The company has improved business continuity in the payroll BPO contracting business.
Q. For what kind of business do you use Questetra?
Works Business Service Co. Ltd. is a BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) contractor that handles payroll and labor management on behalf of our clients. We are a member of the Works Human Intelligence Group which develops COMPANY, the HR and payroll system used by 1100 major corporate groups.
We are mainly commissioned by companies that use COMPANY.
Questetra is being used by the team that handles the payroll operations entrusted by our clients.
Specifically, we are dealing with two types of operations. One is interoffice operations such as reorganization, transfer, recruitment/retirement, leave/return procedures, payroll, bonus calculation. The other is legal operations such as social insurance, labor insurance, year-end adjustments, resident tax, etc. We are also dealing with peripheral tasks including employee benefits, expense management and helpdesk support.
Q. Could you give us an example of how you use our system?
One of the main areas of work that we undertake is monthly payroll. The payroll process broadly consists of the following steps:
- Confirmation of employees on the payroll (e.g. start and finish of employment)
- Checking attendance data
- Confirmation of monetary data such as allowances and deductions
- Calculation of fixed monthly salary
- Calculation of overtime payments and statutory deductions
- Confirmation of payroll calculation results
- Delivery of calculation results (transfer data, payslips, accounting journal entries)
In simple terms this is how it works, but it requires a high level of expertise in the relevant laws, the regulations of each of our client companies and the details of the work, such as the flow of documents and data. In addition, since our payroll operation is related to people, employees of each company, unexpected issues will occur every day.
Therefore, before the introduction of Questetra, the following issues existed.
- A large administrative effort was required to maintain the business (maintenance of processes and manuals, communication time, etc.)
- Long handover periods
- Oversights in the work
To resolve these issues, we organised the payroll processes and standardised the way the processes were handled.
Q. Please tell us about a specific solution
To explain the aforementioned problem in detail, there were differences in the work procedure and the level of output depending on the staff responsible for handling the work. Moreover, because the progress could not be checked in real time, it sometimes took us a long time to check the processing.
With Questetra, after reviewing the process of the payroll operation, we created a workflow diagram and determined what kind of processing would be done in each Task. Therefore, the method of getting the data, editing, and so on are clearly displayed on the operating screen.
After all these settings were configured, the platform for the processor to proceed with the operation was ready. Processors are now able to recognise the Tasks they need to process on Questetra, and handle them in accordance with the workflow diagram without any omissions. We also made it possible to maintain the same quality for every employee.
In reality, a huge number of Tasks are processed as shown in the following figure.
Through the standardisation and visualisation of the payroll operation we have been able to overcome our initial problems.
We now have a clearer picture of the processes and people responsible for processing, which enables us to provide a stable service with high standards of delivery and quality to our client companies. In addition, the workflow diagram allows us to see the status of processes in real time, which has reduced unnecessary communication and management time.
One of the most surprising benefits of the new system has been the handover of work. Originally this took two months, but it has now been reduced to one month because the chance of work being assigned to one person has become less. We believe that halving the handover time has made a significant contribution to the overall improvement in operational efficiency.
Q. Please tell us about your future plans and what you expect from Questetra
Currently, we are using Questetra mainly for monthly payroll operation, but we are planning to apply it to the year-end adjustment and annual renewal of the resident tax in the future. In particular, we believe that the year-end adjustment will have a great effect on reducing the training cost, since we employ a large number of fixed-term personnel.
What we expect from Questetra is to expand the range of functions to analyze business processing data. Currently, Questetra has a function to display the processing time and the number of processes as a dashboard graph, but if we can compare the data of the previous year/this year, and the previous month/current month respectively, we think this can be used for business improvement. We believe that such a function would make it easier to discuss improvements and to judge the effects of improvements.
