The power of payroll and HR automation to optimise efficiency

HR and payroll are critical but complex activities made up of hundreds of individual processes and tasks. Many of these actions are now ripe for automation, believes Phil Glew-Deval, Principal Power Platform Consultant – Business Intelligence.

Automating business processes used to be a long, laborious exercise that involved significant investment, a lot of resources, and the prolonged support of the IT department.

Nowhere was this truer than for HR and payroll automation. Here the underlying data is rich, complex, sensitive, and has a lot of dependencies. For example, every time a tax code changes, it impacts pay and possibly benefits too. As a result, organisations understandably often felt anxious about introducing change.

But thankfully those days are over. This is due to a radical new combination of Microsoft’s Power Automate process automation platform with the Zellis Intelligence Platform (ZIP). ZIP integrates data from both the Zellis HCM Cloud and third-party applications into a single datastore.

The power of payroll and HR automation software means teams can now quickly and easily create workflows all by themselves. Doing so enables you to automate mundane processes and tasks, supported by real-time ZIP HR, payroll, benefits and employee recognition data and alerts.

In other words, this exciting move democratises data access, to the authorised at least. Doing so brings about huge benefits.

The ROI from automating routine tasks

Organisations often don’t realise the huge number of routine, repetitive tasks that their HR and payroll administrators need to undertake. But automating them can have a significant impact, freeing people up to put their brains and knowledge to better use.

As an example, last year Zellis took its own top 13 basic HR processes and automated them using Microsoft’s Power Automate. These processes included issuing reminders for managers about freelance contract expiries and the end of employee probation periods. In both instances, while the processes themselves are straightforward, the consequences of missing relevant deadlines can be serious.

But the return on investment (ROI) from taking action here was enormous. Zellis found that its employees could spend a total of 1,866 hours over the course of a year working on just these 13 processes. This is the equivalent of 1.5 FTE, which over a three-year period, would have cost in excess of £140,000.

Introducing Microsoft’s Power Automate saw these costs being cut to just over £30,000 per year. This equates to an ROI of over 300%.

As an example of how these differentials were calculated, in the past it took employees between 20 and 25 minutes to write a single leaving letter. But it now takes them a mere four seconds to send out a standard version.

The benefits of payroll and HR automation

Furthermore, the only likely real variable between Zellis and other employers’ costs is in Microsoft licensing fees. These inevitably change based on an organisation’s size. It is also worth noting that savings are significantly higher than when hiring a graduate or apprentice to perform such tasks.

But there are other benefits too. For instance, automated workflows provide you with meaningful, analysable data about what’s happening in the business. They remove the propensity towards human error but can also alert you if something goes wrong.

Another advantage is that it becomes possible to move data analysis beyond the usual dashboard basics, such as showing absence rates. Because Microsoft’s Power Automate is integrated with ZIP and can also link to third-party data sources using the thousands of connectors available in the platform, it becomes possible to put this data into context.

In other words, you can drill down into deeper layers of data to understand contributory factors to those absence rates. Such factors might include high rates of sickness or perhaps the absences are mainly occurring in specific departments.

Such insights not only make your perceptions easier to defend; they also provide you with concrete evidence of the need to take action to fix things.

Maximise the benefits of automation with Power Automate Accelerator

Our Power Automate Accelerator packages are designed to help smooth and speed up your path to useful payroll and HR automation. The most popular use cases relate to joiners, movers, and leavers. This includes automating the provision of welcome emails with all the information new starters require to hit the ground running.

It’s also about sending managers reminders about probation and contractor arrangements that are coming up for review, renewal, or expiry. Other favourites include sending out exit surveys at the most appropriate time, and obtaining alerts if tax codes change.

Our Power Automate Accelerator packages come in three main levels: Standard, Premium, and Enterprise. They all include an initial fact-finding call, followed by a workshop to explain how the technology works and to capture use cases.

We also spend time helping you develop your first workflows. But we’re there to handhold you through the next phases of your journey too, offering troubleshooting and advice if you need it.

Because Power Automate and ZIP are both located in Microsoft cloud data centres, the only thing your IT team needs to do is undertake an initial one-off configuration. This means your new workflows can be up and running in as little as a few days.

Get optimised with our HR and payroll automation software

Feel free to get in touch if you’d like a technology walk-through that could transform your HR and payroll operations for ever.