Greenlea Premier Meats is a USDA and EU licensed export meat processor operating out of two premises located in the Waikato.
Greenlea exports 90% of the meat that it produces, sending over 300 types of beef and veal products to more than 40 countries worldwide. Their principal overseas markets include the USA, Korea, Indonesia, Canada, Malaysia, and Taiwan. This season their two Greenlea premises combined will process over 200,000 cattle.
Rising to the challenges of growth
From small beginnings 20 years ago, Greenlea now employs around 425 staff.
With growth comes challenges and they identified the wage payment process as a key business risk, both in terms of coping with the existing business at the time, and the inability to handle further growth.
Half of the payroll process was spreadsheet based, using Excel to record and summarise time and production data for feeding into the pay system.
While this did work, it was prone to errors and inefficient in terms of double handling data. The old pay system also required data to be purged annually for the system speed to remain acceptable. This created issues when required to provide historic data, for example to IRD, with documents having to be retrieved from archives.
A confident decision
Greenlea looked at many options from up-scaling their existing solution through to a cloud-only based solution.
They chose PayGlobal Exolvo through Fusion5, as the solution was most able to deal with their needs without significant modification.
This capability was demonstrated by staff who had a good knowledge of meat industry payroll requirements. Fusion5 had previously worked with a number of other meat processors and were confident that any modifications required for the package to fully fit Greenlea’s needs were understood and achievable. The key was a robust platform, with the support of a company who could understand specific requirements.
Meeting objectives
A key objective was ensuring supervisors could quickly and easily amend daily pays for an entire department depending on the day’s manning levels, breakdowns, and the number of animals processed. This was achieved via the use of a customised ’start-of-day routine’. It was important that whilst a success factor for the project was to save time in payroll processing, it was imperative that this did not mean more time at Plant level. This outcome has been achieved.
A major benefit was the reduction in payroll effort from 1.5 FTEs to 1 FTE. More time is now provided in true payroll analysis rather than processing. This increased process integrity prevents errors such as potential double paying of staff and other such errors that can occur when payroll is stretched and processes are less visible. Overall there is a reduced error rate. Greenlea also now has a streamlined process for layoffs and rehiring shifts.
In addition, there are some processes and time consuming tasks Greenlea once had to perform but no longer needs to, such as:
- No annual requirement to purge data
- No longer have a regular correction pay run
- Multiple users at the same time have access to this core system at multiple locations.
Only a year into the new solution Greenlea rolled out additional functionality on the PayGlobal Exolvo solution. Further, they explored the Self Service and Health & Safety functionality including the ability to provide Incident Reporting and Hazard identification and registers online. Fusion5 has assisted Greenlea through this process and into project delivery.
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