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Integrating a global payroll solution like CloudPay with a comprehensive human capital management (HCM) system like Oracle Cloud HCM is vital for getting the most out of both platforms. But this level of integration remains relatively unexplored. During our webinar on maximizing your Oracle investment, two-thirds of the participants said that only 25-50% of the workforce within their HCM system is automatically integrated with payroll.
Bringing your payroll and HCM together ensures that payroll data is more accurate by utilizing automated data entry, which can avoid one of the biggest pitfalls of manual, siloed processes. And while integration may not be the simplest undertaking, the multitude of benefits make it well worth the effort. In this blog, David Docherty, Chief Commercial Officer at HCM integration specialists Epicenter, shares his experience of what the ideal combination of payroll and HCM can look like.
Shifting towards integration
There are a number of reasons why integration of payroll and Oracle make an increasing amount of sense for every type of organization. Three stand out in particular:
- Synchronizing data: when data is disconnected across both platforms, it has to be entered separately and manually into each one, but by synchronizing the two, this inefficient and potentially risky process becomes one seamless stream of data.
- Up-to-date information: without integration, data often gets stored up and only entered once a month, meaning that downstream systems can be days or even weeks out of date. With integration, editing data in one system means automatically updating both.
- Fully utilizing the HCM: in multinational businesses, payroll and HR teams in some countries can tend to shy away from regularly utilizing an HCM system if data isn’t fed into payroll automatically. David explains: “If the HCM doesn’t automatically feed payroll, local teams tend to just keep using the legacy system as the master, which means the new HCM system isn’t being utilized to its fullest extent.”
Why invest in an Oracle/Payroll integration?
Businesses that have made Oracle and payroll integration a priority, and encouraged more widespread adoption, are finding that the two platforms collectively become more than the sum of their parts. For starters, it ensures that Oracle and payroll workflows are intrinsically tied together through a single source of employee information. The result of this is that efficiency can be driven through one process, one data set, and one system.
It also means that the number of human touchpoints can be drastically reduced, which minimizes the risk of errors being made, allows data to be updated more regularly, and reduces the administrative burden on payroll and HR teams. “With an integration, you know the data is accurate and timely between all the systems that need it. So, by prioritizing integration, you ensure that Oracle (or any other HCM) becomes the global master system, meaning you maximize the return on your substantial HCM investment,” David says.
This functionality improves data quality and generates full visibility of total payroll and employment costs across the entire organization, allowing for new analysis levels that drive more informed business decisions. That’s because data from CloudPay can be brought back into Oracle to shed light on local components such as social security and car allowances that Oracle systems won’t normally cover.
“An important part of the integration is bringing data back from CloudPay into Oracle. And bringing these local pay elements back into Oracle enables total cost of employment calculations,” David says. “Bi-directional integration enables a number of things, such as pushing total compensation statements to employees and reporting on the true cost of your workforce.”
And for the HCM itself, integration means Oracle can be of greater value to the business. Greater integration will foster wider adoption across the enterprise and make Oracle an asset for business growth and scalability. David adds: “If you don’t integrate your HCM with downstream systems that rely on HR data, such as payroll, then the HCM system you invested in isn’t driving key business processes.”
How to approach the integration journey
There can be a lot of complexity involved in the integration process. It requires strong buy-in across the organization, including from in-country partners, and has to balance payroll and HCM needs at a global and local level. As David notes: “HCM systems can be set up for best practice with global standard processes in mind, but payroll will always be local.” Organizations also have to control costs, ensure strong compliance throughout, and keep stakeholders engaged and informed along the way.
Standard integrations tend to follow a cookie-cutter approach which will serve some of these needs better than others. “Intrinsically, integration can be challenging because you have to make two systems that don’t necessarily read data in the same way, and often have incompatible data models, talk to each other,” David explains.
But from our experience, there are five keys that bring CloudPay and Oracle together for the best possible integration:
- Meeting the fundamentals: ensure all required data points are transformed into a format that can be understood by the receiving system
- Bi-directional data: integrate payroll data and documents back into Oracle to drive adoption and improve employee experience
- Flexibility: allow for variation from the standard in your HCM and payroll setup
- Smart data validation: ensure your data is validated intelligently and automatically
- Hands-on support: provide ongoing maintenance of the integration to provide peace of mind
In summary: the best foot forward
At CloudPay, we’ve now overseen more than 2000 integrations between our global payroll platform and our HCM technology partners, including Oracle. We understand how complicated and inefficient payroll and HR can be when integration is missing or limited, and we know how to navigate the complexity of the integration journey, so that adoption is maximized, and everyone gets on board with the combined system.
David concludes: “Ultimately, integration helps drive adoption. If it’s well-adopted, you know the data is accurate, and that supports the real value adds like analytics that can help to drive better business decision-making. Integrating your HCM with other systems means it becomes a de facto single source of data. “Through a market-leading platform, integration expertise and a flexible managed service, the combination of CloudPay and Oracle can transform the way your people are paid. Find out more on our integrations here.