Technology paying off for engineering giant

Press release

Salary reviews are smoother for 6500 employees across 13 countries at engineering, sciences and project delivery firm, Sinclair Knight Merz (SKM)

24 May, 2010, Sydney. - Implementing a software product called Remuneration Ally from Pivot Software has helped global engineering firm SKM transform the efficiency and effectiveness of their salary review process.

“The benefits SKM has received from Remuneration Ally are immeasurable,” says Carrie Luzar, SKM’s Group Remuneration & Global Mobility Manager.

“It’s given us more transparency and visibility. Managers have all the information they need at their fingertips. They don’t have to search through different spreadsheets or the intranet to find anything.”

With the previous manual system SKM found that managers were spending a lot of time on their staff remuneration reviews.

It has helped SKM’s HR team take a more strategic role in the business, says Carrie, “Our rewards team now help managers make the right decisions, rather than dealing with the actual vehicle of the process.”

Employees have also responded to the new system. “They see a structure behind the scenes of our remuneration processes that is lived by every manager in the organisation and they all feel a part of that”.

“SKM plans to grow significantly in the coming years, into new countries with different languages. We know Pivot can provide any changes to Remuneration Ally that will ensure it grows in line with the company.”

“The best thing about Pivot is that they are so knowledgeable – rather than dealing with a software company, we really were dealing with HR experts who have software capabilities,” says Carrie.

The SKM project was a great achievement/success for Pivot and validation of the company’s business model, says company Director Philippa Youngman, “Traditionally the lowest risk approach for a company of SKM’s size and complexity would be to undertake a long and expensive extension of their core payroll/HRIS system.”

“Instead they opted for our software-as-a-service Remuneration Ally offering, seeing it as best of breed for remuneration review processing, backed by a flexible and responsive vendor with specialist and high level domain knowledge.”

Pivot’s SKM project is part of a drive into the Australian market that has seen the New Zealand-based software company establish an office in Sydney, and secure customers across the professional engineering, infrastructure and finance sectors.