Microsoft International’s HR Team
Microsoft International provides sales, marketing, and services for Microsoft Corporation’s locations outside of North America.
The human resources (HR) team within Microsoft International is made up of approximately 600 employees and provides support for HR management teams in more than 100 countries.
The HR team uses many global systems and tools across each of the international Microsoft subsidiaries. One key HR objective was to standardize common business processes of all subsidiaries across all Microsoft locations.
Jean O’Connor, HR project manager for Microsoft International, explained:
Experience with different HR business processes would vary significantly from one location to the next.
Without documentation, each new HR employee will need to be trained by someone who may or may not know the process.
Teaching new hires an inefficient process can introduce repeatable errors and decreases our overall effectiveness.
Increasing HR Processes Efficiency
The team wanted to find ways to improve process efficiency and effectiveness across subsidiaries.
To start, the HR team needed to understand current business processes at each subsidiary and be able to discuss them, which they achieved by diagramming them using Visio modeling
Software.
Benefits of Business Process Modeling
The HR team used Microsoft Visio Premium 2010 to design templates (also called models ) that define and describe the steps in each process .
Benefits that the HR teams achieved are:
- Significant savings in labor hours through increased process efficiency.
- Decrease in the training time of newly hired employees.
- Improved decision making through visual process analysis.
Why did Microsoft International have inefficient HR business processes until this HR initiative was completed in 2010?
Because the human resources (HR) team within Microsoft International is
made