How to Accelerate Your Move to EC Payroll

It’s great that we have multiple vendors with tools to help us accelerate EC Payroll implementations, particularly those coming from on-premise SAP Payroll platforms. We have tools to migrate employee data, payroll results, configuration and programs from the on-premise SAP system to EC Payroll. They take a lot of mundane work out of a project and reduce the time to get a system up and running. We also have tools that help us automate parallel testing. This saves a lot of time, particularly in larger implementations. This is all great – and there are tradeoffs customers have to consider in this, often not mentioned in the vendors’ bid responses or sales pitches.

Though much of payroll is the same from one customer to another, every customer’s SAP Payroll implementation is somewhat unique to their own circumstances. The payroll product has changed over the years, but many customers are stuck in the era their system went live. The consulting community has improved – generally – how implementations are done, so if you went live in the 90’s your system is probably configured much different from a system that went live in 2015. And every customer’s business has changed over time, resulting in effective-dated configuration and if/then/else branches in the schema and rules to handle it. Finally, most customers have found and corrected errors in their original implementation, but because of payroll retroactivity they have to support the old process as well as the new, corrected one – resulting in more if/then/else branches. Maintenance gets much more complicated as systems get older.

Your on-premise SAP Payroll works, but do you want to move it as-is to EC Payroll and live with it for 5, 10, 15 or more years? Your HR colleagues are probably reimagining how to make HR work and setting up EC according to that new vision. Payroll can choose to do the same. Take what you’ve learned about SAP Payroll up to this point, add in the new features of EC Payroll, leverage the enhanced integration with EC, make those changes you’ve always wanted and setup Payroll for how you want it to look and work for the future.

Now, this takes time and money. If you have don’t have that or can’t get it then you can fallback to simply moving everything over from SAP to EC Payroll. Those accelerators will do that very well. And then at some time in the future you can reimagine your EC Payroll – but that doesn’t happen often. If you never did that with your on-premise SAP Payroll, what leads you to think that you would be able to do that with EC Payroll in the future? And reimagining a productive payroll system is more costly and demanding than reimagining it while implementing a new one because we can’t break a productive payroll and it can never go down. The stakes are higher once you have to pay people with it.

Accelerators still have a valuable role in a reimagined EC Payroll implementation. Using them to move over selected configuration and other data does save time. And accelerators for automating parallel testing are always a good decision. The guiding principle then is to move towards your reimagined EC Payroll with all it has to offer and use accelerators to help you get there. 

But this isn’t what you are likely to hear in your RFP responses and sales pitches. You are not likely to hear about the work to reimagine your EC Payroll, but just about how much time the accelerators will speed up the process of moving your payroll. And I don’t even want to hear about implementing EC Payroll ‘out of the box’ to save time. Any company with a sizable employee count will have to build on that box and make it their own.

So bottom line then – TL; DR if you want – Take the time and effort to reimagine how your payroll should look in EC Payroll and let that drive your use of accelerators.