll strategy that has grown up as a locally controlled operation. A great many countries may continue to "own" their payroll operations as part of their local budgets, while others assign responsibility to HR, to finance, to shared services—with different ownership in each country or region. Establishing ownership is key to country-level participation, funding, and investment. Increasingly, clients are acknowledging the need to focus on global payroll by first creating a champion or visible owner within the central global organisation. In many instances, a global payroll owner is named, but true "ownership" of payroll operations budgets still trails the figurehead positions. Techniques for empowering the global payroll owner with full financial accountability include shifting staff and budgets for the largest countries or assigning countries and locations to the global payroll cost centre upon transition to a new provider or outsourced model. This establishes line of sight and governance responsibility from this point forward. Further expansion of the global payroll office can then happen by rolling additional country staff and budgets into the shared services model—either on demand (payroll system or provider for a given country needs to be replaced) or tied to a major initiative impacting countries across a region or the globe. 2) Ride the global transition wave. Spurred on by the "buzz" of fresh new platforms such as Workday and Fusion, clients seem to have a renewed focus on reaching a single global information system (HRIS). For some, this means extending a North America-centric enterprise resource platform with upgrades, while others will make the leap to new cloud-based platforms. Regardless, there is no quicker way to raise questions about the number of payroll providers that might need an HRIS interface than to begin planning for waves of HR transition across the globe. There is a distinct school of thought that links global payroll to the timeline for implementing a global HR system of record. As plans are made to reach a single HR system, the tactical plans for interface are also discussed. Most clients will quickly realise that the number of payroll interfaces to internal or external systems exceeds the number of countries. Idealists describe a world where the newly global HR interfaces to a single—or, more realistically, a The search for global payroll harmony is far from over, but its pursuit is more sophisticated than ever. [20] HRO TODAY GLOBAL | FALL 2012