Webster Buchanan Research gave an overview of these issues at the American Payroll Association’s Annual Congress in Long Beach, California this month. The workshop was led by Keith Rodgers, co-founder of Webster Buchanan Research, and Alan Wigley, an independent consultant and European vice chair of Webster Buchanan’s Multi-country Payroll Forum.

The workshop ranged across several topics that will be addressed in more depth in a series of web seminars produced by Webster Buchanan’s Global Academy, which will be launched on July 2nd. 

The presentation began by focusing on ways to analyze the status quo in each international payroll operation, focusing on high-level issues relating to the team and the set-up. Payroll managers will want to look at what skills and knowledge they’re inheriting, for example – but also at any friction and critical dependencies that need to be factored into a change program. If a small country operation is highly dependent on one person’s knowledge of an ageing in-house system, for example, that represents both a risk to address and a special factor to accommodate during a transition project. Similarly, there are multiple issues to examine in the current payroll set-up, from the degree of process automation to how effectively outsourcers’ service quality is measured and managed.

The assessment moves on to examine country-specific issues – ranging from cultural differences to the practicalities of working across multiple time zones – before addressing one of the most critical issues, compliance. While most parts of the initial status quo assessment can be carried out at a high-level, the presenters stressed that multi-country payroll managers need to get a comprehensive understanding of their major compliance responsibilities as early as possible, including past performance and upcoming requirements. While much of this information should be provided by the in-house team, there are half a dozen potential sources of information that can be consulted to unearth and validate compliance requirements, from payroll institutes and associations to vendors and personal networks.

The status quo assessment continues with a brief overview of payroll performance, using the five key indicators outlined in Webster Buchanan’s Payroll Performance Scorecard – timeliness, accuracy, compliance, cost and employee satisfaction.

Among other highlights of the presentation, Webster Buchanan looked at:

• Assessing risk, from the fundamentals of maintaining a minimum level of service quality to the challenge of retaining key individuals and recruiting new talent during the transition to a multi-country structure
• Assessing opportunities, ranging from improved compliance to potential cost savings, which will form part of the business case
• The practicalities of driving through change, with a particular focus on people and process management

 The workshop concluded with a brief analysis of the vendor equation, exploring the on-premise and outsourcing options that are available on a regional or trans-continent basis. This included an analysis of the different types of outsourcing services available, from traditional managed services providers to business process outsourcers, payroll brokers that aggregate services from different country specialists, and software as a service providers. The conclusion was that companies should:

• Seek the ‘best possible’ system set-up – i.e. not necessarily the ideal, but the best possible within the constraints they operate in
• Be prepared to live with the status quo where the business case dictates
• Go for a cost-effective rather than purist vendor strategy
• Take a tiered, prioritized approach

To find out more about the upcoming multi-country payroll web seminars from Webster Buchanan’s Global Academy, contact us in confidence 

The leading multi-continent software and service providers are analyzed in depth in Webster Buchanan’s Multi-country Vendor Review, a 40 page independent research report published last summer and due to be updated in June 2009.