Cheil Australia

Originally established as an internal agency for Samsung, the creative-hub of the business is located in Sydney where their headcount has doubled over the past four years. Today Cheil’s team includes 300 team members spread across Australia.

The company has been on an exciting growth phase, but as their operations started to grow, Cheil quickly discovered significant inefficiencies in their existing HR systems.

“We were using around five different platforms to manage our very manual HR processes,” says Kassandra Paterson, Head of People & Culture at Cheil Australia. “We had one system for our recruitment and onboarding, a separate survey tool, a paper-based performance management review process, Excel sheets for rosters and timesheets and our payroll was outsourced to an external provider.”

With a payroll system that was mostly manual and managed externally, moving payroll in house was the highest priority for Cheil.

“We had been wanting to bring it in house for years,” says Kassandra. “The manual and disjointed systems we had in place meant our Payroll Officer was regularly working overtime to ensure everyone was paid on time.

“We needed a system that everyone could access easily, that would be streamlined and able to remove manual tasks and double-handling to lighten the workload for everyone.”

Another pain point for Cheil was their recruitment and onboarding process.

“The recruitment platform we were using was fine, but we really needed an integrated system which could smoothly transition someone from application through to recruitment, onboarding and compliance, through to payroll.”

It was time for Cheil to adopt an end-to-end HR system, as a solution to meet their needs
now but also support the company’s future growth.

The complete overhaul of the payroll system and process has been the most significant benefit of working with ELMO.

From the time and money saved to empowering their employees, the benefits have been felt across the entire organisation.

“Prior to ELMO we were constantly communicating with our outside payroll provider when there were issues and whenever a pay correction was required. It became quite costly,” says Kassandra.

“ELMO is not only saving us time and money but it has empowered our employees to self manage their own rosters, timesheets and leave, further lightening the workload. Our Payroll Officer has gone back to working regular hours!”

Cheil’s recruitment and onboarding processes have greatly improved using ELMO, with automations playing a key role.

“Using ELMO there is no longer room for error with our contract templates, we can relax knowing we are all working from the same up-to-date version,” says Kassandra.

“And when we have a new starter, we simply add them to the workflow and everyone involved in the onboarding process receives requests to complete tasks followed up with reminders. It really speeds up the whole onboarding process.”

Having one centralised space for all information has enhanced Cheil’s ability to communicate updates, benefits, policies, forms and more with their employees. As a result, ELMO has been well received across the organisation.

“Communicating with our team is so much easier with one true source of information to refer to,” Kassandra says. “Our storage system was so hard to navigate but now we have our own customised ELMO dashboard where everything can be found easily and is up to date.”

Finally, ELMO’s reporting capabilities and ease of use have provided Cheil with actionable insights.

Kassandra has also been impressed with the support received post-implementation and the ability to provide feedback.

“There’s always challenges in switching to a new payroll system but the ELMO team helped us through it and we worked together to roll everything out,” says Kassandra.

“ELMO is always open to feedback as they work to continually improve their products and their help desk is great.”