Payroll, the cloud way!

Picture this - you work for a company that pays you hourly. The bi-weekly ritual of submitting a timesheet is a given. For most of us, the default assumption would be submitting our time using an online portal. Simple right? After all, we live in a digital age, where just about anything you can envision is an electronic service. But what if you lived and worked where there was no WIFI? Or you did not have enough financial resources to own a laptop?

Now, consider a government agency in one of the largest states in the U.S. They employ over 1.5 million people who provide and perform various services to their citizens. Due to legacy processes and technology, their employees had the unenviable fortnightly task of sending their timesheets on paper to receive their paychecks. Can you envision how much extra effort this entailed—printing, envelopes, postage, mailing? 

All that effort without guaranteeing that the timesheet will arrive at the processing center. There are a variety of reasons why paper mail may not show up at the intended location—illegible handwriting, wrong address, and improper handling by the postal service, to name a few. Unprocessed timesheets can mean significant hardships as they risk not getting paid promptly, not to mention the inconvenience of resending the missing timesheets. You get the picture!

From paper to the cloud 

Cloud computing has become essential for government agencies and public sector organizations. For organizations with outdated processes, migrating processes to cloud-based applications can be a game-changer. By leveraging cloud services, these entities can benefit from increased agility, scalability, and cost savings. Instead of maintaining physical data centers and on-premises infrastructure, public sector organizations can utilize cloud resources as needed, rapidly scaling up or down based on demand. For example, Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a cloud platform for public sector organizations, giving them access to secure and scalable cloud solutions and enabling them to modernize IT operations, accelerate innovation, and deliver better services to citizens. 

Modernizing government payroll  

As an AWS partner, we worked with a large state agency to modernize one of their core payroll systems. The client’s vision was to deliver a consistent and positive user experience for its employees during timesheet submission. To make this vision a reality, we worked to provide a fully digitized web portal and mobile app for timesheet entry, making the outreach and impact of this effort significant. Imagine 1.5 million people getting their timesheets submitted on the same day, within a short time window, every two weeks. The agency’s goal was for a consistent and positive user experience for its employees during timesheet submission.

With this vision in mind, our migration and modernization experts got to work delivering a system that provided flexibility, scalability and security necessary to handle increased workloads. The new system provided high performance while keeping operations costs low. The modernized version was architected using a core set of services to dynamically provision the workload and keep the data in a ‘fit-for-purpose’ storage layer. We deployed the payroll system on AWS with a bedrock of high-grade security, aligned with the AWS Well-Architected Framework. We also migrated the older payroll system to the cloud to provide elastic capacity in handling high workloads.  

The transformative benefits of the cloud for the public sector

Is your public sector organization reaping the benefits of cloud solutions for essential functions like payroll? For our client, they experienced the following benefits delivered in only seven months:

• Consistent user experience for all employees, regardless of timing
• Ability to scale up and down based on the number of active users
• Elapsed times during timesheet processing decreased by five times
• Timesheet processing throughput increased by ten times
• Cost of operations compared to on-premises decreased by 3.5 times

Like many organizations, this state agency proactively evaluated cloud computing solutions to improve their services. They've continued modernizing and migrating more workloads to AWS, reaping benefits for their operations and employee experience. 

Organizations across sectors have the opportunity to enable employees and customers with cloud-deployed systems that deliver high value, like this public sector client. With an agile methodology and iterative value delivery, modernized cloud systems can provide enhanced user experience and high performance at low cost. Now, that's time well spent in re: invention!

Learn more about our cloud transformation and migration solutions with AWS.