High street health and beauty retailer Boots has signed a £16m seven-year payroll and HR outsourcing contract with supplier Northgate HR, it was announced today. The contract covers the outsourcing of payroll services and core HR systems for Boots 65,000 employees. It will also cover manpower planning and labour scheduling, the provision of which Northgate will sub-contract to Torex Retail. Dave Vallance, head of HR operations at Boots, said: “We had identified a need to upgrade and improve our core HR and payroll systems. After investigating our options, we concluded that the most efficient and effective way to do this was via outsourcing.” Northgate’s online self service software, ResourceLink, will provide the backbone to the new Boots HR system. Samad Masood, an analyst at Ovum Holway, said: “Boots already has significant deals with Xansa, for application outsourcing, and Xchanging, for procurement services – both of which are prominent HR outsourcers. Receive the Personnel Today Direct e-newsletter every Wednesday “In choosing Northgate and Torex Retail for their specific technology knowledge around payroll and retail planning/scheduling respectively, Boots has stuck to its “multi-sourcing” guns rather than succumb to bundling all of this together into one deal with one supplier.”
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