Case Studies - Unilever

DERA   Ernst and Young Highways Agency LVMH

Congruent consultants, initially representing PeopleSoft Consulting were heavily involved with the first implementation of PeopleSoft Global Payroll in the United Kingdom for Unilever.

Congruent were initially involved with the Global Payroll Implementation project and the Global Assignments Tracking V8 Implementation Project on behalf of PeopleSoft Consulting. During these assignments our consultants provided detailed functional analysis and technical consultancy.

During the functional design of Unilever's Global Payroll, Congruent developed and implemented a number of processes such as the absence rules including rolling year sickness entitlement calculations, maternity and unpaid absence, the design and coding of Global Payroll rules for standard earnings and deductions. Congruent assisted in the development of standardised Positive Input and Absence Input from managers using Excel spreadsheets.

As a result of Congruent's expertise, Unilever requested the continuation of support for their Global Payroll project after going live. Currently there are four Congruent consultants working as key members of the Support and Development teams, providing production support, system support and immediate post go-live maintenance. We also provide the technical expertise for Phase II development of their Global Payroll functionality.

The bedding in of the application and the skills transfer to Unilever resources are key benefits that Unilever are deriving from their relationship with Congruent. Congruent have a lead role in the incident management of Unilever's Global Payroll system, managing the software and data, the provision of security, user account maintenance, application bundles and PeopleTools upgrades. Congruent have worked closely with Unilever internal team to ensure that best practice is followed in their support environment. This promotes the most efficient use of resource which maximises the return on investment from this part of the project.

Congruent was involved in the maintenance of the environments in a fully patched and bundled condition. At the end of 2001 PeopleSoft ceased the practice of releasing individual patches and instead began issuing bundles. Core Bundles and Application Bundles are usually released each month, each bundle will normally require the previous one to be applied as a pre-requisite.

Unilever made the decision to keep their system current, meaning critical bundles can be applied as needed and do not require a large number of pre-requisite bundles to be applied first. Congruent typically applied bundles to the Unilever Production environment during convenient gaps in the Pay Run cycle, and only after around a month's testing in Vanilla, Development, Testing and QA environments.

DERA   Ernst and Young Highways Agency LVMH