“Once I realised what AMS was and was introduced to it, we have flown with it. It has been an absolute godsend.”
– Daniel Hancock, Head of Payroll, UK & Ireland, DFDS.
Since 1866, DFDS has operated an extensive transport network spanning ferry, road and rail. Every year, it carries millions of passengers and huge volumes of freight across more than 20 countries, connecting much of Europe with Türkiye and North Africa.
The business employs around 3,000 people in the UK and Ireland alone – and it’s the responsibility of Daniel Hancock, head of payroll for the region, to make sure that every one of those employees is paid on time using Zellis HCM Cloud.
“We produce around 6,500 payslips a month across weekly and monthly cycles, multiple legal entities and a constantly evolving structure,” says Daniel – who has been with the company for more than two decades. “I’ve watched the payroll operation grow from four monthly payrolls to a peak of 23 monthly and 13 weekly, while our team has expanded from two people to nine.”
When growth makes payroll more complex
That growth hasn’t come without complexity. Over the years, acquisitions have brought new colleagues into DFDS, and with them a mix of legal entities, pay cycles and contractual terms. Payrolls that were once modest became significantly bigger as a result.
Each acquisition also brought its own arrangements, from how sick pay is calculated to maternity and paternity entitlements. The payroll system had to handle all of those different conditions for different groups of employees, and every variation had to be configured, tested and kept up to date.
“We were spending an increasing amount of time on system configuration and testing,” Daniel says. “It’s important work, but it was taking us away from other pressing activities.”
The pressure grew as capacity tightened. A restructure last year reduced the team by one full-time role, so the same people were absorbing more complexity.
What DFDS needed was more expert hands, without adding headcount. That’s where the Zellis Application Maintenance Service (AMS) came in.
A team that speaks payroll
Zellis AMS was offered to DFDS as part of its contract renewal. It gives Daniel and his team access to a dedicated group of Zellis specialists who understand the HCM Cloud platform, DFDS’s configuration of it and the operational realities of running payroll.
“Once I realised what AMS was and was introduced to it, we have flown with it,” Daniel says. “It has been an absolute godsend.”
For Daniel, the biggest advantage is who is on the other end of the line. Standard support is built to resolve routine platform queries, but the questions a payroll team asks day to day are often about how to get the best out of the system. That’s where AMS fits. It sits between a support ticket and a consultancy, offering practical advice and hands-on expertise.
Delivering compliance and confidence
Ensuring payroll accuracy and compliance at scale is central to the partnership.
Zellis supports British Airways through a combination of structured processes, system controls and specialist expertise. Recent work has included supporting PAYE reconciliations, with the managed service team undertaking detailed analysis of payroll data to provide confidence in submissions to HMRC, including the complexities associated with earlier year adjustments.
This disciplined approach is reflected in performance outcomes. Payroll accuracy is consistently maintained above 99%, providing a strong foundation for trust across the organisation.
“The AMS team are people who use payroll, people who do reporting, people who understand the processes,” Daniel says. “They talk our language. If it’s more technical, they tell us what we need to do step by step, rather than attaching a knowledge base article.”
They also understand the pressure of payroll deadlines. When a weekly payroll is due on Wednesday and an issue arises on Monday, there’s little room for delay. “They know what has to be achieved before you reach a time-critical submission deadline,” Daniel says. “When you’ve got weekly payrolls, you don’t have time to sit around.”
The service is personal, too. “We definitely feel appreciated as a customer,” Daniel says. “You’ve got that one-to-one with somebody who knows payroll. It’s the old-fashioned kind of service you don’t get often these days.”
Handling complex configurations with ease
One of the first areas where DFDS saw a clear benefit of AMS was setting up the rules that govern sick pay, maternity and paternity pay. Six or seven sickness rules had never been built into the system. Each applied to somewhere between half a dozen and 15 people, so the team had been handling them manually.
Creating the first configuration took careful discussion and testing. Once the correct approach had been established, however, AMS was able to replicate the structure and adapt it for other groups.
“We managed to get the next four or five closed off within two weeks, which has been brilliant,” Daniel says.
