From seven business units to one AI-powered backbone: How Zalaris saves millions yearly

Headquartered in Norway, Zalaris delivers HR and payroll services to businesses in 34 countries, processing payroll for 1.8 million employees every month. “We cover everything from core HR and payroll services to recruitment, onboarding, goal-setting, compensation, and the full employee lifecycle from hire to retirement,” shares Mike Ellis, Global Head of Zalaris Consulting at Zalaris.

Siloed operations

Historically, Zalaris operated as seven distinct business units, each running its own systems, processes, and client engagement model. “The same task was done seven different ways, and reporting on that was impossible,” Ellis adds. Portfolio reporting, in particular, was a constant lag: by the time it reached a decision-maker, it was already two weeks old.

Ellis was tasked with bringing these units under one banner. “As we take on global projects, our clients need a consistent experience,” he shares. The fix, as he saw it, wasn't a better report: it was a single operating platform that would bring the entire business together. “We go to client sites and sell them the story of having one solution to manage their human capital,” Ellis notes. “We needed the same for our own business.”

Bringing regions together

In April 2022, the Zalaris Asia-Pacific (APAC) team piloted Smartsheet for two use cases: sales estimation and project management. Within a year, the results had caught the CEO's attention, and he decided to roll Smartsheet out globally. This meant migrating from Smartsheet's US data centre to its EU instance to meet GDPR requirements—a move Zalaris made with Smartsheet Platinum partner InfoSpark, which also helped implement Smartsheet Control Center.

Smartsheet brings all regional Zalaris offices into a single system of execution. 

“We started using Smartsheet across the entire organisation, from the sell phase right through to delivery—sales estimation, bid approval, resourcing, governance, and reporting. Smartsheet is truly end-to-end, with dozens of automated steps running quietly in the background to keep approvals moving and clients updated,” explains Ellis. “This drives improved collaboration and cohesion among teams. The system guides our employees through the specific steps required to manage our projects.”

Global, enterprise-grade, real-time visibility

Zalaris also linked Smartsheet to Power BI, bringing financial, timesheet, and project data into one dashboard. Day to day, project managers check the portfolio register to see which projects are flagged red and need attention, while clients get their own live dashboard, tracking project status and schedule health without ever seeing the commercial details behind it. “Smartsheet has been essential for project governance, giving us a comprehensive view of the business and helping us assess risks and overall financial health. The dashboards provide a clear, unbiased snapshot without unnecessary complexity or subjective interpretation,” shares Ellis. Smartsheet Control Center even enables project managers to create project plans and reports in the local language and roll them up into a global portfolio managed in English.

Zalaris wanted the same real-time visibility into customer sentiment as it had into project delivery. The team built Qualtrics customer surveys directly into Smartsheet, triggered automatically whenever a project hits a milestone. Ellis now gets a continuous read on client satisfaction as engagements progress, without adding another task to his project managers' workload. “We now understand what our clients want and act on it,” Ellis adds.

Matching talent with demand

With a single source of truth in place, Zalaris turned to its staffing needs. “What matters to our clients is our people and their knowledge, and we want the best people in front of the client when they need them. Without a resource management tool, that was nearly impossible,” Ellis notes.

Consultants are spread across regions and nine skill modules, and getting the right person on the right project depends on knowing who's available and where. Smartsheet Resource Management gives Ellis a real-time view of utilisation across the business—a heat map flags who's underused and who's at risk of burnout. 

“With Smartsheet, we can make hiring and staffing decisions across the entire world in real time,” adds Ellis. “Each employee can also log in and see what they're working on today, what's coming up, and where they're needed.” 

If someone has a utilisation gap, they can flag it and get assigned work, with the platform automatically recommending people with a similar skill set.

An overnight capacity analysis forecasts hiring needs, giving recruiters a head start on roles that would otherwise be filled at the last minute. “Given how challenging it is to find people with the necessary skills, planning ahead is essential. Hiring contractors on short notice is expensive,” Ellis explains. “Smartsheet lets us estimate staffing needs for the next 90 days, down to the week, by role, location, and skill.”

AI as a force multiplier

More recently, that backbone has become the foundation for Zalaris's use of artificial intelligence. The native Claude integration turns company-wide data into real-time decision support, faster reporting, and capacity insights the business didn't have before. “With just one prompt, in just five minutes, AI can build me an entire customer report: roadmap, executive summary, risks, the lot," Ellis shares. “This gives us the ability to manage customers and align with their expectations on a real-time basis. It's a genuine productivity uplift for all our employees: it gives them the information they need faster and makes things easier for them, which has ultimately changed how our organisation works.”

The savings have been substantial. Steering committee reporting, which used to take six hours to pull together, is now near-instant. Getting a red project back on track used to take around five hours of planning and alignment—now handled in real time. Resource analysis used to cost each of Zalaris's 99 resource managers four hours a week; that's now largely automated. 

“Across the portfolio, AI-driven efficiencies add up to roughly EUR1.35 million a year, and I expect that figure will only keep climbing,” Ellis claims. “Standardisation made this possible. We built the backbone with Smartsheet, improved data quality, governance, and the intelligence and AI-readiness followed.”

Thinking big

Zalaris started with three Smartsheet users in 2022; it now has 1,251, running a consulting business of 342 people across 11 countries. “Without a tool to manage that, you almost wonder how we did it,” Ellis shares. That scale is now shaping what's next: extending Control Center into payroll processing itself, so Ellis can flag a missed task before it threatens a client's payroll run, and building out the Smart Assist features that make new projects easier to launch. 

“We use Smartsheet AI daily in almost everything we do,” Ellis adds. "This is just the start."