University of Portsmouth partners with MHR to automate HR and payroll at scale so it can focus on staff and student support

MHR, the specialist provider of HR, payroll and finance software, is working with the University of Portsmouth to automate the institution's highest-volume HR and payroll processes through the People First platform, giving its people team the capacity and the data to plan staffing around student need.

The University of Portsmouth is home to just under 30,000 students and around 4,000 staff, with a campus in London and operations across a number of overseas countries. It is a quarter of a billion pound institution running five separate payrolls, the largest processing over £13 million a month, and handling up to 15,000 timesheets in a single year because of the volume of students and casual colleagues working across catering and other services. Processing at this scale had consumed most of the HR team's capacity.

Working with MHR, the university has automated timesheets end-to-end into payroll, introduced rostering to support its 24/7 operations, and moved recruitment onto a platform feeding directly through to onboarding. The university has seen substantial improvements in accuracy in payroll and onboarding, and the overhaul of recruitment processes has delivered savings of close to £3.3 million.

With HR data now linked to finance and strategic planning data, the university models staffing levels against student numbers course by course, including in medicine and dentistry where required ratios are set externally, and supports analysis of workforce costs at course and school level. Reporting from the platform also gives senior colleagues and line managers a view of workforce demographics and the cost of absence, supporting staffing and budget planning over the medium and longer term.

Fiona Hnatow, Chief People Officer at the University of Portsmouth, said: “We are a complex, international institution with a turnover of around £250 million, with five payrolls and a workforce shifting constantly with the academic cycle. Managing it through manual processes costs you time, and you also lose sight of what is happening while it is happening. Better workforce planning helps ensure the university can align staffing with student demand and operational requirements. My team could not do the work while they were processing timesheets by hand. Now they can, and the difference shows up in the experience of everybody here.”

Anton Roe, CEO at MHR, said: “The University of Portsmouth's decision to bring its HR, payroll and recruitment processes onto a single platform reflects the scale universities are now operating at, and the pressure on their people teams to do more than process. We're proud to be supporting Fiona and her team, and to see the data now shaping decisions about how many staff each course needs. For any organisation carrying a high volume of casual and shift-based work, this is a good reminder of how much capacity sits inside manual processes, and what becomes possible once it is released.”