Outdated legacy systems and processes will soon become obsolete

HR professionals must proactively embrace change and revolutionise their approach to payroll management, or risk becoming disconnected from their businesses and losing valuable talent.

This article is brought to you by BoardRoom Group

Navigating the complexities of doing business across Asia can be challenging, especially if an organisation is unfamiliar with the region. Help is at hand, however, in the form of highly skilled professionals at BoardRoom Group, who use their comprehensive local knowledge to help companies navigate the changing business landscape and ensure employers remain compliant with local laws and regulations.

After building a solid track record over the last 50 years, BoardRoom has established its position as a leading provider of integrated corporate and advisory services in the Asia Pacific region. With a focus on payroll expertise, this is driven by investments in its platform, as well as by finding best-in-class partners and people to expand its geographic coverage.

In its bid to help clients across Asia future-proof their payroll needs, BoardRoom has recently concluded a high-impact initiative, that involved successfully transitioning all clients from legacy payroll systems to its cloud-based HRMS solution, ‘Ignite’.

This move provided mutual benefits for both BoardRoom and its clients. For BoardRoom, it enhanced the team’s efficiency and accuracy by removing administrative burden and manual calculations, thus being able to serve clients more effectively. It also meant further opportunities for engagement and career pathways for BoardRoom’s workforce, who now benefit from a Centre of Excellence (CoE), a centralised hub that provides lateral learning and development programmes across different payroll functions and geographies.

For clients, this transition has resulted in superior employee experience and played a critical role in their business continuity planning. As a result, all payroll functions are able to run seamlessly, regardless of where their staff are based, or what macro factors may be affecting working from an office.

Ken Wong, Managing Director Asia, Payroll, BoardRoom Group (pictured above), affirms: “With Ignite, all payroll functions can seamlessly operate, without geographical boundaries and in an ever-changing working environment.”

With a successful year capped, what’s next for this prolific payroll specialist?

“We anticipate that clients, particularly those with multi-country operations, will continue to streamline and centralise their activities to optimise cost and resource efficiency,” Wong explains. Thus, BoardRoom will remain agile in its response by preparing the team for managing increased scale while digitalising internal processes.

The BoardRoom team also recognises that accurately captured and well-analysed payroll data can provide impactful insights for business planning. These insights include the ability to assess team workload and staffing needs through overtime analysis, identification of employee engagement and wellbeing trends via leave applications, and addressing potential disruptions in the manufacturing chain or task completion by monitoring time and attendance data.

“Therefore, we will continue to enhance our systems and software to assist our clients in harnessing the potential of this invaluable information,” says Wong.

With this forward-facing outlook, BoardRoom looks to lead the industry by providing guidance and assurance on matters beyond payroll. Its new performance appraisal module on Ignite is a flexible and multi-faced tool to help visionary organisations reduce time spent on performance reviews and increase their efficiency. The module allows customised templates across different groups of people (whether by role, department, cost centre, etc.), easily tracks employee performance across the company, and identifies opportunities for alignment.

Evidently, it is Wong’s view that the payroll and talent management landscape must shift to align with the dynamic business environment and evolving employee expectations.

He shares: “Outdated legacy systems and processes will soon become obsolete. HR professionals must proactively embrace this change and revolutionise their approach to payroll management, or risk becoming disconnected from their businesses and losing valuable talent.”

Photos / BoardRoom Group