The Challenge
Silver Cloud was initially engaged to conduct a digital review, including a gap analysis and requirements gathering exercise to support a wider digital HR & payroll transformation programme at a leading, global law firm. The review was requested following an internal decision to change the incumbent solutions to help drive a more strategic HR function.
Whilst an incumbent solution was in place, Silver Cloud found that over time the HR team had largely adopted manual and paper-based processes to compensate for lack of functionality. As a result, there was no source of truth for people data which created a data security and integrity risk.
Several other areas of improvement were also identified, including solution usability, and user experience within the current system. Lack of workflow and poor reporting functionality also contributed to an overall poor perception of the solution and consequently, reflected on HR as a function.
Following the review, Silver Cloud recommended that the firm looked to replace the current systems with a new cloud-based, global HR & payroll solution. This was required if the firm was to digitise its HR department and drive value through its team by enabling them to provide quality people data and analytics that can support the business with strategic decision making.
Silver Cloud HR identified several opportunities for the team, which included:
- Raising the profile of HR by moving to a true data analytics culture that could provide the firm with information to help drive decisions and understand the impact of changes
- Improving the use of existing resources by automating workflow and reducing manual effort
- Owning the source of truth when it comes to people data and gain trust in this data from across the firm. Improving data quality and confidence in HR data
- Improving the security of people data by holding it centrally and not in disparate systems or spreadsheets
- Bringing international HR together through better and global systems and process
- Providing more self-service opportunities to employees and managers and increase the transparency of personal data
- Improving time to hire and become productive through a better recruitment and onboarding platform
- Reducing the cost of the HR administration function and ensure it is scalable.
The Process
As part of an information gathering exercise, Silver Cloud met with key stakeholders from the firm to collect information relevant to the current HRIS and identify current challenges and opportunities for improvement. Silver Cloud met with members of the following groups/teams:
- HR Senior Management
- Recruitment
- L&D
- Rewards
- HR Generalists
- IT
- Learning and development
- Finance
- Risk
Stakeholders were interviewed about people data and processes and were asked for their experiences, current challenges and ideas for improvement. HR members were invited to talk through specific processes to help Silver Cloud identify opportunities for digitising. Silver Cloud also reviewed relevant forms, documents and policies.
All the information gathered was analysed and presented back to the Firm via a digital review report, together with a suite of options and a recommendation of how to move forward, based on their specific needs.
The Results
The firm opted to do a wholesale replacement of the global HRIS solution and outsourced payroll provision: selecting Workday and partnering with activpayroll to provide fully managed, outsourced payroll.
Silver Cloud supported the project team with requirements gathering, issuing, and managing the RFP response, vendor presentations through to selecting their preferred vendor.
Following a 9-month implementation, the solution was already providing transformative results, particularly around process optimisation, reporting capabilities, and end user engagement.
All countries went live with self-service within a 2-week period and now manage their own data.
An integrated payroll module for the UK meant that double entry of data was eliminated, and many processes automated. Data feeds, via Intapp, were built to feed all other systems including Active Directory and the new PMS, Aderant.
Employees were able to access their payslips within their own portal and payroll was brought back in-house whilst reducing time spent on payroll processes.
Silver Cloud was also able to build a dashboard of reports for both HR and other parts of the Firm which meant that data could be accessed via self-service and access controlled.
If you are a UK or global law firm seeking support with your HR and payroll solutions, get in touch!
Alternatively, feel free to book into one of our regular 1-2-1 advice sessions here.
