HR operations amidst a pandemic have propelled leaders across the world to think differently about their systems, reporting, and overall system efficiency. Customers who operated in an on-premise model or who used siloed legacy systems have needed to explore digital transformation and cloud software solutions. Despite the availability of accelerators and solutions, organizations still find these projects complex, costly, risky, and time-consuming – that it may take years to fully implement.
This week we had the opportunity to speak with SpinifexIT‘s Co-Founder and Solutions Architect, Darren Souter, and Mathew Katakis, Chief Operating Officer, about two specific solutions that have been proven to be instrumental in accelerating Employee Central Payroll implementation and migration whilst making this process easier and more accessible for both SAP SuccessFactors customers and system integrators (SIs).
About SpinifexIT
SpinifexIT develops smart software solutions for SAP and SAP SuccessFactors that ensure compliance, reporting, and automation for companies. With a collective 350+ years of SAP HR expertise in their team, SpinifexIT has helped customers in over 50 countries use their products to overcome a variety of common challenges within HR software.
They work in a broad range of countries and industries, and have found that most HR and Payroll departments encounter similar challenges within their internal systems. SpinifexIT set out to develop software that helps these SAP SuccessFactors customers make the most of their investments and create more efficiency within their operating systems. Currently, SpinifexIT solutions have been installed over a thousand times, and are used to support over 5 million employees globally.
With SpinifexIT, Payroll and HR processes that require Reporting, Reconciliation, and Document Generation are optimized to make the complex simple. Payroll and HR staff are empowered to work more productively and creatively while focusing on value-adding activities. With the high-volume administrative actions out of the way, HR teams can focus on driving employee engagement, hiring the right talent, and driving organizational development.
Cloud Migrations Are Becoming More Crucial
A significant amount of HR leaders are considering moving their HR systems to the cloud, if they haven’t already. Operations and transactions within HR systems are now running “business as usual” as they’ve been adjusted to the new operations in a remote-first world, but HR leaders are realizing that there are still gaps in their software. This realization is where SpinifexIT’s solutions provide support to both new customers and existing SAP customers. And in a time when people are no longer sitting in the same rooms – speed is critical.
SpinifexIT’s customers are those who have invested in SAP SuccessFactors products or are considering an SAP implementation in the future. Many customers who previously implemented SAP SuccessFactors still have gaps, or are looking to optimize the value of their investment of SAP’s products. SpinifexIT’s solutions can be applied to quickly and easily migrate payroll data, execute off-the-shelf reports or build custom ones which aid in payroll reconciliation and data validation, and address many other real-life customer-specific challenges.
“For us, it’s about driving ROI for the customer. They have already invested hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars on the SAP system itself, and now it’s about how much value can we drive from that. Additional value from what they’re already receiving from the investment of SAP itself,” says Mathew Katakis, COO of SpinifexIT.
Customers who are considering moving their HR and Payroll systems to the cloud can highly benefit from using SpinifexIT’s solutions, or by keeping these solutions in mind as they approach their Implementation Partner. SpinifexIT has a large global partner network coverage who can easily help customers implement SAP SuccessFactors and/or Employee Central Payroll. With our key solutions and our Partner’s implementation experience, Customers will benefit from a drastically reduced implementation time and simplified migration process.
“It’s really about taking the power of an existing SAP or SAP SuccessFactors system and helping customers take things to the next level,” said Darren Souter, Solutions Architect at SpinifexIT.
Easy Migration
Easy Migration is an implementation accelerator that allows SIs partners (change to: that allows Implementation Partners) to help current SAP payroll customers take their current configurations and move them to the cloud–eliminating the need to reimplement payroll from scratch. This integrated solution copies payroll configuration, Payroll and Employee data and helps customers run reports between the legacy system and test system to validate configuration before going live.
This solution is particularly beneficial for customers who have 5, 10, or 15 years of historical payroll data and enables them to move their payroll configuration without losing that data. It also helps them transform their configurations, such as naming conventions, without reimplementing.
