Implementation Highlights

• Implementation times reduced from a year to a few weeks
• Handles any data format, both input and output 
• Tested and proven scalable for high data volumes
• Improved customer experience

Benefits

Handle Any Data Format - This one technology provides connectivity to the majority of name brand applications, such as SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, as well as XML and Web service APIs. And newly encountered payroll engine interfaces can be added rapidly.

Fast Implementation - Ceridian and its selected vendor can provide clients extensive payroll technical expertise that they can call on as needed, and test platforms to verify new maps and processes for the individual payroll engines. This cuts new payroll engine interface creation time from as much as a year down to a few weeks.

Reusable Components - The target XML format is consistent and Pervasive allows that part of the map to be reused. So, instantly, half of all new maps are already done. Scalable. Even if the business doubles in size, the same integration infrastructure will still work fine. Testing has proven that the system can handle very high data volumes.

Low Cost and Easy to Use - As Ashton put it, “The cost was unbelievable compared to some of the other ones. And I didn’t need an army of developers to implement it.”

Printable Format

Ceridian Small Business Division case study

A Single Solution Provider for Ceridian

Ceridian is a multi-national company that provides payroll and HR services in 45 countries and Employee Assistance Programs (EAP) in over 100 countries. This requires Ceridian Tax Division to deal with over 9000 federal, state, and local regulations that must be tracked and constantly updated. To ensure timely and accurate payroll tax services to virtually any business, Ceridian has formed alliances and strategic partnerships with ERP providers like Oracle, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Ultimate Software. Ceridian processes more than $163 billion in annual payroll tax liabilities for their customers, including 80 percent of the Fortune 100 and 60 percent of the Fortune 500 companies.

It needed a solution from a single provider that could handle bi-directional data exchange between any format, especially the large number of payroll engines in current use. Pervasive Data Integrator was chosen based on the requirements for adaptability, reliability, scalability, and ease-of-use, as well as for having a very small and affordable footprint.

Integrate the Integrations

Various clients were using multiple data sources including SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and home-grown ERP systems. Multiple vendors had built and were supporting different payroll engine interfaces for Ceridian and its clients that were highly inconsistent, and often quite intrusive on the client’s system. The challenge was the consolidation of all of those complex integrations into one small-footprint solution — owned and supported by Ceridian — with a goal of greater control over compliance with thousands of constantly changing regulations.

Pervasive Solved the “Three Cs” with a Small Footprint

Ceridian, as a multi-national, multi-development company that has grown by acquisition, has many ETL tools in use across the various business groups. The Ceridian Small Business Division strongly recommended the Pervasive integration platform. Sam Ashton, VP of Tax Technology for Ceridian, said, “It was easy to install, and they built a really slick little application around it. It helps them extract data for their 401K andbenefits business and sharing information, and it worked out really well. So we saw a demo of it. We talked with the developers that implemented it, and that really helped in our decision to also look at Pervasive for our team.”

After analyzing and performing a proof-of-concept with all the in-house tools and several other tools available in the market, Pervasive Data Integrator came out on top based on adaptability, scalability, and ease-of-use.

Ashton added, “The biggest thing that won us over in our evaluation of all the tools was the ability to take the integration services engine and to put that on the client as a very small footprint, as opposed to big intrusive types of tools like some of the other ones we looked at.”

In-House Team Takes Control

Sam Ashton said, “We’ve built an integration or interface team inside Ceridian Tax Services using the Pervasive tool. We build the solution, thus eliminating the need for third party vendors.”

Whenever a new client needs integration to a new payroll engine, Ceridian’s interface team—working with a single selected vendor who provides functional and technical expertise in all the payroll elements, as well as available test platforms—can build maps and run a series of test files in only a few weeks.

Ashton states, “We have a pretty complex XML file format that we use for our products. Pervasive was able to very quickly take some of our test files and throw it into the XML. And it went very well. Some of the other tools that we looked at would have taken weeks to try and get that done. We were able to do it in a matter of hours and days.

“So, right there we saw the power of the tool. Our back-office XML format is always the target, so we’ve instantly got half the project done as soon as we move onto a new payroll engine.”

Data Quality & the Customer Experience

Pervasive Data Profiler provided the other necessary ingredient, data analysis. Sam Ashton said, “We get bad data, everybody gets bad data. So, how do you deal with it? Well, now the process of dealing with it is baked right into the application.”

Ashton added, “We can elaborate the business rules to be able to make that a better customer experience.”

One Solution for Multiple Platforms and Formats

Now, Ceridian Tax Services has one solution based on one technology, that’s repeatable, consistent, adaptable and scalable, and can handle any format and multiple platforms.

When asked to compare the situation before and after Pervasive, Ashton said, “If I were to go back in the old world and go to a third party-vendor and say, ‘Here, build me this interface,’ it would have taken probably months, if not a year, to get something. With the new tool, we’re able to take that engine and actually have our tax filing service run a few test files in a short period of time, very short. I mean weeks. “It’s night and day compared to what it used to be.”