Greentree saves ISS four payroll staff

Three years ago, ISS chose to implement a Greentree system. “We chose Greentree because it was easy to roll out and easy to use,” says Rodney Scott, Chief Financial Officer of ISS New Zealand. “It offered a consistent user experience across modules and good value for money.”

ISS employs over 3,000 staff nationwide. Staff are paid weekly. Previously, the weekly payroll was a manual process that required data entry by a number of staff members, across many different systems. With Greentree, staff on the ground can now enter payroll details via the web, which populates the Greentree payroll. This greatly speeds up the logistical process and helps save four full-time payroll positions a week – that’s 160 hours!

“It’s a huge responsibility to have wages going out weekly to 3,000 people,” says Rodney. “If we don’t pay our staff, and pay them correctly – that is a massive problem.”

ISS entered the New Zealand marketplace in 2005 and immediately started buying up companies. But ISS was held back by not being able to merge them all into one financial system. Instead, the financial team had to work across multiple systems. “We desperately needed a scalable enterprise resource planning (ERP ) system that could handle fast growth. We wanted a more flexible and simple system that would allow us to easily make changes. The Greentree solution requires less resource, especially in terms of maintenance, upgrades and testing,” says Rodney.

Thanks to the scalability of Greentree and its ability to integrate data, ISS is able to acquire new companies and roll those into the system without growing its back office. “We’ve got economies of scale thanks to Greentree,” he says. “When we merge a new company we don’t have to take over their back office. One plus one doesn’t equal two.”

ISS recently acquired a $30 million company with its back office in India. ISS only needed to take over about a third of the back office, equating to savings of around 66 percent, says Rodney.

Greentree also makes it “extremely easy” to merge financial systems, he says. “It is plug and play when acquiring other companies. There are no problems interfacing systems or uploading massive amounts of transactions into Greentree. We can also replicate data and create new divisions. The Greentree system is very helpful in that sense.”

When ISS acquires a company it inherits all conditions for each staff member, resulting in a very complex payroll system. There are around 200 different payroll rules depending on shift work, overtime rates, leave options and allowances, as well as different ways of paying staff, says Rodney. The Greentree system integrates all the different rules, which ISS values highly.

ISS plans to take the partnership with Greentree into the future. With the scalable and highly integrated Greentree system, ISS can continue taking over other companies effortlessly and grow as needed, Rodney says.