Centralising and digitalising Comp & Ben in one move

Scattered administration means a lot of implicit knowledge and just as many variants of the same process. That gave process variation, little transparency and a high administrative workload, always depending on what a site had built up over the years.

Centralising alone wouldn't solve that fragmentation but would displace it: the same variants, now in one place.

Two intertwined tracks. The structural track: as project manager and team lead, centralising the HR Operations team (Comp & Ben) into one shared service centre, making decision-making clear and installing a shared way of working.

The digital track: mapping the processes end to end, automating high-volume payroll administration through RPA (robotic process automation), further developing the processes within SAP HR, deploying K2 workflow management for orchestration, and building out a collaboration environment. A small project team was led and coached alongside the external partners and the central IT organisation in Germany.

The moment when processes were no longer tied to sites or individuals, but became recognisable as “that's how we do it”. Workflows got owners, decisions became traceable, and HR and operations now worked with the same data instead of with each other's files.

Manual administration decreased, payroll processing became more robust and the shared service centre took on its own professional identity. Where the team used to have to check large files line by line for errors and additions ahead of every monthly pay run, SAP HR took over a large part of that control after the further development. And a high-volume process that people used to be stuck on for a long time ran every day again after automation without anyone having to intervene.

The culture that grew within the team contributed at least as much as the technology. What remained is a scalable HR foundation in which structure, technology and people were designed together.