Think it’s tough trying to squeeze efficiencies from your HR and payroll operations? It could be a lot worse. Imagine you are running payroll in 11 countries by using 13 different systems and outsourcing partners - and then being told to consolidate it all.

That was the scenario outlined by Ray Porter, employee services director at global IT giant Dell and vice chair of Webster Buchanan’s multi-country payroll forum. It’s what Ray took on when he was given responsibility for Dell’s Asia Pacific and Japan payroll operations two years ago. Today, after driving through a major change project, he’s on course to have most of the company’s regional employees paid by a vendor from only two locations, China and Malaysia, by the end of this year.

You can imagine what this means in terms of efficiency. Two consolidated centres bring enormous economies of scale, and having just one supplier to deal with cuts your vendor management costs and can give a bit of clout during contract negotiations. Then there are the benefits that come from improving management control, opening up access to information and reducing the risk of payroll failure. On top of that, the quality of payroll service has also improved.

I’ve had numerous conversations with Ray about how he handled the project. Several things are worth keeping in mind if you’re looking to drive through efficiency changes in your own HR or payroll function. First, there’s Ray himself: while he’s got plenty of payroll experience gained prior to Dell, his background is in operations. So he came into this project, not as a guru steeped in the complexities of Asia-Pacific payroll legislation (he hires people for that), but as a change expert. While I’ve met plenty of senior HR and payroll professionals over the years who’ve successfully led major change projects, I’ve also met plenty more who don’t have that experience. It’s not a criticism, but if you’re in that position you may want to think about bringing in change expertise, either through consultants or by recruiting someone in-house.

Second, this kind of project would never leave the drawing board in many organisations because of a combination of excess caution, low ambition, poor vision and lack of commitment. It’s true that there have been plenty of badly-run centralisation initiatives. And the list of things that can go wrong in something of this complexity is scarily long - think of the people and process issues, the language and cultural barriers, the technical challenges of building two service centres and migrating onto one technology platform. But while you need to go in with caution, there’s a big difference between caution and paralysis - and paralysis isn’t an option in the current economic mess. It’s better to think big about what you might be able to achieve and then scale back to what you’re capable of, rather than starting out in your comfort zone and scaling back from there.