EY Nordic Tech Hub transforms annual salary review process with Microsoft Power Platform
EY is a global professional services firm with over 300,000 employees across 150 countries. With specialties in assurance, tax and transaction, and advisory, they have delivered client solutions to 1 million users worldwide.
EY is also a global leader in providing digital solutions. Most recently, the EY Nordic Tech Hub team transformed their annual salary review process with Microsoft Power Platform. The solution uses Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, SQL, and is connected to SharePoint online. With this new technology, a process that once took four months, now takes only two.
Power Platform solution – EarnEY
EY Nordics (which includes Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland) conducts annual salary reviews. A project was in-flight for a new global compensation solution to improve the high-volume process; however, it was a few years away from completion. To reduce complexity sooner, EY Nordics leveraged Microsoft Power Platform to rapidly develop an interim, scalable solution within four months. The solution was built by EY Nordic Tech Hub, an internal digital transformation team that defines and develops cutting edge solutions for the Nordic region. Emil Hovgaard, Leader of Nordic Tech Hub, stresses how EarnEY was developed with an agile fusion development approach which incorporated an agile team of Pro Developers, Human Resources, Business Analysists, End-Users and more.
“EarnEY enables our Talent professionals to focus on strategic value – add activities, and not routine administration. This allows our people to do less and be more.”
– Mette Storm, Nordic Chief Operating Officer, EY
Power Apps canvas app provides an overall view of employees with insights on their annual salary reviews
The EarnEY Power Platform solution was used by Service Line Leaders and Compensation Managers to successfully complete salary reviews of all 8,000 employees in EY Nordic. To reduce the high-volume files that would otherwise have been distributed to the different teams involved in the annual salary reviews, files added to SharePoint folders are extracted by Power Automate cloud flows and uploaded into an Azure SQL Database. The information from these tables for the salary reviews is accessible by the Compensation Managers, Country Service Line Leads through a dedicated Power Apps canvas app, known as EarnEY. The Nordic Service Line Leaders also interact with the Power Platform by receiving automated approval requests. A Power BI report was developed to provide visibility of the submissions from the Compensation Managers and an overview on the overall financial consequence. After this process is complete, EY employees are automatically notified on the outcome of their salary review.
Data is retrieved from the salary review files uploaded in SharePoint document libraries. The data is extracted using Power Automate cloud flows and stored in an Azure SQL Database. It is surfaced into the EarnEY app and in a Power BI report for insights on the salary reviews.
As represented in the process flow diagram below, the data is shared with each individual based on their role and access rights. Each has a particular role as follows:
- EY Nordic Reward team – regularly upload Excel files with salary information into SharePoint document libraries
- Compensation Managers – review and enter salary and bonus components for each employee
- Human Resource Business Partners, Country Service Line Leads – review and approve salaries at a country level, track all submissions by the Compensation Manager
- Nordic Service Leads – final approval of salary increases at a service line level
Process flow diagram of the different individuals involved in the annual salary review and how they interact with the Power Platform solution
Summary of benefits and impact
- The team was able to optimize the complex and high-volume process for which the planned solution was still a few years away from being implemented.
- Time to complete the annual salary process was cut in half. It previously took 4 months to complete and is now reduced to 2 months with automated and simplified employee compensation planning.
- Has enabled a secure and scalable centralized platform that can be repurposed for future salary reviews.
- Richer insights into salary reviews with the ability to quickly filter on dimensions such as gender, rank, performance indicators etc.
The rapidly developed EarnEY app enabled a secure and efficient solution to performing the annual salary reviews.
“By investing only four months of development time, we were able to reduce the lead time of a crucial and complex business process by 50%.”
Looking ahead
The EarnEY solution is one of many innovative ways in which EY Nordic Tech Hub is using Microsoft Power Platform to drive rapid solution development. Another solution to be deployed soon is Project Zilla, a complete reinvention of how a Global Finance function posts journals to its general ledger. Project Zilla is being developed for EY’s own Global Finance function. The solution is built with Power Platform technology and is expected to deliver significant cost savings combined with a ~95% lead time reduction.
“Building a future-ready EY demands deep levels of integration across business-critical systems and processes. By fusing Microsoft’s technologies with EY’s transformation experience, we will continue to alter how work is being done while growing organizational agility.”
The EY Nordic Tech Hub team behind the EarnEY solution
More Power Platform success stories at EY:
- After digitally transforming and automating HR operations, EY and Microsoft Unified Support reduce manual processes by 70%
- Ernst & Young processes emergency loans for small business using Microsoft Power Platform
- EY teams speeds time to market using Microsoft Power Platform, delights clients with flexible, all-in-one solution
- EY picks Microsoft Power Platform to digitize complex enterprise scenarios