Future ready payroll: Ryanair transforms HR processes for people-centric growth

Ryanair operates a fleet of over 600 aircraft, with more than 3,500 daily flights to 235 airports in 37 countries and manages over 27,000 skilled employees. The airline expects to boost traffic by 9% in 2025 carrying up to 200 million passengers and plans to carry 300 million passengers annually by 2034 on 800 aircraft.

Their previous payroll setup relied on third-party payroll bureaus across different countries, with manual processes on shared drives and data transfers between teams. With high personnel movement across regions and complex reporting needs, this fragmented approach was unsustainable given the company’s growth trajectory.

Zalaris drafted a comprehensive migration plan to implement SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll (ECP) across ten countries. The programme that was chosen by Ryanair involved a very aggressive schedule and required a significant amount of data alignment that had to be done in the background to ensure that Ryanair was collecting all the correct employee information needed for the SAP Employee Central Payroll solution.

Zalaris keenly understood Ryanair’s business and strategic goals, working closely with the airline to address specific challenges including:

• Country-specific legislative requirements, taxes, and social insurance regulations
• Complex 7-day roster patterns for pilots and cabin crew affecting variable pay
• Staff mobility across 93 European bases
• Future scalability to accommodate continued growth

The collaboration created a one-stop payroll solution that has minimised manual interventions while enabling real-time integrations. The payroll team now has complete oversight over centralised operations, with employees accessing their profile, pay and bank details via the Ryanair Connect app.

The implementation has delivered significant improvements:

• Headcount reports can now be generated at the press of a button – this used to be an admin heavy process
• Ryanair have gone from painstakingly generating employee and data reports once a month to now running them daily in seconds.
• Annual pension renewals reduced from 6-8 weeks to minutes
• Seamless movement of payroll data when staff transfer between countries
• Significant cost savings by eliminating payments to multiple payroll bureaus
• Freed payroll team capacity to focus on higher value strategic tasks

Ryanair is now using Zalaris for Application Maintenance Services (AMS), receiving ongoing support for changes, queries and SAP updates across all countries.