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To develop and maintain a competitive edge in today’s economy, multinational companies must explore every opportunity to improve processes, manage costs, and gain value from even basic tasks. While the global payroll function arrived late to the digital optimization party, we have made impressive advancements not just in better processing but by developing the strategic role of payroll.
Measuring the merits of these steps forward, however, has been tricky. Payroll leaders have relied on the digital, integrated, cloud-based examples of functions like human resources and finance to guide them in adopting better technology into payroll.
They’ve compared each monthly outcome report against previous reports to note any changes in accuracy rates or costs. But the understanding of what’s possible, what similar companies achieve by country or region, and what to change to get those results, has been missing. That’s why we put together the PEI report.
The Payroll Efficiency Index
Based on anonymized data from more than 2,500 entities across CloudPay’s global payroll platform, the Payroll Efficiency Index (PEI) is a revolutionary new way of understanding payroll production around the world. For the first time, multinational organizations are able to benchmark their own payroll performance against results on a global, regional, and country level, and gain key insights to guide their process improvement efforts.
Available as a free download from CloudPay, the PEI presents global data from the 2022 calendar year, along with regional averages and top-performing countries. Additional editions coming this year will focus on specific regions, and the next global report will be released in 2024.
Resetting the Standard
The majority of global payroll service providers define success by the fulfillment of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) around rates of accuracy and timeliness. Reported once each payroll cycle is complete, these SLAs are good for documenting results, but do nothing to expose process inefficiencies or opportunities for improvement.
The PEI challenges our reliance on the SLA model of performance measurement. It focuses instead on how companies can move beyond SLAs to gain real intelligence about their payroll processes, with actionable insight into how to solve issues and improve productivity. The result is a new model of payroll measurement and analysis, built to enable business leaders to not only understand their payroll and set better goals for the function, but to achieve them.
Key Efficiency Metrics
The PEI introduces five efficiency-focused performance metrics that provide insight into the process that creates payroll outcomes. Rather than relying on final outcome reports and SLAs, multinationals can use these efficiency KPIs to identify processing issues and improvement opportunities that would otherwise be missed.
Visibility into data processing workflows is what makes this insight possible, which CloudPay’s unified global platform and end-to-end database is uniquely able to provide across a variety of diverse global entities.
All CloudPay customers have access to these metrics in the Analytics tool, so they can see how their payroll compares to companies similar in size and location. Because it’s not enough for companies to acquire this data — benchmarking performance metrics against those of similar organizations is the key to fully understanding the efficiency and effectiveness of payroll processes.
Visit payroll efficiency index to learn more or click to download your copy of the free PEI report now.