How do you become a multi-country payroll strategist - and when you do find yourself in charge of international payroll, how do you select the best delivery model from all the outsourcing and on-premise options on the market? According to Michelle Whitfield, director of EMEA and APAC payroll at Honeywell, the former is largely down to luck or good fortune, while the latter is a combination of experience, confidence to experiment and a touch of trial and error.

Whitfield, a vice-chair of Webster Buchanan's Multi-country Payroll Forum, has more than two decades' experience managing national and multi-country payroll. The routes she's taken include running custom payroll in-house: connecting multiple ‘best-of-breed' national payroll systems; outsourcing, both as a client and while working in a senior role at a service provider; co-sourcing (where the client and service provider jointly run projects) and offshoring. A keynote speaker at Webster Buchanan's upcoming Second Annual Multi-country Payroll Summit in London in April 2010, she believes each approach brings its own benefits and challenges.

Whitfield started what she describes as an "accidental payroll journey" in the late 1980s, working for a clothing manufacturer in the north of England that was subsequently bought by another highly-acquisitive provider. At the time, the company ran payroll in-house on its own system. "Having an in-house platform was expensive," she recalls. "It also meant the payroll team had to understand legislation and the terms and conditions of our union agreements so that when a law changed, we could translate it to the tech team to build the requirements into the platform. But it did give us an engine to bring in new businesses quickly at little cost."

Her next move took her to an outsourcing provider, where her first role was to implement an SAP payroll for a local government body in the UK. There she experienced a relatively common problem in outsourcing. Like many third party service providers, the outsourcer wanted to collect data in a standard way, using the best practices it had baked into its systems: the customer, however, was set against changing any of its own processes. "The result was that they implemented a state-of-the-art platform, but never realized its potential because the change only happened on one side."

Her next project, still with the outsourced services provider, saw her taking a co-sourcing approach at a large retailer in a project designed to improve its HR, finance and in-store processes. This approach is perhaps the purest form of collaboration in the outsourcing field, requiring representatives from both companies to work together as one team in everything from planning and decision-making to maximizing resource allocation.

From there, she moved to a global services provider role, managing a wide range of in-house "best-of-breed" payrolls in multiple countries. The provider built interfaces to each of the in-country payrolls in order to centralize data collection - a difficult project to execute because of the wide variety of processes and working practices in each territory. In effect, this model was a precursor to the broker/aggregator model favored by a number of multi-country payroll outsourcers today, usually built around a central middleware platform that provides a single data entry point and reporting dashboard for customers.

While the choice of service delivery model is critical, Whitfield argues that it's important to think less about the platform and more about the processes and skills required within the payroll team to carry it out. She breaks the payroll cycle into discrete steps - time capture; source to gross; gross to net; reporting and tax filing; audit and compliance; and employee contact - with business intelligence layered across the top.

Drawing on all of her experiences, Whitfield is now in the process of rolling out what she sees as the optimal model to meet the needs of aerospace-to-automotive manufacturer Honeywell, built around an in-house SAP platform. Following an initial rollout in the UK, standard processes, controls, documents, and governance are now in place in eight countries. Standardization is critical to the project: where exceptions or changes to the standard are requested by in-country teams, it's the responsibility of Honeywell's governance board to assess the business benefits, analyze the configuration requirements, decide whether to go ahead with the move and if it is approved, determine whether each change is unique to one country or should be adopted as part of global best practice.

Adopting a "transform then transfer" approach, the company has also built a center for back-office transactional tasks in Bangalore, resulting in significant efficiencies and improvement in service quality delivery to the business.

Michelle Whitfield will give detailed insights into her multi-country payroll experiences during two sessions at Webster Buchanan's Second Annual Multi-country Payroll Summit in London, UK, on April 27th & 28th. Find out more and register for the event