Behind every Costa coffee cup, every Waitrose carrier bag and every Liberty advent calendar, you’ll find Bunzl UK & Ireland. As a specialist distribution and logistics business, it sources products directly from manufacturers, consolidates them in its own distribution network, and delivers them to some of the UK’s best-known organisations – from the Compass Group and contract caterers to the White Company, John Lewis and HMP prison service.

“We’re a £1.5 billion turnover business in the UK and Ireland with a huge logistics network,” explains Paula Eavis, the company’s HR Director. “Two-thirds of our growth comes from acquisition and a third comes from organic growth. So we acquire small- and medium-sized businesses on a regular basis which helps us expand our geographic reach, product breadth and specialist capabilities. That means we can be incredibly agile in terms of meeting the needs of our customers.”

This growth model results in a complex organisation, with 6,000 employees spread across 93 locations, ranging from small 15-person branches to large distribution centres with several hundred members of staff. Around half of the workforce is blue-collar, working in warehouses or driving vehicles, with the other half in corporate and support roles.

“That creates a really diverse employee base,” Paula says. “They’re not typically digitally enabled, and they’re certainly not sitting behind a desk all day. So, when you start introducing technology solutions, the detail really matters in terms of meeting the needs of all those different groups.”

This complexity is amplified by Bunzl’s decentralised operating model – a defining feature of the business and one that has a direct impact on how HR and technology are delivered.

“We don’t run a matrix model,” Paula explains. “Most of the decision-making, operational expertise and day-to-day ownership sits within the individual business units. That allows each part of the organisation to run at pace and respond quickly to its customers. There’s a very small central team whose role is to provide support where it’s needed.”

In practice, that means HR and payroll processes need to work consistently across a highly varied organisation, without relying on heavy central control. It is this need for consistency at scale, while preserving local autonomy, that has shaped Bunzl’s approach to HR technology. Paula has been working within this model for over a decade, with Zellis at the heart of it.

The challenge – complexity, compliance and paper

Bunzl’s journey with Zellis began more than 12 years ago, originally driven by a pressing compliance requirement.

“The original motivation for going out to market was pension auto-enrolment,” Paula says. “Our existing system simply couldn’t support it, so the clock was ticking to source an alternative.”

However, the organisation’s needs extended far beyond compliance. One of its key motivations was the ability to build very complex hierarchies in the system, which would enable Bunzl to operate digitally in the same way that it works commercially – in that very decentralised way. It was also important that the system could handle multiple payrolls, as the company manages 29 separate payrolls and PAYE references, including for the Republic of Ireland.

At the same time, HR processes were almost entirely manual. “We knew there was potential to introduce employee self-service for holidays, absence management and personal details, because all of that was handled through paper-based processes at the time, as was the case for many organisations,” Paula says.

Zellis – with its HR and payroll platform, combined with the MyView self-service experience – provided the foundation Bunzl needed. ResourceLink supports the organisation’s complex payroll structures, compliance requirements and organisational hierarchies, while MyView enables employees and managers to interact with that data through intuitive, digital workflows.

HRIS becomes the foundation for long-term success

One of Bunzl’s critical early decisions was hiring a dedicated human resources and information systems (HRIS) manager – and this has helped shape its adoption of Zellis solutions.

“We recruited an HRIS Manager early in the journey, and that was the single biggest factor in where we are now with the Zellis system,” Paula says. “He focuses on maximising the functionality of the modules we’ve implemented, keeping the data exceptionally clean, and maintaining system security and integrity.”

That expertise has enabled rapid innovation and continuous improvement. “I might start with a rough concept sketched out on paper, and within a few days he’ll come back with a working version of exactly what we had in mind. It significantly accelerates our ability to develop and enhance the system.”

Bringing a non-digital workforce into the digital age

With roughly half its workforce in warehouses and driving trucks, Bunzl faced an initial challenge that many organisations with predominantly desk-based employees do not: introducing digital tools to people who, in many cases, didn’t even have an email address.

