Case Study
Financial Services — Retirement Plan Administration

Mid-market 401(k) Plan Administrator

Cut payroll-exception backlog by 92% in the first 60 days post-go-live.

~1,800 employees across 14 states
The Challenge

What the client walked in with.

The client had just completed a 22-week Dayforce implementation covering Payroll, Time & Attendance, and Benefits across a multi-state workforce with 14 distinct tax jurisdictions and three acquired entities rolling forward on legacy pay rules. Go-live landed on the Tuesday before a semi-monthly cycle; by Friday of the first week they had 312 open payroll exceptions — most of them off-cycle corrections, missed garnishments, and missed-state withholding that had not been mapped during implementation. Their internal HRIS team was two people, neither of whom had run a Dayforce production cycle before, and the implementation partner had handed off without a structured hypercare window. Senior leadership wanted a clean second cycle with no manual checks delivered to employees.

Our Approach

How the engagement was structured.

We embedded a hands-on-keyboard hypercare consultant within four hours of the request. First 30 days were structured as daily-cycle support: pre-cycle data validation against 27 known failure patterns (jurisdiction coverage, garnishments priority order, pay-rule overrides from acquisitions, retro-dated position changes), real-time issue triage during the run with a one-hour response SLA, and post-cycle reconciliation against parallel payroll for the first four cycles. Weeks five through twelve moved to weekly health reviews and a runbook of failure patterns so the internal team could triage tier-1 issues independently. We also re-configured three pay groups that had been grouped incorrectly during implementation and re-wrote four earning-code mappings that were silently suppressing state withholding.

The Outcome

Measurable results.

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