How Möller Digital Baltic replaced five HR and payroll systems with one Baltic source of truth.

Three countries. Fourteen legal entities. One platform.

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At a glance

HR and payroll at Möller before and after consolidation onto one platform.

5 → 1

Systems consolidated

14

Legal entities:
LV 7 · EE 4 · LT 3

~650

Employees

3

Countries · 6 brands

Company overview

  • Industry: Automotive distribution

  • Region: Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania

  • Group: Möller Auto – one of Northern Europe's oldest car distributors

  • Implementation:
Kickoff Dec 2023 · Parallel rollout LV/EE/LT · Continuous improvement from Jan 2026

What changed

  • Five disconnected HR and payroll systems consolidated to one

  • Manual cross-system aggregation eliminated for group-level reporting

  • Payroll calculation time reduced

  • Per-vendor regulatory negotiations ended – one subscription covers all three Baltic regimes

  • Weekly status calls retired in January 2026 → quarterly reviews
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Why Möller Digital Baltic chose consolidation.

Agnius Dambrauskas, Project Manager, on the helicopter view that made the decision.

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Chapter 1 · Before

Five disconnected systems. No group-level view.

Möller Auto Baltic – the regional arm of one of Northern Europe's oldest car distributors, operated 14 legal entities, six brands, and around 650 employees across Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. Each country ran HR and payroll on its own vendor stack. None of those systems talked to each other. Möller Digital Baltic, formed to look at the technology landscape across all three countries from above, was the team that asked the simplification question for the first time.

Each country had built its HR and payroll architecture on its own timeline, with its own vendors, around its own legal interpretation of working time, leaves, and tax rules. There were no integrations between HR and payroll, even within a single country.

Earlier attempts to fix this stayed local: a template here, a tighter control there, a process tuned for one country and one vendor. Reporting was an aggregation exercise rather than a management tool.

Whenever a regulation changed in one country, business teams negotiated it directly with the local supplier – with no group-level oversight of what was being changed or why.

You're improving five solutions bit by bit. There is some improvement for that particular country, for that particular process and for the people working there. But there is no improvement overall, and no systemic view.

There was no helicopter view. There was a stack of binoculars.

Frame 350 (1)-1

Agnius Dambrauskas

Project Manager

Chapter 2 · The decision

Three criteria. One vendor that met all three.

The formation of Möller Digital Baltic created, for the first time, a team whose job was to look at the technology landscape across all three countries and ask the simplification question.

The HR and payroll stack was the obvious starting point. The case for change was structural rather than financial.

Full Baltic coverage in one system

  • Contact details and home address
  • Bank accounts (with approval flow)
  • Tax exemption status
  • Family members and disability status
  • Education and certificates

Strong functional fit on HR processes

  • Leave requests by type
  • Real-time absence balances
  • Team vacation calendar
  • Real-time approval status

A partnership that could carry the work

  • Payslips — secure, monthly
  • Salary information
  • Contract details and history
  • Job description
  • Remaining vacation balance

Letter of Intent signed in November 2023. Kickoff at Möller Digital Baltic took place on 8 December 2023.

Chapter 3 · The build

Three countries. Twenty years of habits.

The implementation was not technically hard. What was hard was the part that does not appear on a system diagram: harmonising HR and accounting processes across three countries, each with twenty years of accumulated working habits, none of them quite the same.

The team did not start from blueprints. There weren't any. Hermetis and Möller built detailed questionnaires capturing, function by function, how each country actually worked.

Where a country had improvised in good faith for years, the response was rarely a hard rewrite – more often a configuration workaround inside Hermetis, or one additional step that satisfied all three legal regimes.

“You're improving five solutions bit by bit. There is some improvement for that particular country, for that particular process and for the people working there. But there is no improvement overall, and no systemic view.”

Frame 350 (1)-1

Agnius Dambrauskas

Project Manager

Implementation timeline

Nov 2023

Letter of Intent signed.

8 Dec 2023

Kickoff with Möller Digital Baltic.

2024

Parallel build across LV, EE, LT. Function-by-function analysis. Configuration over rewrite. Big-bang go-live planned across all three.

Cutover

Lithuania first. Latvia followed. Estonia , where harmonisation took the most discussion – reached 100% usage last.

Jan 2026

Weekly status calls retired in favour of quarterly reviews.

Chapter 4 · The Day-to-Day Now

From five logins and an inbox to one system.

The change was not the addition of a system. It was the subtraction of four of them.

What used to require five logins, an inbox, and a tab open to a chief accountant's spreadsheet now happens in one place.

For HR & Payroll

One source of truth, instead of five

Before

Every question about someone in another country started with a navigation problem - which country, which legal entity, which payroll system, which absence tool.

A simple query like contract status or remaining vacation could mean opening three or four systems and reconciling what they said.

After

Employees, managers, HR specialists and accountants all work against the same data.

Master HR data still originates in Möller Connect at group level; everything downstream happens inside Hermetis. One link, one place to do everything.

For Payroll

Calculation that finishes when it should

Before

Payroll across the Baltics meant navigating per-country tools, reconciling inputs from email and spreadsheets, and absorbing every late absence notification as a recalculation.

