Introduction:
HR Office has retained our services to study the current HR business processes, analyze bottlenecks and make suitable recommendations to streamline their HR practices thereby making HR a strategic department within the overall business.
HR Office is a manufacturing warehouse that provides construction materials for contractors to approximately 300 customers. The manufacturing warehouse has 1,200 employees in multiple offices around the state with positions across a variety of jobs ranging from office workers to warehouse crew to supervisors to managers. The main branch is located in a rural area and does not utilize a HRIS system. The business is growing at an annual rate of 12%. Payroll data is transferred to the finance and accounting department by way of Excel data inputs and transfers to the payroll system.
Analysis:
All the HR related processes are being carried out manually, with large volumes of physical paper documents moving across the organization. This large volume of transactional papers is leading to reduced effectiveness in the hiring process. Resumes are not being screened effectively, time taken between application and screening and next rounds of interviews and offer being made is taking an inordinate amount of time, an average of 6 months is common.
Since the HR hiring process is completely manual, there is no way to predict how much time HR will take to bring a set of people on board. This is quickly making the entire HR team work reactively and fighting fires all the time. They do not have the ability to work proactively by creating a 1 year, 3 year and 5 year HR hiring plan that reflects the business growth and business plans. Given the fact that the company is growing at a rate of 12% annually, the business and HR can plan to increase the staff in the various departments by analyzing past head count growth and translate that to future manpower requirements. Over a period of time HR Office can predict very effectively head count requirements and be proactive in their approach. If a little more time is devoted to planning this, the hiring process will become smoother and less time consuming.
HR Office employs a manual testing procedure. All candidates undergo a written test. All test answer sheets need to be manually scored; tabulated and successful candidates are shortlisted. This cycle takes a long time due to the sheer volume of applicants. These delays cause good candidates to not be contacted in time, interviews being scheduled late, manual followup with interviewing and feedback all add up to delays at every step of the hiring process. An inordinate delay through the hiring process projects the organization in bad light to the applicant pool, the best talent may not apply over a period of time thereby limiting the availability of suitable manpower in the area and leading to HR not being able to support the business growth.
The benefits administrator has to respond to each query from employees about their benefits package, eligibility, limits, coverages and enrolment. This process is manual, tedious and time consuming; leading to delay. New employees are introduced to the benefits package bi-weekly during the orientation meetings. Recommendations:
In today’s times, businesses are increasingly adopting technology to automate the HR workflow across the organization. In general, HR processes are quite complex; but if managed efficiently it can lead to spectacular gains in productivity and morale within the organization.
Given that the current level of automation existing in the organization is low to non-existent; HR Office has a great opportunity to adopt our two step approach to embracing automation.
Step 1 of our recommendation is to look at an organic growth. The HR team along with consultants from our firm can identify low complexity, low cost products from a variety of suppliers in areas that are currently bottlenecks. These have an advantage of short ramp up times, lower cost and still provide fairly advanced levels of automation and increased self reliance and confidence building within the HR department. It will also allow the IT team at HR Office train and gear up for increased involvement.
These areas could start with automating job posting with integration with job boards like Dice and Monster; deploying automated online testing products, integrating these into an applicant tracking system that includes integration with email systems and a workflow to electronically move data across the hiring cycle with built in escalations in case of delays. An immediate benefit of these systems will be dramatically reducing hiring process times, improved applicant communications and provide HR recruiters with tools to provide update and timely scheduling of interviews and next steps in the hiring process. This one action alone will substantially reduce paper flow across the organization leading to further productivity gains.
In addition, an online portal based benefits administration package can be deployed as well. All eligible employees can avail of employee self service and review their eligibility norms, benefits options, limits and open enrolment schemes and apply for these online; with minimal human inputs. The existing benefits team can review, approve, enroll and communicate with employees electronically.
Business intelligence solutions can use the hiring data and provide analysis and trends in hiring which can provide valuable insights into existing hiring practices and benchmark with other organizations in the area. These will also provide HR managers with tools to provide ongoing process feedback leading to improvements. This will effectively help the HR department move in the direction of becoming a proactive department.
Step 2 of our recommendation is the Big Bang Approach; which can be a logical next step after successfully deploying and realizing the benefits of step 1. HR Office has an opportunity to adopt a completely integrated and a more technically sophisticated business application system to support the HR business processes.
This approach is substantially more expensive, takes more time to realize benefits and requires more training and development of existing HR and IT teams. It may also require hiring highly skilled IT personnel to support the automated HR business systems. Our understanding is that it may take HR Office upto 5 years to be ready to arrive at Step 2. This will enable the various teams HR, IT and other support teams to gear up for bigger and more responsible work. Importantly the senior management team will have seen the benefits and financial impact to the bottom line by way of increased profitability by having efficient HR business tools to support their business objectives.
There are a handful of such integrated business tools available that run the whole enterprise from HR to finance to logistics to sales and distribution and business intelligence. Oracle Corporation and SAP have good offerings in this area. Both these applications provide integrated tools and services that support the enterprise. A specific recommendation as to modules, time lines and cost outlays is currently outside the scope of this study.

Conclusion:
HR Office is a midsized manufacturing warehouse business with very low exposure to IT and business process automation tools at this time. Our study analyzes some of the bottlenecks and issues that prevent the HR department from supporting the business by providing a firm foundation built on a scalable technology platform.
Our 2 step recommendation will enable HR Office to quickly realize business benefits in a short time and realize business benefits before embarking upon a full scale integrated application system deployment at a time which is in line with their business growth in the future.
We are confident that our expertise and knowledge in working with other clients like HR Office will enable us to partner actively to business success.

References:
Successfully Implementing SAP. (n.d.). SAP Basis, ABAP Programming and Other IMG Stuff. Retrieved March 27, 2012, from http://www.erpgreat.com/sap-implementation.htm
What is applicant tracking system (ATS)? - Definition from Whatis.com. (n.d.). CIO information, news and tips - SearchCIO.com. Retrieved March 27, 2012, from http://searchcio.techtarget.com/definition/applicant-tracking-system