Overview

Migrating payroll is supposed to be the hard part. For this Fortune 500 manufacturer, it was only the beginning of the hard part.

The company had already moved off EV5 in the US and Workforce Now in Canada onto GlobalView, and relocated payroll operations from the US to Mexico.

What remained was minimal documentation, minimal training, and a workforce management and payroll system throwing off errors nobody could fully explain.

A Fortune 500 manufacturing company with operations across the United States and Canada experienced payroll instability following a systems migration and an operational relocation, with issues surfacing after go-live rather than before it.

The Challenge

Minimal documentation and minimal training meant the team inheriting the new system had no reliable record of what the implementation was supposed to do—only evidence of what it was actually doing wrong.

Our Approach

Stiletto's team started where the trail actually was: issue logs, whatever setup documentation existed, and a line-by-line comparison of what the implementation was supposed to do against what it was actually doing.

Where the paperwork ran out, the team ran the numbers by hand—manual T4 and W2 recalculations to catch what the system was getting wrong.

The team then worked directly with ADP to trace each discrepancy back to its root cause.

Key Metrics

Key Takeaways

• A completed migration isn't the same as a working system. Go-live and stable are two different milestones, and treating them as one is how errors go unnoticed.
• When documentation is missing, reconstruct the record—don't guess. Issue logs and manual reconciliation rebuild the ground truth a migration should have left behind.
• Manual verification can be the fastest way to find automated errors. Recalculating by hand isn't a step backward—it's often how root causes get found.