This removed a significant amount of work from the internal team and gave DFDS a more consistent approach to handling different absence and payment rules.
Fixing problems, not working around them
The introduction of AMS has changed how the team works. Rather than lengthy back and forth with screenshots, they can now share an employee record and an error message, and the AMS team logs the case in the background. If they need to understand a screen, a Teams call is quick to arrange.
“Normally, there would be so much time lost to emails and capturing screenshots,” Daniel says. “Now the speed and efficiency is just amazing.”
It has changed behaviour, too. Daniel and his team are now much more likely to investigate issues rather than relying on temporary workarounds.
“We’re not afraid to ask questions,” Daniel says. “We might do a quick fix while we are processing payroll, but then we can pick it up afterwards and know it is going to be dealt with really quickly.”
The result is that DFDS is logging more cases and clearing more issues. “I think that’s because we know they’ll get solved,” Daniel adds.
That has helped DFDS tackle problems that had been consuming time for months. One report kept flagging employees as being below the National Minimum Wage, even though they were not being paid below the required rate. The cause was linked to annualised hours in the background, and the team had been checking the exception manually every month. When the guidance did not clear it, Daniel asked the AMS lead to take a look. The recurring exception was resolved immediately.
That kind of intervention is helping DFDS move away from repeated manual checking and towards a cleaner, more reliable system environment. “We’re gradually clawing back a little bit of time here and there,” Daniel says.
Keeping the system in order
The value of AMS is not limited to reactive support. DFDS is also using the service to improve system housekeeping and strengthen control over user access. The AMS team raises cases to check that inactive operators are being cleared down, and a review identified people in other departments who had access to HCM Cloud but were no longer using it. Those licences are being deactivated, giving DFDS tighter control over who can use the system.
DFDS has also introduced a monthly call between the AMS team and the whole payroll team, rather than just Daniel and his senior specialist. It shows what has been resolved, how the system works and where further improvements could be made. Requests for bespoke reports are collected on a shopping list for DFDS’s Business Intelligence days.
Time back for the work that matters
Daniel is candid that the time saved is hard to put a number on, because it is going straight back into the department. “It’s difficult to quantify,” he says, “because we’re churning that time into doing more and more projects.”
For a team that has absorbed extra work without adding headcount, that headroom matters.
“It’s freeing me up,” Daniel says. “I feel like this year I’ve done a lot more projects than I’ve been able to before, because I was always pulled back into the day-to-day payroll, which I’ve now stepped well away from.”
– Daniel Hancock, Head of Payroll, UK & Ireland, DFDS.
Rather than getting caught up in the churn of doing the same thing day in, day out, the team can now step back and look at how processes could be improved. That has included: preparing for the merger of DFDS’s legal entities, which will streamline its payrolls; standardising how average holiday pay is calculated, replacing the different formulas used in individual depots, and reassessing rolled-up holiday pay for casual and zero-hours workers; and planning to bring the currently outsourced Jersey payroll in-house.
Looking ahead
DFDS has plenty more planned, and AMS will play a part. The team is scoping a time and attendance project and also exploring where automation might help with absence processing. In addition, Daniel expects AMS to help with the configuration needed to bring the currently outsourced Jersey payroll in-house.
“There’s a lot more capability in Zellis that we can take advantage of,” Daniel says. “We need to ramp it up and look at where we can get more automation. And I’ll be the first to shout out, Zellis can do this.”
Since introducing AMS, DFDS has:
- Accelerated the configuration of complex absence and payment rules
- Reduced recurring manual checks and system administration
- Improved access management and system housekeeping
- Increased the speed and quality of issue resolution
- Given the wider payroll team more confidence to raise questions and seek advice
- Created capacity for legal entity changes, automation and process improvement
- Enabled the team to absorb additional work despite reduced internal headcount
Key features of Zellis AMS:
- A named team that knows your set-up: specialists who learn your configuration and stay with your account
- Fast turnaround: minor changes and ad-hoc reports ready for testing within five working days
- Proactive housekeeping: routine monitoring, data clean-up and user access administration
- Release and upgrade support: guidance on what each release means for your configuration
- Predictable cost: inclusive volumes designed to cover a typical year of change demand
