Two week process reduced to less than an hour with OpenHR
Skipton Building Society (Skipton) has saved hundreds of man hours every month by automating HR tasks with an online HR management solution from Advanced. OpenHR’s self-serve technology has streamlined processes and reduced the staff time it takes to manage incremental salaries from two weeks to just one hour.
Automating pension processes has also increased staff enrolment to more than 90%.
Skipton has more than 1,700 staff, and manually managing employee records such as personal details, pensions and holiday entitlement was time-consuming and laborious for the 36-strong HR team. Through OpenHR the building society has introduced several self-service workflows to simplify processes and empower staff to manage their own records.
The HR team created a workflow to manage its fixed increment salary process (where employees are supported to reach target salaries), saving them hours in manual entry every month.
Jonathon McNaughton, HR Systems and MI Manager, Skipton Building Society, says, “Before we implemented the workflow, this was a really time-consuming process of creating numerous reports and then editing and filtering through them. We also had to make lots of phone calls and send emails back and forth with managers.
“The power of OpenHR enabled us to turn this two-week job into something that now takes less than an hour. The solution automatically sends a monthly email to the manager of someone who is on a fixed increment salary, so they can take any necessary action, and automatically chases them if they are unresponsive. Any lack of response subsequently auto-approves the process, ensuring employees are not unnecessarily penalised.”
Workflows have also been introduced to automate staff opting in to pensions, in line with recent Pension Auto-Enrolment regulations, and to amend contributions at any time. Since implementing the software the number of staff enrolled in the pension scheme has risen by over 10%.
McNaughton says, “OpenHR has been a key part in our strategy to support more staff to save for retirement. Now that it is a simple 30-second job to opt-in, more people are joining the pension scheme, and joining it quicker as well.
“Previously a paper form had to be completed and then posted or emailed to head office. Now, we have cut out any potential delays and sped up the whole process.”
Staff are also able to manage their own benefits, such as requesting and receiving eye care vouchers, and amend their personal details themselves. This saves time, paper, printing costs and IT network space.
Personalised emails, for example about pension contributions and benefits, can also be sent out to all employees via OpenHR which automatically filters the content to ensure recipients only see what is relevant to them. This allows over 2,500 tailored emails to be sent in under an hour.
McNaughton says, “As part of my strategy I periodically check the market to ensure we have the best HR system possible, and I have yet to find anything that has the same high level of customisation and automation that is possible with OpenHR. The only limit we have is our own imagination – whatever we think, we can build within the system.”
