HR outsourcing giant automates processes for global clients

Company Overview

NGA Human Resources (formerly NorthgateArinso) offers business solutions for HR processes including HR outsourcing, payroll outsourcing and consulting. Over 20 percent of FORTUNE Global 500® companies are NGA customers. NGA provides HR and payroll services to 3 million employees each day in more than 100 countries across 5 continents in 25 languages—including 40% of all individuals employed in the United Kingdom.

Business Challenge

Following a number of large, international acquisitions, NGA’s IT infrastructure became more complex, posing challenges to the enterprise IT team.

At the time, NGA had been using an automation solution that employed “schedule/scan processes.” Each of NGA’s subsidiary companies had one or more job schedulers, each with its own dashboard, that ran a scanning process that looked for jobs scheduled for processing. NGA maintained process integrity by overseeing these processes 24/7 and manually adding or removing items from the job queue to maintain consistent service that met their SLAs.

The NGA IT team began to look for a solution that would enable them to automate across a variety of human capital management (HCM) applications and bring its global enterprise under a single method of control and automation. NGA hoped such a solution would eliminate the need to manually reorder scheduled jobs and would instead orchestrate them all to run at the right time and in the proper sequence.

Solution

NGA implemented Redwood as their enterprise-wide automation platform.

Redwood’s hybrid process and data orchestration solution seamlessly coordinates and integrates legacy applications, data, OS activity and web API interactions from NGA’s acquired companies. Redwood’s modular automaton enables NGA to define automation processes once and reuse them as they add customers. Process steps, sequences, calendars, and other elements can also be reused across business processes. Process monitoring capabilities notify NGA before processes miss deadlines to enable IT to resolve issues before they impact the company’s SLAs.

“Redwood breaks the costly cycle of firefighting and manual intervention across business and IT processes, speeding them up and improving accuracy and reliability,” says Pete Cortes, Technical Director SAP and Production Control Teams. “The process automation we achieved with Redwood – even in the early stages – gave us tremendous improvements in efficiency and quality.”

Results

“Thanks to Redwood, we’ve successfully integrated various core HR applications in our HR services landscape, both in the cloud and on-premises. We are now automating thousands of inbound and outbound interfaces across our extensive HCM enterprise applications, including those for payroll, tax provisioning – everything,” says Cortes. “And we do these consistently while also supporting a wide variety of different tax withholding, compliance and procedural guidelines depending on the country or region.”

Redwood also helps NGA integrate and automate custom-made applications, bringing every step in their processes together no matter where it resides or how it was developed. “Our goal now is to expand how we use Redwood to dramatically reduce manual effort.” says Bruner.

Future Plan

“After using Redwood for just over a year, we‘ve started a Global Transformation Program to bring all of our processes together and automate as much as possible,” says Bruner. “This approach is critical to NGA as a global HR service provider. We must have highly automated, reliable, repeatable, and accurate processes for all of our customers. We can’t waste time fighting fires. Redwood gives us the process automation we need to move forward.”