Euphony Communications

Euphony Communications sells telephone services in the UK and Europe. With offices in England, Belgium, the Netherlands, the Republic of Ireland, the Czech Republic and Germany, the HR team needed a personnel management system that would provide remote access to a central database while being flexible enough to cater for the different needs of the individual offices. This proved to be too challenging using their existing HR system and they decided that a replacement was needed.

In additional to the technical challenges, the personnel management team at Euphony Communications had a number of strategic goals that required them to record and share personnel information securely, to schedule and monitor HR-related tasks, and enable all staff to communicate and provide them with feedback. The two areas that were proving impossible to manage effectively using their old HR system were absence and staff-development.

Having worked with personnel management software that only granted access to the HR team, all too often absence from work was being recorded on pieces of paper or spreadsheets at departmental level making it impossible to monitor at a company level or analyse using reports. Furthermore, no central records were kept of return-to-work interviews and the allocation and management of time of in lieu varied from team to team. Simple reports such as a comparison of absence by team for a particular period of time were simply not possible to compile.

The appraisal system and staff training was a similar story. In some areas of the business there was a feeling that there had not been a structured staff-development program for some time and that when appraisals did take place, little or no action was taken as a result. Training was of course provided to staff, but Euphony communications decided that the profile of this needed to be raised, and employees should be able to contribute (by adding comments and feedback on appraisals and training themselves). Taking this route also enabled individual employees to take more responsibility for their own development activities.

With some very minor enhancements, People Inc. enabled Euphony Communications to provide the appropriate level of access to members of the HR team, line managers and employees. Secure access to the personnel management system via their web browser enabled individuals to manage all aspects of absence, schedule appraisals and training courses, and communicate effectively with all involved in the process. This meant that all the records were now held centrally and were available (with appropriate security) to all. It also saved the HR team an enormous amount of time each month on data entry, and following up activities manually.

The information held in their existing system (and some custom features that had already been developed for them) were transferred across to the People Inc. system using the systems migration tools and this process proved accurate, quick to effect (and therefore inexpensive) and created the minimum disruption.

An additional benefit came from IT. They had been running a server specifically to host the old HR systems database as it was not compatible with the latest versions of Microsoft SQL Server; this server could now be decommissioned, saving further costs.