The City of Mesa faced an increasingly complex set of challenges when calculating the supplemental pay gap related to eligible workers’ compensation cases, which routinely numbered more than 100 during a two-week payroll window—and reached nearly 200 cases at its peak. Mesa’s self-insured workers’ compensation program is overseen by its Safety Services Division, but the Payroll Division manages the Industrial Insurance Supplemental Program (IISP), which supplements the payments made by Safety Services. Calculating the actual pay gap between workers’ compensation pay and regular pay, the difference in which IISP covers, during Mesa’s short payroll cycle was a complicated but critical process to keep employees whole each pay period. These supplemental IISP payments require W2 reporting and payment calculations based on multiple factors, including job role or function and date of injury. Prior to Mesa’s operational transformation, all calculations were processed manually in an Excel workbook and required data collection from multiple sources, such as email request forms, the city’s timekeeping system, and CGI Advantage. These calculations then had to be manually shared with the Safety Services division for their base pay calculations.

Since Mesa pays in arrears and is required by Arizona statute to remit payment within five business days after the most recent pay period ends, there was a strong sense of urgency around achieving process efficiency through automation. With the Payroll Division operating on a four-day work week, the payroll window effectively was shortened to two days due to banking deadlines and other factors. Yet the team couldn’t begin their work until timecards were closed. Getting the payroll files out on time was imperative, and it became clear that the manual IISP process had to change.

Weighing the risks, reaping the rewards

After conducting a cost-benefit analysis of leveraging RPA for critical and time-sensitive workflows, Mesa partnered with CGI on an innovative solution that transformed its IISP processing. The solution employs three bots that run simultaneously: one that scrapes and sends targeted information from emails, one that captures time data from Mesa’s timekeeping system, and one that works in CGI Advantage Payroll. With the RPA solution, Mesa has now automated several formerly manual operations through:

  • Data extraction - automatically extracting and organizing data from the database and emails
  • Hours calculation - utilizing timesheet data to compute eligible hours
  • Dynamic pay calculation – automating IISP payment calculation each pay period through defined logic that reacts to common variables, such as intermittence, extensions and concurrent events 
  • Review handling - managing Payroll team reviews and responding to feedback

By incorporating human-in-the-loop processes, Mesa’s automation minimizes the human capital required to support IISP processing and significantly reduces errors. This critical process no longer requires spreadsheet data entry 10 hours per day, per period. Instead, the team now only enters data into two fields and has shifted focus to overseeing the information pulled by the bots. Most importantly, the payroll team’s workplace satisfaction has improved, and the payroll process has been safeguarded by completing files promptly instead of late at night.

Further, the automated and streamlined process is no longer dependent on a single payroll professional to run it. Training new payroll staff is significantly easier, and Mesa’s embracement of forward-looking technology attracts job candidates.

Mesa characterizes its new process as a capstone example of true business transformation. It states that greatness can be achieved when the right parties come together with the right intentions around the right goals.