Automation and streamlining of annual pay review process

Moving away from an amalgamation of spreadsheets

Our customer sought to overhaul the inefficient Pay Review process, which relied on a bottom-up approach using personalised Excel spreadsheets and email communications. The goal was to address the time-consuming review and approval stages, data inconsistencies, and GDPR compliance issues.

• Process inefficiency: The bottom-up approach, starting from junior to senior managers, was slow and cumbersome.
• Data discrepancies: Varied data capture methods by different managers led to frequent manual corrections by the Finance team.
• Time-consuming reviews: The lack of standardization significantly prolonged the review and approval of salary data.
• GDPR compliance risks: Sensitive employee information communicated via email posed significant GDPR concerns.
• Digital solution need: A standardised and secure digital system was necessary to streamline the Pay Review process.

A solution to standardise and automate the process

After engaging with the Finance team and senior execs we designed a bespoke solution based on the Microsoft 365 platform to meet the customer’s needs.

The solution leveraged Microsoft SharePoint and Power Platform tools to create:

• A digital database of Employee salary packs stored in a SharePoint List with uniquely permissioned items accessible only by the appropriate managers; This list replaced the multitude of spreadsheets previously used for data collection and aggregation across the business;
• Power Automate workflows that managed the seamless, bottom-up transition and approval of Employee salary data across the hierarchical chain levels in the organisation; These workflows enabled a single manager only (from the lowest level up to the CEO) to review and approve a specific Employee pack at any given point, with Managers only seeing data pertaining to their subordinates;
• A versatile Power BI reporting toolkit that enabled the HR & Finance teams and Senior Managers to keep track of Pay Review statistics throughout the process, featuring custom role-based reports with groupings and filtering per Manager, Business segment, completion stage, and other KPIs.

Significant time and cost savings, better experience and in-depth analytics

Our solution improved all aspects of the previously manual process whilst resulting in richer analytics and significant time and cost savings.

• Significant time savings vs. previous approach reported by all stakeholders involved, resulting in the total Pay Review process getting completed in 3 weeks vs. 3 months previously;
• Having one version of the truth ensured that the sign off process was much quicker and smoother, with Finance admins saving approximately 40 hours and managers saving 1 hour on average whilst reviewing salary data sets
• Cost savings from having to purchase specialist software estimated at a minimum of £30k – £40k for purchase and setup plus an added £20k / year perpetual costs for ongoing licensing and software maintenance including vendor support
• Improved GDPR compliance with personal/sensitive data safely secured in SharePoint as opposed to stored and communicated across hundreds of employee mailboxes in previous years;
• The new process was greeted as more professional and received very positive user feedback for the solution’s intuitiveness and minimal training requirements.