Case study – Unilever

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

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

As a result of Allinity's expertise, Unilever requested the continuation of support for their Global Payroll project after going live, which involved several Allinity consultants working as key members of the Support and Development teams, providing production support, system support and immediate post go-live maintenance.  We also provided 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 some of the key benefits that Unilever derived from their relationship with Allinity.  Allinity had 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 upgrade.  Allinity worked closely with Unilever's internal team to ensure that best practice was followed in their support environment.  This promoted the most efficient use of resources, which maximises the return on investment from this part of the project.

Allinity was also 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.  Allinity 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.