Payroll consolidation: how a food manufacturer went from 27 in-house payrolls to three

This is what a mature enterprise payroll operation on Affinity looks like: a shared-service team at the centre of a complex stack, with its time going into improving the business rather than maintaining systems.

Why did the group need to consolidate 27 payrolls?

Before Affinity, the group ran 27 separate in-house payroll instances, one for each business and brand it owned across Australia and New Zealand. Each had its own configuration and its own interpretation of the agreements it paid. There was no shared setup and no single view of the workforce. A change to a pay rule had to be made 27 times, and time and attendance data moved between systems by hand.

Migration onto Affinity began in mid-2013. The job was to consolidate 27 interpretations of the same agreements into a small number of well-governed configurations, and to automate the interfaces that had carried time data manually, while everyone kept getting paid correctly every cycle.

Three instances, on purpose

The programme did not end with one instance, and that was a decision rather than a compromise. The group runs three: one for the main Australian group businesses, one for a separately structured Australian business, and one for New Zealand.

Today: how the operation fits together

One shared-service payroll team, inside the group's business services function, runs all three instances. Affinity sits in the middle of the stack:

• SAP is the finance system. It masters cost centres, which are interfaced to Affinity, and Affinity produces the general ledger files SAP consumes.
• UKG is Australian time and attendance. It interprets the awards and enterprise agreements, and Affinity pays from the result.
• SuccessFactors is being rolled out as the HR system of record, with Affinity supporting the integration and process work.
• In New Zealand, Affinity runs both time and attendance and payroll.

Everything the team changes in Affinity is configuration, not customisation, so each change survives the next upgrade and every interface keeps working. That is the discipline that lets a stack this size stay current. See how Affinity's integration approach handles finance, HR and time systems.

What complexity remains after consolidation?

Consolidation did not simplify the workforce. The group pays under 24 active enterprise agreements and about 30 sets of terms once grandfathered conditions and New Zealand collective agreements are counted. Sites range from 20 people to 1,500, and pay points fall where the agreements put them. More integrations also mean more regression testing when legislation changes, because a change in one system has to be checked against every interface it touches.

Improving the business, not maintaining systems

The payoff is in what the team does with its time. With time data arriving through interfaces and pay rules held in configuration rather than spreadsheets, the team's effort has moved from manual entry into integration and automation work it never had capacity for.

Over five years:

• Employees paid grew from about 4,900 to about 7,000, including the New Zealand business and a newly added waged workforce.
• Payroll-caused errors run below 1%, tracked monthly and reported to directors.

New Zealand, where Affinity runs time and attendance as well as payroll, is the part of the operation the customer's Payroll Manager would most like to extend.

The group runs Affinity as SaaS payroll, with its own team operating the platform. See how Affinity handles payroll for manufacturing: shift patterns, site-level agreements and time data from the plant floor.