Excelity Global: Automating Payroll & HCM

Sudheer Noohu, Chief Platform & Technology Officer

Sudheer Noohu, Chief Platform and Technology Officer at Excelity fondly remembers how instances of adversities can be seen as opportunities for development. He elaborates on a recent endeavour of his company, Excelity--a provider of HCM and payroll management solutions- -that presented itself as an uphill task while providing an opportunity to add another feather to Excelity’s cap. An employee base of 16000 strong, 20 legal entities, spanning across 17 countries; disparate operating styles in every region without standardization of payroll process among the nations; multiple challenges with attrition and local partners. These formidable challenges were bestowed upon Excelity Global with a herculean task of streamlining multi-country payroll operations for one of the biggest telecom equipment providers in the world. “Experience is an interesting, noteworthy trait,” says Sudheer. “Our client was convinced about Excelity’s expertise after implementing our platform to address these challenges.” Working closely with the telecom giant, Excelity started off with the unification of payroll process by taking a consolidated route for 17 countries that their client operates from. Invoices and HR data from these 17 countries were brought into a unified application set, with customized reporting functionalities, and a unified program management and implementation methodologies across the countries. The result: Enhanced employee experience due to common pay slips, HR and finance backed by standardized resources, automation, integrated entities from merger across all countries. Projects such as this have positioned the company as a trusted advisor in as much as 20 countries worldwide and Excelity has tailored their products and services for each of those countries.

With over 20 years of technical proficiency in payroll management and HCM services, Excelity Global has designed a proprietary platform for Managed Services, SaaS, PaaS with an integrated HCM. The company is continually serving more than 1.2 million employees on a monthly basis with an annual payroll of $50 billion. “We singularly support more employees per month than any other contemporary in the countries that we have deployed our solutions and in Asia Pacific,” adds Sudheer. The portfolio of Excelity covers Core HR functions, payroll processing, benefits administration, and talent management, all deployed through a multi-channel suite of solutions. Built on deep domain HCM expertise, Excelity strives to simplify HR operations and human capital management, thereby achieving improved service delivery with lower risks and associated costs.

Addressing Market Complexities

With more HCM or payroll solution seekers prioritizing "a technology first approach", the ‘Bureau style’ service models ages towards obsolescence. Excelity has noticed the massive wave of digital innovation and has geared up to surf the wave as it grows in magnitude. The company has maintained a consistent country-specific statutory compliance with technological advancements, investing 25 percent of the revenue towards technology and innovation. Additionally, the company prioritizes BPaaS (Business Process as a Service), an offering based on technology and automation, to enhance their delivery automation model and streamline manual bound operations.

Through these strides, Excelity aims at achieving unparalleled service levels in SLAs (Service Level Agreements) to optimize their outcomes with various industry standards and requirements through the HCM offering.

Excelity strives to simplify HR operations and human capital management, thereby achieving improved service delivery with lower risks and associated costs

The company’s flagship offering, HCM 4.0 is designed to address these manual bound processes for higher productivity and operational efficiencies. It covers a long array of services such as CoreHR, payroll, leave, time and attendance, claims, business expenses, talent management and exit management, all directed to attain a unified HR function. Through a role-based workflow engine, Excelity rolls out dynamic configurations to leverage actionable insights from various deployment models such as on-cloud, on-premise, managed services, and hybrid offerings. Its prebuilt API for HCM 4.0 seamlessly integrates with existing enterprise applications. With a single sign-on, clients can plan, hire, and pay their workforce. “It is like the complete set of HR operations in a box,” adds Sudheer. These services extend to mobile applications within the HCM ecosystem, allowing the workforce to view pay slips, tax reports, and use various self-service HR functions remotely. Excelity also launched a Mobile Timesheet application quite recently that supports multiple channels such as Wi-Fi, geospatial and beacons to amplify the features available to mobile users.

