The recent impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic exposed many HR and payroll service delivery models as being unequipped and unprepared to pivot to remote work, access the data needed to obtain government support, and move money to employees in a timely and compliant fashion. The pandemic also accelerated an already intensifying push toward digital HR and payroll adoption, particularly as the “work from home” response has turned into the “work from anywhere” norm.

With so many employees now working remotely, the employee experience and employee engagement are more critical than ever before and require modern technology to keep employees connected while ensuring timely, accurate, real-time information, and facilitating reliable outcomes throughout the HR delivery model.

While cloud HCM technology remains the vehicle for HR digitalization, existing solutions often lack the ability to support the HR service delivery function in-platform. Thus, integrated HR service delivery technology is key to extending the HCM capability and enabling a next-generation delivery model and user experience, one that facilitates critical HR support activities in real time, such as knowledge and inquiry management, document storage, process monitoring, and automation. 

As a result, more organizations across sectors are considering managed HR and payroll services as the lever and pathway to modernizing their HR delivery models and advancing their digital capabilities, tapping into the innovations HRO providers have proliferated in recent years in preparing for the “future of work.”

Here, I take a look at how HR and Finance BPaaS provider and Workday specialist OneSource Virtual (OSV) is leveraging its proprietary service delivery technology, OSVAtmosphere, to differentiate its managed services, providing its clients access to the types of next-generation apps required to enable a resilient, modern HR service delivery model and user experience.

OSVAtmosphere

In line with its mantra and branding, "Make the day more doable", OSV maintains a relentless focus on supporting its clients with integrated solutions that maximize their Workday investments while elevating the HR service delivery experience.

OSV enables its service delivery in support of ~800 clients through OSVAtmosphere, which provides real-time, in-application service delivery capabilities leveraged by OSV resources on the back end for HR and payroll process administration, as well as by its client administrators on the front end. This is key, as both the client and back-office OSV resources remain in lockstep in real time throughout key processing and service delivery activities, enabling OSV to operate as a tightly integrated extension of the client's HR delivery team.

For its client-facing OSVAtmosphere solution, OSV has developed a bundle of web apps aligned to its core managed services offerings (HRO and FAO).  With >500 of its clients adopting its managed payroll services, OSV has focused its recent app development around providing its clients with real-time actionable insights at every step of this critical process through to funding.

OSVAtmosphere currently offers five fully responsive web apps that include support for the following processes:

• Payroll: a centralized control center for end-to-end payroll administration (on and off-cycle), providing client administrators real-time, in-flight updates and push notifications on the status of their payroll(s) as it progresses through the entire cycle, up to employees receiving their pay-slips

• Tax: provides a control center for tax liabilities and remittance processing. Post payroll submission, the necessary tax data, and details are automatically drawn into Atmosphere from the client tenant, providing full visibility into tax activities conducted by OSV on behalf of the client. Clients have access to both summary and detailed tax jurisdiction details with drill-down capability for more in-depth analysis and actionable insights, designed to identify downstream exceptions and errors for proactive client notification and resolution, with correspondence capability in-application. OSV has also enabled the Tax app in support of COVID-19 compliance activities, providing clients with access to details and insights into deferred tax codes, deferred tax liabilities, federal tax credits, and supplemental form data

• Garnishments: enables real-time visibility into the fulfillment and payment side for client garnishment orders and wage attachments across their workforce. RPA and OCR technology automate the loading and interpretation of court orders, as well as the remittance of outgoing letters and payments, including electronic copies attached to the client Workday tenant for reference, resulting in a near touchless process   

• Treasury: provides clients real-time visibility into the timings/deadlines for payroll liability funding and money movement, including activity details and historical check registers for identifying cashed and uncashed checks

• AP Invoicing (for FAO clients): provides clients real-time visibility into their invoice coding and supplier updates to drive invoicing accuracy. The app includes the ability to code and search by keywords, to pinpoint line items within Workday finance, with the ability to code by keywords as well as other standard factors.

Roadmap and future apps

As a central technology to its service delivery and omnichannel support model, OSV is focused on deepening OSVAtmosphere's capabilities and continues to invest in roadmap initiatives that will produce additional next-generation apps.

OSV has plans to expand the solution with additional apps due in early 2021, aligning to its broader HR service offering, which includes dedicated apps for workforce data administration and maintenance and benefits and COBRA administration services, including apps for both client administrators and employees. 

With Workday adoption accelerating outside of the U.S., OSV will enable some of the apps in support of clients in Workday-supported countries beyond North America, including a payroll app enabled for U.K. and Ireland due in early 2021. (OSV's Treasury service is not currently offered outside of the U.S. and Canada.)

Aside from continual UI/UX enhancements, OSV also plans deeper collaboration and correspondence capabilities between the client and OSV across all of its process apps (similar to its Tax app capability) to boost communication and speed issue resolution. It also plans on expanding its back office automation through RPA, which is already present against several critical payroll use cases.

Longer term, OSV plans to explore the infusion of AI in OSVAtmosphere to address key use cases and drive deeper predictive capabilities, as well as adding KPIs for potential benchmarking and process improvement insights and recommended actions.