A “bootstrapping” philosophy, coupled with hard work and innovation, has paid off for four determined South African entrepreneurs whose company received the Frost & Sullivan 2015 South African Product Leadership of the Year Award for Enterprise Resource Planning Systems for its PaySpace cloud-based payroll product.
Frost & Sullivan’s Excellence in Growth, Innovation & Leadership Best Practice awards recognise companies globally that have achieved world-class performance within their industries with superior leadership, technological innovation, customer service and strategic product development.
Established in 2000, PaySpace offers low-cost, cloud-based payroll and human capital management (HCM) enterprise software.
Fadzai Deda, Frost & Sullivan best practices analyst, comments: “PaySpace has positioned itself as a leading end-to-end human capital management (HCM) software developer and provider. Owing to a pay-as-you-use model, its customers have the flexibility to readily change their payroll and HCM as the need arises.”
Frost & Sullivan reports that companies are set to increase their spending budgets on ERP systems at a forecasted compounded rate of 11,6% between 2013 and 2017. While this is positive news for industry participants, a current challenge is the slow adoption of cloud computing by business entities because of information security concerns.
Against this backdrop, Deda says that PaySpace’s pricing model will be a key driver for cloud adaption within enterprises not only in South Africa but also in the 37 African countries in which its payroll solutions are used.
“The pioneering history of PaySpace is characterised by continuous refinement of its HCM solution to create a benchmark product,” Deda says. “For instance, PaySpace’s Cloud Analytics provides rich information for organisations to make strategic decisions based on historical and real-time data. This has made PaySpace the payroll and HCM vendor of choice for many international and local blue-chip customers.”
PaySpace co-founder Bruce van Wyk, says that PaySpace is unlike the legacy on-premise systems, which require annual licensing fees and are costly to maintain in that PaySpace customers pay per pay slip and that customers can access their software and information anytime, anywhere in the world with no software required.
“All you need is an Internet connection and browser,” he explains. “Automatic system and legislative enhancements/changes/updates ensure that clients don’t need to download any files or run a program.”
PaySpace was started by brother directors, Bruce, Warren and Clyde van Wyk and George Karageorgiades, who previously all worked together at an international payroll company. They launched the PaySpace integrated payroll and HR platform in 2007, becoming the first South African payroll provider to eliminate the time-consuming payroll runs and back-up procedures required by most packages.