Oracle saves time, money, and effort via a global payroll cloud upgrade

Oracle Global Payroll Operations annually processes US$10 billion in salaries and $US5 billion in taxes for Oracle’s 133,000 employees. The unit comprises 155 professionals working out of five regional centers, managing pay and benefits across 163 legal entities in 17 languages.

To run the global payroll and associated workflows, the team used a variety of solutions. Only about 40% of data uploads and sharing workflows were automated. The remaining 60% required error-prone and manually intensive extraction of information from a third-party payroll system. The team also uploaded data from numerous disconnected forms—including emails, documents, spreadsheets, and PDF files.

This meant the team wasted time and effort in routine and siloed processes—causing some business units to miss their payroll deadlines. The lack of integration and the limits of the individual legacy systems’ capacities caused internal team delays—and even threatened overall payroll accuracy and timeliness.

The payroll team decided to move to Oracle’s cloud technology and applications stack to achieve a standardized and efficient payroll system. Having multiple powerful cloud-based functions in a single suite of products would integrate, accelerate, and improve the entire payroll process.

Needing a configurable, secure, and reliable payroll platform—with a single interconnected set of processes and solutions—Oracle Global Payroll Operations migrated to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Oracle Fusion Cloud applications.

The system’s backbone is Oracle Payroll, part of Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM). Oracle Payroll shares a single data model with other Oracle Cloud HCM applications, including Oracle Time and Labor and Oracle General Ledger. This enables immediate and seamless cross-enterprise information sharing and a standard and intuitive interface across multiple end-user roles. There is also one set of regular enhancements, including legislative upgrades and quarterly bug fixes.

Additionally, Oracle Payroll provides embedded error correction, best practices guidance, and global standardization and compliance. As a single, complete, and feature-rich platform, the Oracle stack also supports payroll and tax localization capabilities across a dozen nations—among other capabilities.

Oracle Global Payroll Operations’ migration to Oracle Payroll on OCI provided a single, highly automated, and efficient employee payment platform. The connected system manages data extraction and processing, tax withholding, reporting, and query reception and response, among other key tasks.

Standardizing on Oracle Payroll enabled the team to eliminate multiple manual workarounds. After cloud go-live, the team automated 95% of the payroll flow—slashing overall costs by 22% in just three months.

Automated and immediate data and file transfer from Oracle Cloud HCM to Oracle Payroll slashed payroll run times from 10 to 12 hours to only 10 minutes. It provides flexibility to make any processing adjustments and enables Oracle Global Payroll Operations to identify payroll errors and address employee questions more proactively.

To improve employee query response times, the team linked Oracle Payroll to Oracle Service. This way, all employee payroll queries remain in one platform—allowing the team to address 58,000 questions and requests annually. Employees easily offer feedback on the service they receive, help the team measure response quality and timeliness, and pinpoint potential training needs. The team also proactively shares payroll data via a dedicated employee-accessible web page.

With automated reporting capabilities, the team saved hours of work in retro-calculations—and cut the regular payroll reporting deadline by one day. With one comprehensive platform and data model, generating accounting reports is simpler and more efficient, as well. Data is available in real time, and the reports are all standardized. This way, the team can centrally reconcile disparate payroll activities and data—something that was impossible on the legacy payroll system.

Based on their roles, team members can easily configure the Oracle Payroll interface—reducing the need for complex and time-consuming screen customizations. Analysts can instantly view data and query results in multiple ways—with streamlined drill-down options available to let them dive into specific issues—such as legal entities or a country or region’s unique statutes.