Vendor Selection, Implementation and Service Delivery
Vendor Selection, Implementation and Service Delivery tests the commercial and delivery side of global payroll: how to choose a provider, how to migrate and go live without breaking pay, and how to hold the provider to account afterwards.
Selection
- Requirements first: country scope, headcount, pay frequency, filing responsibility, integrations, reporting, data residency, languages.
- RFP and weighted scoring: compliance capability, local coverage, technology, service model, price, transition risk. Score before the demo, not after.
- Due diligence: reference customers of similar complexity, financial stability, subcontractor network, security certification, exit and data-return terms.
- Contract: scope, SLAs, credits, change control, whether statutory change is included or chargeable, termination assistance, data ownership.
Implementation
Phases: discovery, design and configuration, data migration, parallel run, user acceptance testing, cutover, hypercare. Controls: mapping documents, reconciliation of migrated balances, scripted UAT with expected results, dual running for at least one full cycle where risk is high, and a documented rollback plan.
Service delivery
Run governance through monthly service reviews against KPIs (accuracy, timeliness, ticket resolution), quarterly strategic reviews, a change board and a named escalation path. Track credits, but do not let penalties become the only conversation.
Worked example
The SLA is 99.5 percent pay accuracy per month on 2,000 payslips. In March, 18 payslips are wrong. Accuracy = (2,000 minus 18) divided by 2,000 = 99.1 percent, below target. The contract gives a 5 percent monthly fee credit per 0.5 percent shortfall band. Reasoning: the credit is calculated on the monthly fee, not the annual fee, and the root cause (late client input) may fall under a shared-responsibility exclusion, so fault must be classified before the credit is applied. A strong answer states the calculation and the classification step.
Traps
Selecting on price alone; skipping the parallel run; leaving statutory change out of scope; accepting one global SLA when local filing deadlines differ; and having no exit or transition plan in the contract.