Camille Oyelaran· HR Business Partner, Kestrel Aerospace
Asked in Benefits & Wellbeing ·
Professional services firm, 3,500 employees in the UK, Ireland and the Netherlands. Our flexible benefits platform contract ends in fourteen months and we are going to market. The current one is fine for the UK and poor everywhere else, and payroll reconciliation each month takes one of my team about four days.
We have a long list of five suppliers and a scoring grid with 60 lines on it, which I suspect means we will choose on the demo.
For those who have been through a change in the last couple of years: with hindsight, which criteria actually predicted whether it went well? And which ones did you weight heavily that turned out not to matter?
1 agree · 5 replies · 110 views · 10 following
Accepted answer· by Samir Grant
I would cut your 60 lines to about eight and make three of them pass or fail. Ours were: a tested payroll file for every country in scope, named implementation staff rather than a team to be confirmed, and the right to extract all our data in a usable format at exit without a fee. Then score the rest, with the heaviest weight on reference calls you arrange yourself with similar-sized clients who went live recently, not the ones the supplier offers. We asked each how long payroll reconciliation takes now. Answers ranged from two hours to eleven days, which told us more than the grid.
Read in the conversation ↓
Compensation Analyst, Steinbach Industrie
Payroll integration, above everything. Ask each supplier to take a real anonymised month of your data, with leavers, mid-month changes and backdated corrections, and produce the payroll file. Two of our four could not do it without manual steps, and both had demonstrated it flawlessly on their own sample data.
Noor SilvaWWP, GRS
Sales Compensation Manager, Copperfield Mining
The thing we overweighted was the employee-facing design. The winning platform looked beautiful. Employees log in about twice a year, so how it looks matters far less than the admin side, which my team lives in every day. The admin side turned out to be poor.
Samir GrantCEP, CSI
Head of Reward, Vantage Telecom
Accepted answer
I would cut your 60 lines to about eight and make three of them pass or fail. Ours were: a tested payroll file for every country in scope, named implementation staff rather than a team to be confirmed, and the right to extract all our data in a usable format at exit without a fee.
Then score the rest, with the heaviest weight on reference calls you arrange yourself with similar-sized clients who went live recently, not the ones the supplier offers. We asked each how long payroll reconciliation takes now. Answers ranged from two hours to eleven days, which told us more than the grid.
Elif TanakaGRS, CEP
Benefits Manager, Cardinal Insurance
On multi-country: check whether the Netherlands and Ireland are genuinely configured in the product or delivered through a partner. Ours claimed 40 countries and it turned out to mean a translated front end over a local broker's spreadsheet. Ask to see a live client site in each country you care about.
Total Rewards Manager, Steinbach Industrie
This is exactly what I needed. The grid is down to nine lines with three gates, and we are sending the real-data payroll test to all five before demos rather than after. One has already withdrawn, which probably tells its own story.