“When we first introduced the Zellis self-service solution, we had to run clinics to help some employees set up an email address,” Paula says. “We’ve had to carefully phase the rollout. We started with holiday management and introduced additional functionality incrementally each year. As confidence grew, we were able to accelerate adoption.”

The results have been transformative. MyView became a gateway technology: once employees were confident navigating it, adopting further digital tools such as a digital Learning Management System became a natural next step.

“That was unanticipated, and I think it’s genuinely positive,” Paula says. “It’s introduced people to a skill set they can’t function without in the 21st century.”

MyView becomes a one-stop shop for employees

Over time, Bunzl has expanded its use of Zellis functionality to create a fully embedded self-service experience. Crucially, the platform is fully branded as a Bunzl product. “Employees have no idea that Zellis even exists,” says Paula. “As far as they’re concerned, MyView is a Bunzl system – operated by Bunzl, for Bunzl. Because they’re using it from onboarding onwards, it’s something they’re never not familiar with.”

Employees now use the platform to manage holidays, absence, overtime, expenses, pension applications, life assurance beneficiaries and onboarding, as well as accessing key documents such as policies and the employee handbook.

“It really has become a one-stop shop for employees,” Paula says. “They manage their own personal details, including bank details, which keeps things secure and removes the need for duplicate data handling.”

This level of self-service has enabled a highly efficient operating model. Six years ago, when the HR Shared Service team was established, it supported around 3,200 employees with a relatively limited scope of services. Today, the same team of five supports 4,000 employees while delivering a significantly broader range of services, including rewards programmes and compliance processes such as DBS screening.

“With that increase in headcount and the expansion of services, we’ve had no increase in team size,” Paula says. “That’s because we’ve been able to leverage the efficiency of the system.”

And the benefits extend beyond efficiency to data quality and governance. “Because the data is clean and comprehensive, we’ve been able to build a strong suite of reports,” Paula explains. “Teams can self-serve the information they need, so we’re not circulating employee data via email or spreadsheets. From an audit perspective, that level of control and security is extremely valuable.”

A pragmatic approach to innovation

The next stage of Bunzl’s journey is focused on removing remaining manual interventions from HR and payroll processes – not to reduce headcount, but to free people up to do more meaningful work.

“I’d rather the HR Shared Service team process tasks on an exception basis and spend the rest of their time really caring for people,” Paula says. “Tools like Power Automate, for example, can take data straight out of the system and into automated communications – to employees, to IT, wherever it’s needed. Those are the really exciting opportunities for me right now.”

Intelligent payslips are also on the radar. On the day payslips go live in MyView, the HR and payroll team currently fields a high volume of calls from employees asking what certain pay codes mean. Payslip intelligence that contextualises this automatically would free that time up instantly.

A refresh of the annual performance review process is also under way, with the aim of making the output more directly usable for training needs analysis and resource planning. Meanwhile, Bunzl’s Ireland business is currently working with the Zellis development team to evaluate the Time and Attendance module – a potential pilot that, if successful, could be rolled out more broadly across the group.

Despite this focus on innovation, Bunzl remains grounded in practical outcomes rather than trends.

“I don’t get distracted by new features for the sake of it,” Paula says. “We didn’t choose Zellis because of how it looked. It needed to be professional and secure, of course, but our decision was based on functionality. Twelve years later, that remains the reason we continue to invest in it.”

Since implementing Zellis solutions, Bunzl UK & Ireland has:

  • Supported 4,000 employees with a broad range of services, with no increase in headcount
  • Managed 29 payrolls and PAYE references within a single platform
  • Delivered fully self-service HR processes across key workflows
  • Created a secure, audit-ready data repository with no reliance on spreadsheets or email
  • Improved digital adoption across a largely non-digital workforce
  • Embedded MyView as a core part of Bunzl’s internal employer brand