Sage HR & Payroll Cutting administration time and increasing productivity for SAGE Publications Ltd, the academic publisher

Sage HR & Payroll Customer success

Client profileSAGE Publications Ltd specialises in academic books & journals and operates across the globe. The company employs over 1,000 people worldwide, with 375 of those based - and paid out of - the UK. Having experienced a period of rapid growth that saw its UK team expand exponentially, SAGE needed a robust software solution that could underpin its HR and payroll function, support the management of its increasingly complex workforce and scale with the business as it continued to grow.

Faced with a growing team and needing to respond to complex legislative changes, leading academic journal publisher SAGE Publications Ltd needed a scalable HR and payroll solution that would reduce administrative burden and streamline processes in order to free up time to support HR’s pivotal role in improving organisational performance. Implementing SnowdropKCS HR and Payroll solutions from Sage the firm succeeded in cutting admin time by over two hours a day, increasing productivity and empowering personnel teams to focus on driving business growth.

CustomerSAGE Publications Ltd

IndustryPublishing

LocationLondon, UK

SystemSnowdropKCS HRSnowdropKCS Payroll

‘It now takes us minutes to run a report using SnowdropKCS which previously would have taken hours, freeing up our time to drive company growth’ Claire O’Sullivan Payroll Advisor

Challenge and solution With a growing team and more information needing to be stored and managed for each employee, SAGE was challenged with alleviating the administrative burden on its relatively small payroll team so they could focus their time supporting the HR and payroll needs of the developing business. The company had been a longstanding Sage customer and now needed to compliment the payroll module with additional HR functionality to help the business expand and effectively track HR data that it had.

Claire O’Sullivan, Payroll Advisor at SAGE, explained: “As a growing company with a one-woman payroll, we needed to find a way to automate and streamline our processes in order to lessen the admin burden.”

O’Sullivan continued: “A major issue for our HR and Payroll department was the time taken to create reports; data crunch and extract key trends in our personnel data that could be fed back into the business. Expansion for us naturally meant we had more people in the business to look after so we needed a more sophisticated solution that would empower us to do this more effectively and efficiently. What we needed was software that could automate and streamline processes to free up man hours so our people could focus their attention on the HR strategy to cultivate the best team and in turn improve organisational performance. Not only this, we also knew that RTI and Auto-enrolment would soon be coming into play for our company so we wanted to ensure we had a system in place that would help us to manage these changes effectively, support the business in responding to the new legislation and in turn future proof the company.

Support – a successful transition to RTIThe impending RTI changes, which represented the biggest shake up to payroll reporting since the 2nd World War, was a key driver for changing solutions and the move gave the company the opportunity to cleanse its data, allowing them to successfully join the RTI pilot in July 2012. Throughout the transition Sage provided the team with the expert support and guidance needed to make the move to Real Time Information a seamless one. SAGE joined the pilot programme to see how the real time submissions would work, and since then has been successfully submitting its payroll information in real time. “RTI is a mandatory change and there was a lot of scare mongering around the introduction, but we have found the transition to be incredibly smooth. “We couldn’t fault Sage’s solution – it provided all the help and support we needed and was simple to use.”

Future By using SnowdropKCS, SAGE has already managed to save 6 hours of admin per week, freeing up the team to create new efficiencies and maintain the best team. The solution is also incremental in preparing for the pensions changes, with Sage’s advice and software compliance being invaluable in the face of another legislative change.

O’Sullivan explains why she is confident the company will be able to navigate the upcoming Auto-enrolment changes as smoothly as it has done with RTI: “We are planning to stage early, just as we did with RTI” said Claire, “We know we will get the support we need, and so we will go ahead of our mandatory date so we are not conflicting with the busiest part of our year.” Training and Development is also an area SAGE is keen to utilise more in the coming year now it has the functionality in its software. The software will help in capturing employees areas of expertise so effective teams can be put together as projects come in. “The next step is capturing everyone’s own professional goals, so we can ensure we are fostering the right environment for our employees” said O’Sullivan.

BenefitsSnowdropKCS gives users the flexibility to choose from eight HR and payroll modules to use whatever best compliments their business goals. To support its increasingly complex operations SAGE added Maternity / Paternity, Absence, Training & Development / Learning Programmes modules to its core payroll solution to better integrate its HR and payroll processes.

Instant access to businesscritical informationOne of the major challenges for SAGE was improving efficiency in reporting to save time and resource, allowing it to be redeployed on more strategic HR and payroll initiatives that could provide vital business insight and support future growth. Claire said: “The SnowdropKCS solution allows us to filter the data needed for each specific report, so that they can be pulled off in a matter of minutes as opposed to the hours previously required. The time saved is critical in allowing us to focus our attentions on value-add activities, whilst the reports themselves empower us to transform traditional data about people, processes and performance into a strategic driver for the organisation.”

The issue of maternity and paternity leave is complex, especially in light of the new legislation allowing the time to be shared between parents. Through the solution, SAGE has been able to automate this process and has saved the company a considerable amount of time by streamlining the process and seamlessly managing complex legislative changes with minimal impact to the business.

The SnowdropKCS solution has also been fundamental to helping to negotiate and manage overseas employees that were not part of UK payroll. “Part of our challenge was keeping historical data about overseas employees but finding a solution that did not put these employees on the payroll, as they were paid by third party solution providers. SnowdropKCS allowed us to do this easily and mitigated any potential problems and automating this into the system, saving us hours putting things right.”

Sage HR & Payroll Customer success

Sage4 Witan Way, Witney, Oxon, OX28 6FF

t: 0800 694 0568 f: 01993 709 300e: snowdropkcs@sage.com

www.snowdropkcs.co.uk

© Sage (UK) Limited 2013 6800LC 05/13 Paper from well managed forests

‘We couldn’t fault Sage’s solution - it provided all the help and support we needed and was simple to use.’ Claire O’SullivanPayroll Advisor