The Pillars of HCM 4.0

While HCM 4.0 builds a solid foundation for HR operations, it is further strengthened by two essential pillars, Excelia, and ezpayroll. The former is an AI-enabled chatbot while the latter is a SaaS module for small and mid-sized companies for payroll management, leave, time and attendance, business expense and claim.

Deployed across 300 customers in India, Excelia is configured to assist employee inquiries with on-demand, personalized responses. Labour intensive operations such as employee onboarding, information requests, and training operations are streamlined through automated workflows. The AI-enabled bot delivers a humane touch to the inquiries through a personalized conversational interface and leverages the ‘Core HR data’ to provide actionable content for the user. With the continuous training of the AI-module powering Excelia, the chatbot witnessed a 40 percent reduction in email inquiries by providing users with support within seconds, contrasting the conventional technical support that required multiple calls, emails, and ticket creation to resolve an inquiry fully.

Along similar lines, the SaaS-based ezpayroll aids the HCM framework with payroll management, leave records, time and attendance information, and benefits administration. The module is templatized to suit various genres such as banking, manufacturing and IT services, catering to the HR-specific traits of these industries. Currently, ezpayroll supports 12 APAC countries, customized to each demographic user. These feature sets are hosted on top of a simple, yet intuitive UI/UX that tailored to meet the user requirements.

Partnerships and collaborative ventures

Owing to Excelity’s highly credible portfolio in the APAC region, several of their clients have timely extended the company’s services and have continued their relationship through the years.

One such client, an electric equipment manufacturer in the Philippines, outsourced its payroll management services to Excelity, seeking the company’s expertise for the seventh consecutive year. The client had a workforce of 5000 employees at the time that required an optimized HR function to consolidate payroll functions with an automated time tracking and leave management system. Excelity implemented the Oracle HRMS interface to automate file processing and considered the SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) to regulate Clock Data. By re-engineering shift patterns, the company was able to bring the work schedule and payroll management processes in line with each other. The electric equipment manufacturer was given the flexibility of modifying this interface as per the changes in client’s Business Rules. After three months of due diligence and implementation processes, Excelity streamlined 200 plus shift rosters and automated the computation of travel allowances for different locations and shift schedules using the NSTS zone table. The payroll reports were customized to the client’s requirements and enabled eITR (Printed Form 2316 and 2306). The payroll operations were optimized to suit the electric equipment manufacturer, along with an incorporated time-tracking feature and a leave management system that eliminates manual processes previously followed.

On similar grounds, Excelity has partnered with several technology vendors on a mutually beneficial enterprise. Collaborating with their contemporaries in the HCM space, Excelity has deployed its payroll or HCM solutions integrated with other HR technology providers in various countries. “We see such collaborations as opportunities for growth, both for our partner and us. Several companies who do not have their own SaaS payroll offerings approach us, and we have integrated our ezpayroll application with their HCM offering,” says Sudheer. With Pre-built APIs for each of their solutions, Excelity’s HCM and payroll offerings seamlessly integrate with a wide array of HR applications, allowing the company to build symbiotic relationships in the HR space. SAP SuccessFactors, Workday, and Oracle are few of the platforms that have been previously integrated with Excelity’s solutions.

The Roadmap for Digital Transformation

Excelity has embraced various automation strategies to drive their technology-based managed services, providing better productivity and predictability in business endeavours. One such automation strategy is delivered through the NextGen HCM (HCM 4.0) platform that eliminates redundancies with a unified SaaS/On-premise solution while providing a homogenous user experience and an industry-standard HR platform for multi-country payroll management. Sudheer emphasises that when multi-country services are considered, automation plays a vital role in defining a common workflow for various operations, with AI being the critical enabler of automated workflows. Their AI expertise, adopted in the Excelia chatbot framework, comes in handy for data analysis and enhancement of payroll services. Rightly so, the company’s roadmap is dedicated to supplementing their ongoing development of automated HR functionalities and managed services. “We are the ones that define our destiny when it comes to technology. Following the agile methodology, we ensure that we are always on par with the latest technological advancements in the HCM space,” concludes Sudheer.

- Karan Kariappa
March 06, 2018