Case study
Iarnród Éireann
(Irish Rail)
On the right track.
After 40+ years of a legacy payroll system, Irish Rail invested in new systems with Zellis, leading to improved efficiency and employee benefits.
Implementing a new system against the clock
Start of a new era
Final thoughts
Iarnród Éireann (Irish Rail) operates the national railway network of Ireland. It runs InterCity, Commuter, and freight railway services across the republic. Iarnród Éireann Irish Rail manages over 50 million passenger journeys annually, a figure that’s growing year on year.
The payroll team of eight runs payroll for more than 5,000 employees, keeping their colleagues paid correctly and on time.
After 40+ years of a legacy payroll system, Irish Rail recently invested in a new payroll solution. We caught up with John Kennedy, Head of HR Organisational Development at Iarnród Éireann Irish Rail, to hear how they embraced this once-in-a-generation move.
John described their legacy payroll system, which was built on an old COBOL mainframe. Maintaining the system was becoming an increasing challenge due to its outdated technology
“The payroll system was purpose-built for us with the first line of code written around 1964-65. You know a product is nearing the end of its life when you having to source replacement parts from eBay,” John joked.
Their support partner indicated that the technology was outdated, and they would no longer support it. This necessitated the move to a new system to ensure continued support and functionality.
This was not the first time Iarnród Éireann Irish Rail had investigated changing their payroll. The change in 2020 was the third such attempt. Previous attempts in 2002 and 2011 were unsuccessful due to funding issues and the financial crash.
The project was resurrected in 2017 when John was joined by Suzie Walsh as Project Manager and along with a couple of colleagues the project team was born. As part of understanding the market John visited the CIPD Festival of Work tradeshow to evaluate the market and gauge potential suppliers.
“We operate as a semi-state company in Ireland, and we're governed by EU procurement guidelines as we are spending taxpayers' money. We had to create an open transparent procurement process to make a level playing field for all the vendors.”
In addition to the technical requirement, GDPR legislation was on the horizon so there was a lot of contractual issues at play. During initial contractual discussions with vendors, some found the contract detail too onerous and dropped out of the process.
Zellis was awarded the contract based on our strong technical performance and commercially advantageous bid.
