HMLR takes one team approach to success

His Majesty’s Land Registry (HMLR) safeguards land and property ownership valued at £8 trillion, enabling over £1 trillion worth of personal and commercial lending to be secured against property across England and Wales. The Land Register contains more than 26 million titles showing evidence of ownership for more than 88% of the land mass of England and Wales.

His Majesty’s Land Registry (HMLR) is a non-ministerial UK government body responsible for registering the ownership of property in England and Wales. It also owns and manages one of Europe’s largest property databases.

HMLR is a sizeable body, employing over 7,000 people across 14 regional of fices. Its HR function is also a significant operation with a broad range of responsibilities, including exchanging information and liaising with HMLR’s outsourced payroll provider.

HMLR had moved to Oracle’s Fusion Human Capital Management (HCM) platform in 2018 but kept payroll on a separate system. While this made sense at the time, after a few years issues began to emerge. Processes and data-entry tasks often needed to be duplicated, which was inefficient and led to risks related to inconsistency and inaccuracy.

“We needed interfaces to enable the flow of information between Fusion and our previous payroll provider, which obviously created risk,” explains Sarah Fisher, Head of HR Services at HMLR. “We weren’t using the same data sources, and we had to create manual workarounds for some processes to work. Our employee experience of accessing payslips was also clunky and we wanted to improve it.”

With a change in payroll provider also scheduled, the logical solution was to combine this with a switch to Oracle Fusion’s payroll software. To achieve this, however, HMLR needed an experienced systems integrator.

Having recently completed the implementation of a payroll system for the UK Home Office, Fujitsu had the experience and reputation that HMLR was looking for. Fujitsu’s
honest and realistic account of what the transition process would entail was a key factor.

Most critical of all was Fujitsu’s willingness to collaborate with other partners in the process and develop what HMLR describes as a “one team” approach to the project. The team comprised of Fujitsu, HMLR, and HMLR’s newly appointed BPO service provider. It was also HMLR’s first engagement with the UK government’s ‘Social Value’ initiative, which aims to encourage procurement from a greater range of businesses and other organisations.

“It’s a civil service project so there’s obviously a lot of build-up work in terms of developing the business case for procurement,” Fisher says. “But once we’d engaged with Fujitsu and our BPO service provider, the project ran very smoothly in terms of planning and achieving milestones.”

The team developed a detailed plan to implement Oracle Fusion on a software-as-a-service(SaaS) basis through Oracle Cloud running on the UK government’s private cloud environment. The project was based on an agile methodology and ran from the summer of 2021 to a full go-live date in November 2022, including the build process, data cleansing, training, migration, and numerous other critical tasks. And while some elements took longer than originally planned, the team’s collaborative approach ensured that the over project remained on track.

“Our team worked closely with Fujitsu and Symatrix, meeting every day,” Fisher notes. “We could talk to each other very candidly so problems could be raised and dealt with
quickly and we could make decisions on changes to the implementation plan’s timeframes.

The team’s robust and rigorous approach was bolstered by Fujitsu’s CloudScale solutions, which are proven accelerators and tooling used many times before on similar projects. Its highly effective payroll comparison tool, combined with rigid scenario testing and reconciliation processes, ensured a smooth and hitch-free implementation.

The project completed on time and on budget; more importantly, it achieved 100% accuracy in terms of executing HMLR’s payroll process. The success of the ‘one team’
approach was also an excellent example of what Social Value projects can bring to government procurement.

“It was a complex and high-profile project because it involved people’s pay,” Fisher explains. “There were very few concerns at executive board level because of the proactive approach we took with Fujitsu and Symatrix. And when we went live, the feedback was very positive.”

With HMLR’s HCM and payroll platforms integrated, the two operations run with far greater efficiency from the same source of truth. Levels of detail, granularity, and accuracy are all vastly improved, while HMLR staff now have a single point of access for all HR-related matters, including payroll and payslips.

“The Fujitsu team of experts were like magicians; they always found ways for us to overcome challenges together,” Fisher concludes. “They even worked with me and my team on how we can improve our use of Fusion on a wider journey, not just payroll. The added value, expertise and professional knowledge that Fujitsu provided was critical to success. It’s a great example of how a project should be run and managed.”