PaySpace has been awarded Transformation Project of the Year. The winning project implemented and integrated modern payroll and human capital management (HCM) services for a major financial institution, serving 50 000 employees across 45 legal entities in eight countries.

In collaboration with Workday and the financial organisation, this work replaced the group’s on-premise ERP/HCM solution with Workday for HCM and PaySpace for Payroll. PaySpace is the first Workday Global Payroll Cloud Certified (GPC) partner with headquarters in Africa.

Overhauling the group’s human capital management by Workday and payroll implementation by PaySpace was a complex, technical, and multi-wave project. By automating 95% of integrations, PaySpace eliminated manual data entry and error correction, reducing labour costs and improving accuracy while complying with strict governance processes within the major financial service provider.

PaySpace worked closely with a leading financial institution and Workday to navigate numerous complexities inherent to such sensitive and vital systems, including:

* Bridging the gap between Workday and PaySpace’s implementation methodologies. PaySpace’s innovative approach involved developing a custom data balancing tool to handle massive data volumes exceeding traditional spreadsheet limitations.

* Enhancing Payspace’s integration to accommodate Workday data snapshots. PaySpace delivered a fully secure data migration directly from Workday in under 36 hours, saving up to 8 weeks’ manual work for all teams.

* Delivering a decoupled go-live, with Workday preceding PaySpace. PaySpace’s flexibility adapted the typical project approach and addressed this requirement by applying pragmatic alternatives.

* Implementing innovative solutions for data validation and integration with legacy systems and in-house data warehouses. PaySpace addressed these issues by leveraging its powerful API layer.

The scalability of the cloud-native PaySpace solution eliminated the need for expensive infrastructure upgrades, leading to long-term cost savings for the financial group and establishing a monumental milestone for large-enterprise HR and payroll modernisation.

“This project was anything but ‘business as usual’,” says Warren van Wyk, PaySpace CEO. “As with many complex, large, and entrenched enterprise systems, there was much to be gained but also a lot at stake and many moving parts. Additionally, this wasn’t an upgrade–it was a modernisation that required new changes and inherent risk. In most cases, a global enterprise would rather let sleeping dogs lie and not mess with those systems. But this enterprise customer knew it could gain significantly from this investment despite the potential turmoil, and Workday and PaySpace made it happen.”