NZ Post retained payroll team in switch to Talent2

New Zealand Post signed with same company responsible for troubled payroll system Novopay

New Zealand Post says that having its own payroll team to manage all interactions with staff was important when sorting out issues it had when replacing its payroll system with Talent2, which is having major problems with the teachers’ payroll system Novopay.

NZ Post signed a contract with Talent2 in September 2009 to replace its PeopleSoft HR system, which had expired maintenance and support back-up.

“The issues we had with the new payroll system related to data migration, transitional change (ie: training our people to use the system, and data inputting) and a small number of systems bugs which existed when we went live,” NZ Post says in an email to Computerworld. It developed workarounds for the bugs.

“We have been live with the system for 20 months. The majority of the issues were resolved by mid 2012.”

NZ Post says the system deals with a large and complex structure and is meeting its needs.

“In the latest stats from our payroll operation, there were 50 errors out of 7000 transactions – an error rate of 0.71 percent. The large majority of the errors resulted from inputting errors.”

Datacom, which NZ Post was a major shareholder in at the time, was among the companies which tendered for the work. Datacom was the provider of the Ministry of Education’s payroll system before the ministry contracted Talent2.

NZ Post contracted with Talent2 after the Ministry of Education “so it did not use us as a reference check site”.