employeeengagementUK General Insurance has selected a completely outsourced payroll service, in addition to iTrent Cloud Services – part of the wider HR outsourcing (HRO) provision from MidlandHR – to support its employees across five locations.

The specialist UK-wide insurance provider has selected a number of iTrent modules including Employee and Manager Self-Service, Absence, Learning, Travel and Expenses which will all be delivered via the Cloud.

Debbie Johnson, Human Resources Director, UK General Insurance, comments: “Our collaborative, strategic partnership makes real business sense in today’s competitive environment. It means that we can get on with our day-to-day work safe in the knowledge that MidlandHR’s UK-based teams are there to help. We definitely benefit from their broad HR and payroll knowledge, whilst MidlandHR ensures that we always remain fully compliant with current and changing legislation. For example, RTI compliance and transitioning has not been an issue for us as it automatically comes as part of the outsourced service.

“A critical factor in our decision to outsource to MidlandHR was the strength of iTrent, the underpinning solution, as well as our trust in their people. iTrent’s self-service functionality means that we have been able to automate a number of previously paper-based processes and therefore free up our HR resources. We now use self-service for a whole range of tasks from absence management and holiday requests to expenses forms, the updating of employees’ details and electronic payslips. This means our HR department has dramatically reduced the time spent on administrative tasks and can focus instead on strategies which feed directly into our organisation’s business goals, such as workforce optimisation and employee engagement.”

“From the outset, MidlandHR worked in partnership with us to thoroughly understand our requirements and design a service to meet our needs. For example, we required bespoke management information reports for the finance function and also needed to make sure that iTrent could align itself to the grading structure which underpins the compensation and benefits package offered by UK General Insurance. Our team worked closely with MidlandHR’s consultants during the training and testing phases to make sure that we were fully prepared in each and every area. We now have a flexible service which we can scale up or down to meet our needs in the future.”

Commenting on UK General Insurance’s decision to outsource, MidlandHR’s managing director, Declan McGrath, explains, “HRO services are proving to be an increasingly attractive proposition to the UK’s leading insurance, financial and banking organisations which look to secure, specialist solutions to reduce risk and increase internal capacity to focus on core business strategy.

“By adopting elements of our HRO provision, UK General Insurance removes the risk of payroll accuracy, data security, legislative compliance, and system and infrastructure issues, whilst enjoying the benefits of a modern best-of-breed iTrent solution, coupled with the expertise of a highly skilled HRO Centre team.”