Strategy

From Document Manager Magazine Vol 20 No 06 - November/December

Howard Frear of EASY Software highlights three UK organisations which use electronic document management and workflow to streamline their HR departments

Electronic document management systems (EDMS) can transform the speed and quality of information access and no more so than in the field of Human Resources. HR Departments have felt the financial pressures of the recession just as much as other departments; not only do they have to keep running costs and remuneration packages down, but they also have to continue to meet their legal and compliance requirements and cope with the transfer of staff during acquisitions, restructuring and downsizing. The recession has also brought additional requests from employees hoping to take out mortgages and loans.

HR professionals can struggle to find employee records, sometimes dating back decades, when relying on paper archives and a variety of IT systems. European legislation, which now states that staff can ask to see their HR files at any time, has made things even more difficult especially if employees have left the company and material cannot easily be sent by post or email.

Secure corporate intranets can sometimes offer a solution, for example, allowing staff to manage their own expenses online, but even here there are dangers if becoming too dependent on IT systems means data confidentiality is compromised. Maintaining the balance (between ready access to up-todate records and maintaining strict confidentiality) can be a challenge. The following examples show how three different organisations have tackled document management within their HR functions to overcome some of the issues outlined above.

CLEANING OUT THE ARCHIVES
Johnson Cleaners UK (JCUK ) is a highprofile laundry business in the UK. It also operates a central processing unit in Rugby, Warwickshire which supports the traditional dry cleaning services available in its branches with specialist services to do with equipment and cleaning solvents. The company also owns another respected dry cleaning brand, Jeeves of Belgravia. With more than 500 properties around the UK and many field-based operatives and managers, JCUK relies on electronic document management for circulating and approving 'paperwork' quickly and efficiently. After applying the technology to its finance processes to handle purchase ledger invoice processing, the company expanded the capabilities to encompass other departments including HR.

Today the company's HR department has a legally secure repository of all employeerelated documentation for starters and leavers. After using a managed bureau service to scan all of its back files, the HR team now has its own scanning stations and is completely self-sufficient in capturing and managing documents electronically. Once paper documents have been imaged, the originals are put into 'deep storage' so that they are retained for legal purposes but otherwise never need to be seen again.

EASY CO-OPERATION
The Co-operative Group is another wellknown retailer which has applied document and workflow management technology in HR as part of a broader EDM initiative across the organisation. With 85,000 employees, Co-op needed a more efficient way of ensuring HR personnel had staff records at their fingertips wherever they happened to be working at any given time. To this end, the company has implemented a browser-based system which ensures that all content is held centrally, and is never compromised because it is security-controlled and accessed according to strict user rights via a browser.

The Co-op's HR document management application focused on content that needs to be retained for legal reasons. This encompasses 600,000 documents, each with multiple pages, amounting to over 1 million pieces of paper - documents that are vital for group compliance and which require a clear audit trail.

Like Johnson Cleaners, Co-op made use of an external bureau service to efficiently scan in all of the existing paper files, but now uses its own on-premise systems to capture new paper documentation electronically, numbering about 1,000 every day. Now HR staff have access to information at the touch of a button, and HR documents now have full audit trails, and cannot be deleted or mislaid.

CONSERVING RESOURCES
In the case of Anglian Water, the largest water company in England and Wales, it decided to outsource all of its electronic document capture and storage activities on an ongoing basis, rather than deal with this in house.

Its HR department was routinely handling upwards of 3,500 HR files containing employee-related documentation, and management of these files required considerable resource. Driven by a need to increase the efficiency of the HR department, corporate concerns over losing documents from flood or fire and a desire to reduce paper storage costs, the HR Services Manager led a project to move the HR documents into an electronic domain.

It opted for a remotely hosted solution whereby the HR team accesses the content using a simple web client. This enables personnel to retrieve its documents simply and quickly, online, from their desks - and without the need for the company to have implemented any hardware or software of its own. By saving administrative time, HR personnel are able to spend more time on value-added activities, contributing more directly to the performance of the business.

SPECIALIST SOLUTIONS GO FURTHEST
As document management technology continues to evolve, HR-specific solutions can provide the ability to provide controlled, temporary 'guest access' to selected records. It is also possible to map a company's organisational structure within some HR-specific document management systems, so that it becomes easier to move files as team structures and people change.

Specialist bureau services can help address existing and ongoing paper backlogs and with secure controls that keep the power in the hands of HR, and facilities to enable secure employee access to their own records, EDM is more of a solution to current business challenges today than ever before.

Document management should be easy. If it isn't, it's probably time to go back to the drawing board.

More info: www.easysoftware.co.uk

Strategy