Hisense SA takes payroll to the cloud with Sage 300 People

Hisense SA, a leading home appliance, consumer electronics and air conditioning distributor and manufacturer in South Africa, has implemented Sage 300 People Payroll solution to modernise its payroll processes and streamline management reporting.

AWCape, a Sage business partner, served as the consulting and implementation partner for the project.

The company, a subsidiary of China’s Hisense Group, wanted to move towards a modern HR and payroll solution to increase efficiencies in its business and be able to generate richer reports in less time. Although Hisense’s legacy payroll solution, Sage VIP Premier, had served it well over the years, the company wanted to put a cloud-based solution in place to reduce admin overhead for its team and better support the new work-from-anywhere world.

After evaluating several options, Hisense selected Sage 300 People running on the Sage 300 People Managed Cloud Service (MCS) platform on Microsoft Azure. The company has already implemented the Payroll Management, Leave Management and Employee Self-Service modules of Sage 300 People Payroll, and is currently implementing the Sage 300 People HR module to gain the benefits of an integrated HR and payroll solution.

Cheré Horstmann, Compensation and Benefits Manager at Hisense SA Sales Holdings, says: “Before we implemented Sage 300 People Payroll, our payroll team was sinking a lot of its time into mundane tasks such as performing backups and generating reports. Now, with Sage 300 People in place, we have reduced the time it takes to generate month-end reports from two days to one day. That will only improve as we learn more about the system.

“In addition to the efficiency gains, Sage 300 People gives us access to more granular detail in our reports, offering us more timely insight into trends in the payroll, leave, overtime and recruitment. Sage 300 People also makes it far simpler for us to produce consolidated reports across the different companies in our group as well as to generate separate reports for each business entity.”

Horstmann adds: “The employee self-service feature has also been a huge advantage for Hisense. Employees now have the ability to apply for leave, file overtime claims and change their personal details from a smartphone or PC. This is helping to improve the employee experience, while ensuring personnel details are up to date and reducing paperwork for the payroll and HR team.

“With more than 1 000 people on our payroll, it is important for us to run an accurate, efficient and compliant payroll. AWCape has played an important role in our journey to refresh our payroll systems. As an implementation partner, AWCape has delivered value for money and has always responded rapidly when we have needed support.”

Says Jeff Ryan, MD for AWCape: “Generating accurate, user-friendly reports is a headache for many HR and payroll departments. A modern cloud-based solution like Sage 300 People can create rich reports and visualisations at the push of a button, with the ability to dig deep and slice and dice the data. This not only simplifies management reporting, but gives companies deeper insight into business trends for strategic decision-making.”

Adds Gerhard Hartman, Vice President, Medium Business for Sage Africa & Middle East: “At Sage, partners like AWCape are at the heart of everything we do – they are an extension of our Sage team. We are proud to work with AWCape to help Hisense implement a cloud HR and People system that allows the business to effectively respond to changing priorities. Sage 300 People MCS uses powerful automation, comprehensive analytics and flexible workflows to ensure global workforces can adapt and thrive.”