Introduction
About Unilever
Established over 100 years ago, Unilever is one of the worlds leading consumer goods businesses. It has a portfolio of some of the most iconic food, personal care and home care brands that are known across the globe. From Ben & Jerry ice cream; Hellmans mayonnaise; Comfort; Dove; Knorr, the list goes on an on.
Software
PeopleSoft
Who was involved
Project dates
08/1998 to 12/2002, City of London, UK and Walton on Thames, UK
Project details
Unilever will always be sentimental to us because back in 1998 it was where we got our first contract.
An initial 10 week Y2K project turned into a 15 month assignment as extra work in the Unilever Pension Department was obtained.
In early 2000, after the Y2K dust settled, the UK Finance Director invited us back as he had in mind a project to replace his 44 UK payrolls with a single, centralised payroll sysrem. Little did we know that this project would form the basis of everything we do for the next 20+ years!
We selected PeopleSoft v8 Global Payroll (GP) literally within weeks of it being launched in September 2000. We spent the next year project managing on Unilever behalf, working with PeopleSoft as the systems integrator. Given the newness of the product, the Unilever team found itself attending the same courses that the PeopleSoft consultants themselves had only taken weeks before. It really was ground breaking territory.
Using Prince2 based approaches, all aspect of the deployment were managed – requirements gathering; data conversion; system build and test; training etc.
We went live with a pilot in September 2001, becoming the first in the UK and only the 3rd in the world to do so. The 2 that beat us were a start-up (nothing to convert or bring across) and an international organisation that had no tax rules. So, in truth, we were probably the first genuine implementation across the globe.
We then proceeded to migrate all the remaining payrolls into the system and had the whole system live in April 2002.
Following go live, we continued to work with Unilever as they established a Shared Service Centre (PeopleLink) with PeopleSoft as its technology.