Easy Migration can reduce a multi-month long implementation to just days, saving costs for both partners and customers. For example, where it may have taken 1-2 months to convert data from legacy systems for ~5,000 employees, Easy Migration can help the customer complete this step in just 3 days.
“Spinifex reporting can be heavily integrated with SAP to meet your reporting requirements. Explore and use to its maximum capacity.” – SpinifexIT customer in the construction / home improvement industry
Easy Go Live
Easy Go Live helps customers run a quick comparison between their legacy payroll system and new ECP system, transfer data to a new payroll system, migrate production employees, and counter potential errors before they occur.
“Customers should be considering us upfront when talking and choosing their implementation partners because they want to choose a partner that has solutions to accelerate the implementation. It will be pretty apparent who has these tools and who doesn’t based on the quote and predicted timeline they provide to the customer,” said Souter.
While conducting validations, the customer can verify employee master data inside the new ECP, spot differences and investigate occurrences, and utilize automatic testing features.
“There’s always a risk associated with these types of projects, in terms of missing data and missing configuration,” Katakis said. “So having a technology such as Easy Go Live, it really helps you de-risk the process.”
What SAP Partners Should Know
SAP Implementation Partners can use these products to accelerate implementation timelines and help customers add value to their investment. SpinifexIT’s software products are broad enough to help HR teams close a number of gaps in processes while creating real value for the organization. For example, it’s critical for HR teams to have an operational reporting strategy that reports across all HR systems, not just one.
Additional benefits of using SpinifexIT software is to automate document correspondence and omit the manual work that surrounds Employee Central implementations. Organizations will benefit from massive time, cost, and effort savings while improving their overall employee lifecycle experience through SpinifexIT products.
SpinifexIT’s Approach to the Customer Relationship
SpinifexIT developed their products with customer challenges in mind, and this is also how they approach relationships with customers. The SpinifexIT team works very closely with customers, working to understand their specific needs and applying solutions that will drive long-term value.
Their team even has the ability to make tweaks to the software to ensure it solves the problem for the customer. Together, this customer-focused approach has allowed SpinifexIT to achieve a 4.8/5 customer satisfaction rating on Raven Intel.
“We are specialists. We specialize in payroll, operational/transactional reporting, etc. That’s our skillset. We don’t try to veer outside of that. All of our consultants are also specialists in this area and I think that’s why we can very quickly understand the problem set a customer exposes to us. From there, we can provide that unique solution that meets their needs, and it’s all software-driven,” Katakis continued.
Approach to Consultants
Most of SpinifexIT’s consultants have worked in similar HR environments before, giving them an uncanny ability to relate to customers and their challenges. SpinifexIT also strives to keep its consultants educated and informed on all updates to their software products so they can pass on their expertise to the customer.
“Our consultants really enjoy working with customers. They really love helping them solve their problems and really taking the time to understand their issues. All of our clients have been in the situation that clients are at one point, so they can relate very quickly to the challenges that they face,” said Katakis.
Approach to Software
SpinifexIT prides themselves on their software being easy to use. Their products are built specifically as an extension of SAP SuccessFactor products, and the benefits can be realized almost immediately. Customers can see a solution, buy the solution, and use the product right away. This drives incredible value to the customer because they aren’t investing more time and effort for their problem to get solved – rather, SpinifexIT empowers and enables them to solve their gaps faster, better, and easier.
“SpinifexIT was great to work with, from procurement through to delivery. Their solutions and technical team offered a lot of value to our project and enabled us to streamline data migration, as well as provide additional reporting capabilities to complement the SAP SuccessFactors core HR and payroll solutions that we implemented.” – Customer in the manufacturing industry
Watch the full interview here:
For more information on SpinifexIT, you can review their Raven Intel profile or visit their website. Additionally, if you’d like to share your experience working with SpinifexIT, you can leave an anonymous review on our website here to help peers such as yourself make educated decisions about their implementations.