Re:Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B
by AndyNemmity on Thursday March 01, 2018 @03:32PM
(#16495987)
Let alone all the country specific rules. Just that is impossible to deal with properly.
Re:Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B
by j45 on Thursday March 01, 2018 @05:05PM
(#16496822)
Absolutely. You reminded me of the pain I blocked out from the project - at the end client decided to go international and now needed to pay people everywhere through separate entities after swearing they never would at the start.
Sadly the "global" payroll vendor did not have a global, multi-entity solution, and required individual accounts to be setup in each country and reconciled.
Creating a new multi-tenant, multi-entity, multi-country compatible mainframe is maybe something that needs further exploration.
Imagine people hired over the last 50 years. Each at a different rate, pay scale, union, non-union, some people in a position have certain perks, some don't, and it all varies from region to region, province to province, department to department of the government.
I recently oversaw a payroll transformation project in Canada for an energy co at a smaller, but most complex scale according to the payroll vendor.
A few key problem makers add to the payroll mess;
- Accountants and their spreadsheets who think adding one little tweak here or there isn't a big deal. They create so much technical debt. It's not realized, until 10 or 20 simple tweaks on top of each other, and then have to interpret them relative to labor or union rules of each province. Accountants are not a vision of innovation. You will hear many just talk about having to do "manipulations" of data to get it how it should be and quickly losing vision that computers are good calculators and followers of instruction.
- HR / Payroll practitioners do not have enough digital skills on average. Either they can't do the excel work and feel threatened, or do have the excel skills and feel threatened. Either way, change management is a constant threat.
- No one knows how to successfully procure, implement and roll out software as a non-technical manager. Whether it's accounting, hr, payroll, sales, every position is becoming digital first, and the powers that be are not. It's a good case as to why CTO's are needed reporting to CEO's who get the big picture.
Payroll othherwise, is a neat problem on it's own. In my case, the project ended up implementing a larger vendor of payroll that did a decent job that was saved by preparations we made at the CTO level.
Before selecting a vendor, a payroll script capturing the rules for all employees in all regions to calculate everything was developed in-house. It took months of hardening at a few payrolls per month. Using this in-house payroll tool, and not wishing to update it, it was used to hold the screws to the payroll vendor if their output didn't match. Hilarity inevitably ensued.
If someone built the stripe of payroll, it would be something.