The embodiment of HCM agility

With approximately $90 billion in assets, Zions Bancorporation (Zions) is one of the largest regional community banks in the country. Zions operates under local management teams and distinct brands in 11 western states. When their portal vendor informed them they were shutting down, Zions was faced with the daunting task of finding and implementing a new solution quickly. Zions partnered with ADP to implement a new portal and move from a premise-based to a cloud-based payroll system. The shocking part — they did it in six months’ time.

I can’t thank ADP enough for how they partnered with us. We needed to be able to pay 10,000 people and perform about a hundred system integrations… It was a huge collaborative effort between the ADP team and our team. Any other vendor would have taken at least two years to accomplish what we did with ADP in six months.

Dennis Burns, Senior Vice President, HRIS Assistant Director
Zions Bancorporation

Interviewees:

Scott Law, Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer
Dennis Burns, Senior Vice President, HRIS Assistant Director
Leona Help, Senior Vice President, Payroll Manager
Marc Nadauld, Executive Vice President, Director – HRIS and Payroll

A seemingly insurmountable task

Scott: We were on ADP’s premise-based Enterprise HR system for payroll, and a completely different company managed our portal. With extremely short notice, our portal vendor told us they were dissolving the company and the portal we utilized would no longer be supported. That meant we had to get a new portal product. To do that, we had to transition from a premise-based system to a cloud-based system, which raised the bar on the complexity of this project’s fixed timeline, making this an “all hands on deck, sound the alarms” project.

Marc: Zions has worked with ADP for over 30 years, and we’ve expanded our use of ADP products over time as our needs have grown. So naturally, when we needed to find solutions, we went to our partners at ADP because we knew they could get us up and running on short notice.

Agility in implementation

Dennis: I can’t thank ADP enough for how they partnered with us. We needed to be able to pay 10,000 people and perform about a hundred system integrations. Additionally, we had a lot of customizations on our premise-based ADP system. If we had gone to any other vendor, we would have had to rewrite every one of those. But ADP was able to import our setup from our prior platform.

Marc: We had to be agile on this project. The ability to react quickly and make meaningful course adjustments demonstrates the word “agility,” and that’s the word I would use to describe our ADP team.

One-stop shop for all our HCM needs

Marc: We are now using ADP Enterprise HR for payroll and HRIS tracking of employee data, the MyADP portal for employee and manager self-service and ADP’s health compliance module. We’ve also incorporated ADP Talent Management, which encompasses performance and compensation management.

Scott: ADP products are the lifeblood of our day-to-day operations. They’re intuitive and easy to use. A non-technical person, like me, can use them without instruction. They made our manual processes obsolete.

Dennis: I don’t think anybody does payroll better than ADP. Previously, we split various modules among different vendors. Now we save so much money in the long run because everything is under one system.

Benefits of streamlined processes

Leona: Working with ADP has improved our processes, especially regarding garnishments. My staff spent a lot of time running copies for multiple agencies, stuffing envelopes and answering interrogatories. With the rollout of full-service garnishments, they can focus on the employee experience and resolve issues much quicker.

Dennis: Since moving to the cloud, the reduction in manual work has been tremendous. With a premise-based system, you must transmit your payroll to ADP. I can’t tell you how many times I got called in on payroll transmission day because our server needed to be fixed. Now that we’ve migrated to the cloud, ADP patches and upgrades everything. No more server issues. This gives me tremendous peace of mind. Now I spend more time developing the long-range goals of my department. When we were using an outside vendor for our employee portal, we’d have this huge exception log that required a lot of manual corrections. Now that MyADP connects directly to ADP Enterprise HR, my team is not involved in that data.

A partnership called One

Dennis: I would summarize the partnership of Zions Bancorporation and ADP as “one team.” It was a fantastic feat to accomplish what we did in such a short period of time. The support from ADP was terrific. You can’t tell 10,000 people, “I’m sorry, we didn’t get set up on our new platform, so you won’t get paid this week.” Failure was not an option. ADP knew we had a hard deadline, and their expertise in guiding us through that was truly amazing — one team, one mission and one goal.

Leona: I love the relationship I have with my ADP consultant. He is an expert in payroll and HR. He knows our company setup and culture, and because of that, he anticipates many of my questions. That’s important because you want someone who stays current on the ever-changing regulations and sends you alerts and updates when changes need to be made.

On winning the Agility at Work award

Scott: What was most impressive about our partnership with ADP on this migration project was how nimble both teams were — and they had to be because of the time constraints. They were changing the schedule every week, sometimes daily, to navigate this project. I’m so proud of the team and am very grateful to ADP for helping us accomplish this and for recognizing our team’s efforts and success.

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