The Merck group operates in 47 countries globally with 45,000 staff worldwide including 25,000 in Europe, Middle East, Egypt and Africa, a strong presence in Asia including India, Japan and China and throughout North and South America.

The Group HR function was seeking to move away from a more German centric model towards a more global and regional model based loosely on Ulrich. In 2012 HR assumed global responsibility for Payroll, which previously had no focal point of ownership and due to this and a growth process of acquisition, payroll had become extremely fragmented with multiple solutions even within each country.

The IT department had undertaken a selection process to appoint ADP as provider of a global solution, however HR had not participated sufficiently to understand the ADP solution offerings and had no experience at all of outsourcing. Consequently no progress had been made with ADP except to initiate a project to implement ADP Globalview in Switzerland to replace Oracle HR.

The HR IT function sought to progress with roll-out of a new SAP global HR system to underpin globalisation and an HR Shared Services project had been initiated.

I was therefore appointed in May 2012 as Interim Global Head of Payroll to provide a focal point of global ownership within the HR Leadership team and create momentum with ADP. The challenges included integration with the new SAP HRIS and parallel development of new end to end HR Payroll processes and operating models with HR Shared Services.

I revisited the strategy and ADP’s solution offerings, identifying significant potential control risks associated with the fragmented legacy model. Also, the benefits of scalability to support new business strategies for growth through acquisition. Working with HRIT I developed a Roadmap for implementing Payroll in alignment with plans for SAP HR. Other factors included appropriate choice of ADP solution by country (either SAP Globalview or ADP Streamline) and developing and introducing new standardised HR Payroll processes for shared services.

I also facilitated developing and agreeing a robust in country methodology between ADP, HR and HRIT for Payroll and SAP HR implementation. From the Roadmap and methodology I developed the project and programme structure required and set this in place for the first phase, which included completing Switzerland and the UK and initiating Spain, Portugal, France, Ireland, Japan, Brazil and Mexico.

There were significant challenges in Switzerland arising from a decision to close the Geneva Head Office that arose at short notice halfway through the project. There was also change resistance to what was seen as a step backwards from the legacy system. In Ireland I developed and facilitated extensive change management in order to achieve local leadership buy-in and support for moving from bi-monthly, hourly based pay to annualised monthly pay in line with the rest of Merck.

The outcome of my year and a half assignment was that projects went live successfully in Eire, Switzerland, UK and Japan and were initiated in Spain, Portugal, France and Mexico. Switzerland was successfully transitioned to HRSC in Krakow via a pilot in Germany. I moved on from Merck in line with Merck’s reappraisal of the use of contract staff for the programme. Having started from scratch, I left Merck with mature capability to implement the rest of the programme successfully and the legacy of an excellent relationship that I had developed with ADP.