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Univ. of Wisconsin's 30-Year-Old Payroll System Needs a $40 Million Fix
jaroslav writes "The University of Wisconsin is attempting to update a payroll system they have had in place since 1975, but spent $28.4 million in a 2004 attempt with no results, and now is experiencing new overruns in cost and time after 'not hav[ing] the full picture of how complex this project would be.' The current estimate of the redesign is $12 million and years of further work on top of the money already spent."
You still need the ERP. It's not like you get together a box with all of the goofy union contracts and agreements, court-ordered judgements, and byzantine business rules, fedex it to ADP, and magically get your paychecks to come out the other end.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Yeah, I'm involved in a small gov't - and the cruft that accretes over time is incredible. We have nearly as many employee classifications as employees. (that means nearly every employee has his/her own job description and responsibilities and pay scale.)
We have union contracts. Several different ones, with different benefits. We have different health care benefits, retirement benefits, and so on. In some cases, we have a single employee who has a particular health plan and retirement plan, and they're grandfathered in, so we can't change them.
It's not just a matter of paying all the different taxes; it's that you have to understand all of the classifications, grandfather clauses, pay scales, benefits, and so on. I would guess that for UM, you multiply this by 10 or 20 and you see what you're dealing with.
The *only* way this can be done is to reclassify all your employees into some sort of structure that makes sense; this will invariably be shot down by the union as some members will see an erosion of benefits.
So most organizations will outsource this, blame it all on the consultant, take it to council/board of trustees/etc, and then run like hell from the fallout.