How exactly does one make the business case for implementing the new GHR payroll solution? The first step is knowing exactly what this project entails, such as ensuring you have the right budget, understanding the requirements of a payroll implementation, what resources you will need, as well as a typical project timeline. An important question to consider is why hasn't your organization made this move yet? If there are decision makers listening to the business case, you should be prepared to make the argument for why your organization is ready for this project to get your budget.
One challenge to the business case might be that your HCM or FSM runs on a loan system that is still on S3 applications or a third party. Another could be that you're not quite up-to-speed in it since it's pretty new. Your team could still be trying to make the decision to go to the multi-tenant cloud. Since payroll is only available on multi-tenant, it cannot be implemented on-premise, or on single-tenant cloud environment, this decision could definitely be holding some people back.
So, what does a payroll implementation look like? It’s important to know up front that timelines can vary from 10 to 15 months or so, depending on the size and complexity. However, there are steps you can take ahead of time to mitigate this hurdle. For example, if you do GHR and if you do your finance implementations prior to payroll, then that transformation has probably already occurred. If you make sure to know what your new pay codes and accounting codes will look like, that will also make it a quicker lift. Another thing to keep in mind is that if you're doing this along with an HCM and finance project, then you’ll be dependent on those areas to wait for some new pay codes.
If you're doing anything like benefits, new deduction, codes, accounting, unit changes, or the chart of account changes, then you'll be subject to those dependencies. That's what will push your implementation out a little longer, and it will impact the number of payroll parallels we can run. Everything depends on that timeline, because if there are a lot of errors that you've resolved and a lot of work going in validating every record, you may not have the time to get that third parallel completed.
The good thing is that if something happens and your timeline is pushed out, that doesn't mean you won’t get to complete that third cycle. You will do transactional payrolls to cover any of the errors that you've resolved or any calculations that weren't working. Obviously, you want everything to balance without having to do a lot of manual checks, and you should be there before go live to ensure to best chances of success.
