SAFEGUARD AND JACOBS ENGINEERING
Overcome manual inefficiencies and achieve significant cost savings
30%
cost savings automation
7k
employees consolidated in 90 days
25%
year-over-year growth
Industry
Engineering
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Region
North America, Caribbean, Europe, Middle East, Asia Pacific
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Company size
45,000 employees
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Challenges
- Fragmented and non-standardized payroll led to inconsistencies.
- Manual processes were error-prone and labor-intensive.
- Increased complexity and risk due to difficulty ensuring compliance.
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Services used
Payroll 360
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Challenge: Moving away from a fragmented payroll system
Jacobs Engineering is working to solve the world’s most critical problems, from intelligence to infrastructure, cybersecurity to space exploration. We engage in government and private engineering contracts and have $16 billion in annual revenue. With more than 60,000 employees on our payroll, our payroll process must run smoothly. And as the Global Payroll Manager for Jacobs, that responsibility falls to me.
Our previous platform made the payroll process both error-prone and labor-intensive. My team entered data by hand, increasing the potential for errors. It consumed a lot of time and effort, which wasn’t sustainable for a consistently growing company like ours. One of the most significant issues was that our payroll processes were segregated across our different locations,and each location managed its payroll independently. We didn’t have interfaces or automation built into these systems. There was little consistency or standardization, and a lack ofoversight made it difficult to ensure accuracy and compliance organization-wide. We began to search for a trusted partner who offered a single, unified solution that would allow us to consolidate our global payroll and reporting while controlling costs.
Solution: A fast start to a more efficient global payroll
Safeguard Pay met the RFP requirements and most closely aligned with our vision of a shared management model, which involved creating a shared service center in Krakow, Poland. Once we landed on Safeguard Pay, we found everything we were looking for in Payroll 360. Safeguard Pay helped us implement these solutions quickly, and their swift action was instrumental to maintaining business continuity. Payroll 360 allows us to manage end-to-end payroll for multiple countries, and the reporting capabilities of Global Unity enable data to flow into other systems, including our general ledger system.
Working closely with the Safeguard Pay team, we built an automated interface that provides the data to the platform quickly and accurately — no manual input required. By eliminating manual entry, we’ve streamlined our global payroll processes, making them faster, more consistent, and more efficient — lowering our risk of errors and our risk of audit.
Efficient global payroll implementation
Automated data interface integration
Streamlined processes, reduced errors
Results: Automation leads to organizational growth
Our partnership with Safeguard Pay has empowered us to achieve our business goals, namely 22–30% year-over-year (YoY) growth. Thanks to our efficiency gains from automation, we have also saved a combined 30% from our renewal costs and additional business growth.
One of our most notable successes came from consolidating payroll in the UK. One of our UK business units with around 7,000 employees had chosen a separate vendor to process their payroll. When our tax division decided to consolidate payrolls into one, it needed to happen quickly because of the audit risk.
With Safeguard Pay as a partner, we moved all 7,000 employees onto our other UK platform in just 90 days. It was remarkable that we could get that done in such a short period of time, and I have to credit it to the automation capabilities and the additional support from the Safeguard Pay team.
Beyond platform automation, Safeguard Pay handles our end-to-end payroll processing, including:
- Interface
- Gross-to-net calculations
- Banking files
- Tax filings
- Accounting reports
We've come to rely on the team as an additional resource, asking them questions about statutory requirements in various countries where we operate. Whenever these requirements change, Safeguard Pay is there to ensure we're aware of these changes and address any potential concerns. When creating new entities or payrolls in the system, the Safeguard Pay team guides us through each step to verify compliance for that specific country. We can then adapt as necessary.
One such adaptation took place early in our relationship. We adopted Safeguard Pay during the implementation of our Australian payroll system. We initiated implementation with our previous vendor, and the old system didn't extract the tax data properly for reporting purposes. Safeguard Pay corrected that issue, so we could report that tax accurately.
Other vendors can be hard to reach. You have to put in a ticket and then wait, and you never know whether or not you'll hear from them. We have regular meetings with Safeguard Pay to address any issues that arise, and if I need anything in between, they always answer a quick email or call. We have an especially close relationship with our client manager, who works alongside us to optimize our use of the platform. There's a constant feedback loop, where we examine each month's payroll process and discuss what went well and what didn't. We also review KPIs, which helps us identify areas for improvement. Everything they do helps our organization become as efficient as possible.
We're excited about our growth, and Safeguard Pay offers the cutting-edge automation and strategic support to simplify global payroll, reduce costs, and scale our operations with unprecedented agility.
SUCCESS STORIES
100s of Countries — 1,000s of Payrolls — 100,000s of People Paid
100% payment on time
Learn how Safeguard Pay helped FICO transform their complex global payroll into a seamless, efficient operation. By unifying processes and providing expert support, FICO reduced manual tasks and ensured accurate, timely payments across 90+ countries.
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