With a world leading global payroll solution, Acrede needed an embeddable business intelligence solution to allow its multi-national customers to produce reports drawn from its HR & Payroll database to better understand their business processes around the globe. Having been disappointed by other BI providers, once introduced to Jaspersoft the organisation was impressed by its functionally, flexibility and non-restrictive licensing policy.
Background
Privately-backed, Acrede is a leading player in the growing multi-billion dollar international payroll marketplace providing organisations with technology and services that enable them to effectively deal with the challenges of global workforce management and payroll delivery. With offices in Jersey, UK and Singapore with satellite offices in Germany, Indonesia, Hungary, Spain and Vietnam with more to come, the average Acrede client operates in 11 countries and employs 7000 personnel. The Acrede technology includes a Multi-tenanted, multi-lingual Cloud Human Resource and Payroll system which is direct and not based on aggregating payroll results. It provides end-to-end payroll processing in multiple jurisdictions on a single platform with standard interfaces to main HCM software vendors. Acrede’s team of acknowledged industry experts and a customer-focused boutique approach act as major differentiators from the competition.
Challenge
Acrede’s cloud technology removes the challenges that organisations face by centralising global workforce management, payroll processing and payroll reporting. The Acrede Touch cloud application suite is simple to implement, highly configurable and can be accessed from any device, anywhere in the world, securely in real-time. Always striving to enhance its product offering for its customers, Acrede required an embeddable business intelligence (BI) solution to allow its customers to produce reports drawn from its HR & Payroll database to better understand their business processes.
Options
“Having used a number of different BI tools in the past we had become frustrated by their lack of flexibility and non user friendliness. Our CEO and the leading pioneer of International Payroll, Karen Paterson, discovered Jaspersoft and we were quickly convinced that it could prove beneficial to our solution,” said Martin Stockton, Chief Marketing Officer, Acrede.
“The beauty of BI reporting is that it can be made available to all employees but some BI providers either make this facility cost prohibitive or administratively unwieldy. The key differentiator for us between Jaspersoft and its competitors is that it is not restrictive but still offers lots of functionality. The Jaspersoft fee to our customers is nominal so that users can use it across the business as we believe that there is no point in offering a reporting tool if only four members of staff can use it,” continued Stockton.
Solution
Acrede Touch is a truly global service which offers in addition to its own service centres, a choice of payroll providers worldwide processing payroll end to end on its own platform along with online real-time payroll processing as. The software offers: integrated transactional workflow with management approval (MSS), full content management, online payslips and Employee Self Service (ESS), guaranteed compliance, Treasury services via its alliance channel and multi-lingual capabilities. The embedded, full reporting suite powered by Jaspersoft gives Acrede customers an on-demand view of their business wherever they are. It is easy-to-use and available in a number of language options. Bespoke reports are delivered directly to the user’s desktop; managers can create and run their own reports; global reports can be produced consolidating any selection of information irrelevant of volume; and reports can be can be generated for any data item held in the Acrede Application database. This is supported by Jaspersoft BI and analytics and there is no restriction to the number of users by named user licences.
Benefits
“One of the key components of any payroll system is that it must generate gross to net reports; this is the first report that clients will examine for compliance purposes. By using Jaspersoft as the core reporting tool embedded into our Touch cloud software, clients have access to gross to net reports on a global level and because of Jaspersoft’s licensing structure anyone within the organisation can have access to gross to net reporting,” explained Stockton.
“Our multi-national clients operating within the pharmaceutical, life sciences, banking, hi-tech and other industries frequently run payrolls in ten different countries and the ability which our solution with the embedded Jaspersoft functionality brings is to run a payroll expenditure report, for example, in one currency – so that it is straightforward to see expenditure in each country regardless of currency,” continued Stockton.
Jaspersoft’s Embedded BI has made Acrede’s SaaS application and their users more intelligent, raising the opportunity for operational applications to deliver greater end user engagement and value. “HR & Payroll involves a wealth of important information that can shed light on some of the more necessary business processes and the costs that are incurred. Jaspersoft’s embeddable BI solution provides our clients with the ability to quickly generate and report on any information from within our application,” said Karen Paterson, CEO, Acrede.
Future
An important aspect of the Acrede delivery model is to keep the core Acrede team focused on innovation whilst its network supports delivery. Acrede is committed to investment in technology and intends to deliver more Jaspersoft functionality as it explores its BI capabilities. “We use Jaspersoft in the delivery of our own payroll system and we are passionate that we will always trial internally the technology that we petition to our clients and will make it accessible to whoever needs it,” said Stockton.
