February 2007

This is a printer-friendly version of the February 2007 edition of Empower News

Empower to deliver national retailer's payroll until 2011

The five-year agreement has seen the retailer upgrade from Empower’s legacy Masterpay bureau to the Empower-HR online service. The company employs approximately 8000 employees at more than three dozen stores throughout Australia While the single largest Empower-HR user is the Tasmanian Government, with 33,000 employees, the national retailer stands out as the service’s largest private sector customer.

While the single largest Empower-HR user is the Tasmanian Government, with 33,000 employees, the national company stands out as the service’s largest private sector customer. The company's five-year commitment to the Empower-HR solution is a major endorsement of the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of Empower’s online payroll service. The retailer, which had used Empower’s Masterpay payroll service since the 1980s, reviewed the market before negotiating the extended contract with Empower.

Empower Masterpay CEO Alan Greig said Empower-HR provided the national retailer with much more than just greater efficiency. “This customer recognised that advanced HR functionality, such as Employee Self-Service, offered major advantages over a traditional payroll bureau,” he said.

Empower-HR provides the retailer with the many advantages of an on-demand HR system including Employee Self-Service, Manager Self-Service, Training Recruitment, Performance Management and Occupational Health & Safety functionality.

Mr. Greig said Empower-HR was giving the customer easier access to more information. “The company has moved from a simple bureau system to a rich online service,” he said. “They get easy access to information in the system and gain the ability to perform transactions as they occur rather than having to store them up to the end of a pay period.

“Empower-HR is one of the few solutions in the market that is truly date-effective. They can enter a transaction on any day and set it to become effective on a chosen date. It can also handle retrospective changes, so the system is able to back calculate pays and entitlements.”

 

Legacy payrolls successfully migrate to Empower-HR

Empower has successfully completed a year-long migration program during which it transferred  more than 100 organisations from the legacy Masterpay bureau to the Empower-HR online payroll service.

Iconic Australian companies including a leader national retailer with more than three dozen stores, RM Williams, Just Group and Australian Air Express now have access to the latest Human Resource management functionality. Many of these customers, which use Empower to pay thousands of employees, have signed contracts for three to five years.

Melbourne’s St Leonard’s College, which has 1740 students and 400 staff, is one of the organisations that are embracing Empower-HR after more than a decade using Masterpay.

St Leonard’s College Accountant Brad Sims said the migration process had gone well. “We took it slowly because we wanted to make sure it went right,” he said.

“It is early days, but Empower-HR is much more user-friendly, so it is much easier getting around the screens. There’s a lot more information in there, but once you know where to go, you’re right. Empower has been very helpful. Its staff are very good people to deal with and always happy to help out.”

Senior Empower executives are currently undertaking a national program of meetings with major customers to discuss the migration process and explore how they can further benefit by utilising Empower-HR’s rich Human Resource functionality to meet other business requirements

Empower Masterpay Director, Client Services, Daryl Rasheed said the migration process was a challenging exercise. “We were aggressive with our timeframes and delivered a good result,” he said.

“The biggest challenge was the success of the Masterpay payroll bureau. Some companies had used Masterpay for nearly two decades, so they had 18 years of entrenched knowledge and experience with the bureau. For them, moving to a new service was a sensitive issue.

“The most important benefit of this program is that all Empower customers now have the future at their fingertips. With Empower-HR, they have the latest HR management capabilities including Manager Self-Service, Employee Self-Service and Time & Attendance.

“The flexibility of the Empower-HR system means they can do much more than just pay their employees, without having to increase the in-house resources to maintain the system. Empower-HR provides them with a powerful management tool for the next decade.”

For more information about Empower-HR, contact Daryl Rasheed on 08 8332 6988

or email daryl.rasheed@empower.com.au.

 

Sandy watches the HR industry grow up with her children

Empower’s longest-serving employee Sandy Duncan has seen an HR software revolution since she joined the company just before the birth of her youngest son, who turns 21 this May.

As the fifth person at Empower (then Towhold Information Systems), Sandy thought her role was only a short-term job, providing practical experience writing software programs as well as social stimulation outside the nursery. “It was an opportunity to work with some interesting people and get out of the house,” recalls Sandy, who is in charge of software development for Empower.

“It was a stimulating environment in manufacturing and there were many interesting projects including developing business process automation systems for incentive payments and automated ordering from stores. In 1990, we made a decision to focus on HR /Payroll and my role became a lot more interesting as we developed HR software using the latest technologies.”

Sandy graduated from what is now the University of South Australia in 1972 with a Bachelor of Applied Science in Data Processing. After working as a programmer for the State Government’s Hospital Department, she moved to London and worked for Shell UK and then returned to Sydney, where she was employed by CSC.

Sandy joined Empower in 1985 between the birth of her two sons, Jesse, 22, and Luke, 20. She said the biggest change of the past two decades had been in customer expectations. “Today, customers expect us, as an HR software vendor, to know and understand much more about their business,” she said.

“Some customers regard us as an extension of their own pay office and call on our expertise to solve day to day issues. Email has changed the way of the world. There seems to be an expectation that we can respond to and act on emails immediately. Expectations are much higher.”

Sandy said an important change was the rich HR functionality in the current generation of applications such as Empower-HR. “Early payroll systems had very little HR,” she said.

“Our major focus now is extending the capabilities in the Employee Self-Service and in particular Manager Self-Service where we are presenting more and more functionality and manager information for line managers to be accountable for their own employees. This is a very exciting development program that utilises the ease of access and intuitiveness of the Internet to help managers manage “

For more information about software development plans for Empower-HR, contact Sandy Duncan on 08 8332 6988 or email sandy.duncan@empower.com.au.

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