After

Calculation runs natively against the same time, attendance and absence data everyone else sees.

Accounting teams across all three countries report payroll time significantly reduced - a read the CFO has confirmed upward.

For Managers

Approve in one step

Before

A single approval - absence, business trip, expense - could route a manager through a system, then a mailbox, then back to a different system, then a manual comment forwarded to accounting.

After

The manager gets a notification, opens Hermetis, sees everything on one screen, and approves or rejects in one step.

In a matrix structure where managers oversee team members in another country, that also solves what used to be a six-system permission problem.

For Employees

Self-service that employees find without training

Before

Employees who weren't at a desk daily - mechanics, sales floor, service centre teams - used HR systems as little as possible, because finding the right one cost more than the task was worth.

After

One portal, accessible from a phone: personal data updates, vacation and salary-advance requests, expense submissions, payslip access. 

Straightforward enough that people use it with minimal onboarding.

Evidence

The decision was structural, came from CFO and HR. The business case was infrastructural.

Consolidation

  • 5 disconnected HR and payroll systems → 1 (Hermetis), plus 1 group-level master (Möller Connect).

  • Per-country payroll, HR, and absence tools replaced with one Baltic-wide platform.

  • Email as a data-exchange mechanism removed

Scope

  • 14 legal entities — LV: 7, EE: 4, LT: 3

  • ~650 employees across three countries, six brands.

  • All core processes live: personnel administration, time and attendance, payroll, business trips, expenses, mobile, self-service.

Stability

  • Manual cross-system aggregation eliminated for group-level reporting.

  • Integration between Hermetis and Möller
    Connect stable; change notifications now
    formalised between vendors.

  • Reduction in payroll calculation time confirmed by accounting teams across all three countries.

Chapter 5 · The Frame for the Future

Further

Möller Digital Baltic and Hermetis have moved past initial implementation into a structured continuous improvement phase – a permanent monthly capacity for configuration adjustments, new modules, and process refinements.

The roadmap for the next twelve to twenty-four months is shaped by what HR, payroll, and managers ask for once they have lived inside the system long enough to know what would make it better.

What’s next

  • Document automation and digital signature
  • Deeper analytical reporting for HR, payroll, and the CFO
  • Further self-service refinement

“Simpler. Cleaner. More professional. Five different solutions, hundreds of email exchanges between countries and departments – that doesn't look efficient or professional. Now it's standardised, harmonised. People know where to go to do what.”

Frame 350 (1)-1

Agnius Dambrauskas

Project Manager

Luminor Case Study

See how Hermetis works for regulated, multi-country organisations

If your organisation runs HR and payroll across multiple Baltic countries under real regulatory scrutiny, Hermetis was built for exactly this.

Read full Luminor story
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For organisations operating across Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, or Poland.

One meeting is enough to walk through what a consolidated view of your workforce would look like, and what it would take to set it up.

Learn more about HR & Payroll

Other organisations on the platform.

Other companies operating across two or more of these markets have moved their
HR and payroll onto one platform.

Banking
Lithuania

“We got our week back”

Lina Vaitiekūnienė

Head of People Partnering and Talent Acquisition Luminor

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Manufacturing
Latvia

“Full transparency with our employees”

Uldis Vilks

Head of IT, Kronus

Read the full story

Frequently asked questions

Moving HR and payroll across several countries onto one platform is a big decision. Here are the questions we hear often.

Didn't find your answer? Get in touch — we'll get back to you.

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Was Möller's situation comparable to a single-country HR/payroll consolidation?

No. Möller's challenge was specifically multi-country: three legal regimes, three vendor stacks, no shared HR and payroll baseline. A single-country consolidation is a simpler problem. The platform handles both, but the multi-country case is where the difference between Hermetis and a single-market vendor becomes structural rather than functional.

How long did the implementation actually take, end to end?

The Letter of Intent was signed in November 2023 and kickoff followed on 8 December 2023, with the build running roughly nine months in parallel across Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania toward a single big-bang go-live. Some differences that hadn't been fully resolved at the analysis stage resurfaced at cutover, so a few operations ran alongside legacy systems for a period: Lithuania moved fully onto Hermetis first, Latvia followed, and Estonia - where process harmonisation took the most discussion - was last to reach 100% usage. By January 2026 the project had settled enough that weekly status calls were retired in favour of quarterly reviews.

Did Möller replace its group-level system as well?

No. Master HR data still originates in Möller Connect at group level, in line with a group digital roadmap defined out of Norway. Hermetis sits downstream of it: everything operational - personnel administration, time and attendance, payroll, business trips, expenses, self-service - happens in Hermetis, while Möller Connect remains the group-level master. The integration between the two is stable, with change notifications now formalised between the vendors.

What was the hardest part of the project?

Not the technology. As the project manager put it, the technical deployment was manageable - the real work was harmonising HR and accounting processes across three countries, each with about twenty years of accumulated working habits and its own legal interpretation of working time, leave and tax. There were no blueprints to start from, so Hermetis and Möller built function-by-function questionnaires capturing how each country actually worked, then resolved differences with configuration workarounds rather than forcing any country to abandon its pattern. The main lesson taken forward: decide where to standardise and where to accommodate earlier, and hold to it more firmly.