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Organisation Redesign at Aintree Hospitals

May 16, 2010 in Our Track Record

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Photo:Wolfpix, Flickr

Attractor’s work with a number of NHS organisations has helped to support and deliver improvement activity and realise benefits.

Attractor is often invited to facilitate strategic thinking, present options, identify opportunities, validate some ideas and challenge others.

This was the case with Aintree University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. A case study published by the Department of Health provides a good example of work delivered with an NHS team with strategic plans supported by decisive action.

Attractor had worked with Aintree earlier, supporting diagnosis and problem-solving actions with the Trust, and helping refine plans for deploying the ESR training administration toolkit.

Attractor was asked to support an organisational design review – taking forward local ambitions to introduce more integrated working arrangements and effective service delivery. Read the rest of this entry →

Successfully Deploying HR Self Service and Portals

April 14, 2010 in Leading and Managing Results, Workforce Management

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Public sector organisations want to use self service technologies to streamline activities and deliver efficiencies.

Moving away from paper can provide benefits for speed of service response, process cycle times, accuracy of information, eliminating waste, delays and service failures.

The challenge today is to encourage adoption by the “Generation X” and “Boomers”, the population of older managers and staff used to working in more traditional ways, helping them to adapt to new ways of working.

Your younger “Generation Y” employees – the net generation – have grown up with Facebook, Twitter and a virtual world. They expect to interact with your organisation using online tools … considering it’s bizarre to work with paper in the 21st Century.

But obtaining the benefits promised by self service tools shouldn’t be considered “low-hanging fruit”. It depends on good design, smart implementation and effective change management. Read the rest of this entry →

NHS Expenses Management Project

April 2, 2010 in Our Track Record

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Attractor has just completed work with an NHS organisation implementing its first “self service solution”.

The new toolkit provides online expenses claims and authorisation workflow for front-line teams.

Like all NHS organisations, it was important to integrate systems and process management with the ESR solution.

The client needed to tighten expense controls, streamline business processes, improve policy and legal compliance, reduce opportunities for fraud and improve the speed of reimbursement. Read the rest of this entry →

NHS Scotland Seeks New HRIS

February 15, 2010 in Public Services, Workforce Management

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NHS Scotland has started a procurement process for a single national human resources information suite

The tender, which follows on from much earlier work on developing the user requirements and specification, envisages a five year contract.

The system will cover recruitment, training administration, attendance management, employee relations processing and medical staffing and is expected to have interface requirements to other systems including -

  • payroll
  • time and attendance
  • expenses management
  • occupational health transferable records
  • performance management and appraisal
  • “staff bank” management
  • e-rostering.

NHS Scotland is looking for a single supplier who can provide the system, training and disaster recovery, support and development and possibly hosting services for all the health boards in Scotland and the organisations that work with them. Read the rest of this entry →

HR and Payroll Integration

February 11, 2010 in Change and Benefits, Corporate Services, Public Services, Workforce Management

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Working with NHS organisations, Attractor is often asked where the payroll function should reside … with Finance or Human Resources.

The right answer to that question for a particular organisation depends on a number of issues but the underlying principles are universal.

If the payroll team are not a part of the Human Resources function, there are many challenges and issues that need to be addressed across that boundary. Read the rest of this entry →

Mandating Shared Services?

January 14, 2010 in Corporate Services, Public Services, Shared Services and Outsourcing

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Deloitte have called for new law requiring councils to adopt shared services, making people focus on implementing shared services, stopping debate on whether to do so.

Deloitte states public sector programmes have saved less than the private sector because cost reduction has not always been the main objective.

They recommend legislation as a means to remove the need to build political consensus and address cultural resistance, suggesting the average county would save between £1-2m a year by introducing shared services. Read the rest of this entry →

Measuring Manager Self Service Benefits

October 15, 2009 in Our Track Record

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iStock_000004891035XSmallWhen deploying new tools, organisations commonly look for cash-releasing benefits, especially headcount reductions which deliver ongoing financial savings.

Where this is the primary objective for a self-service project, teams can often struggle to demonstrate these types of benefits and savings.

The less tangible benefits of self-service are often easier for managers to understand – though harder to measure using traditional cost-benefit analysis. Read the rest of this entry →

Self Service – Gaining Benefits from ESR

September 28, 2009 in Corporate Services, Leading and Managing Results, Public Services, Workforce Management

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Photo:Bitterjug, flickr

Photo:Bitterjug, flickr

During 2008-09, NHS organisations deploying ESR (an ORACLE-based human resources and payroll solution) worked to address early challenges with initial deployment.

Most are now in the process of refining practice to gain benefits and many are at the early stages of planning to deploy self-service.

Organisations should not dismiss lightly the effort needed to address stakeholder concerns and revise business processes when implementing self service. Nor should the ongoing challenges of systems management, user administration and support be ignored.

It is possible, though, to address these challenges effectively and there are some large prizes availble for those who do so successfully. Read the rest of this entry →

ESR Vision and Benefits

September 21, 2009 in Public Services, Workforce Management

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iStock_000004185698XSmallThe Electronic Staff Record, an Oracle-based integrated HR and Payroll solution, was implemented across the NHS as an enabling “service solution” for transactional processes and business intelligence for corporate teams.

The ESR solution, an integrated database supporting needs of all corporate functions, has the potential to become an immensely powerful corporate information tool.

While the project should be seen as a rare example of a successful, large scale, public sector IT project, it is important to recognise many people consider there are features of the system which remain flawed, cumbersome or tricky for end users. This is true of many, if not all, IT solutions. Read the rest of this entry →

NHS and HR Self Service Benefits

August 5, 2009 in Our Track Record

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A trust had deployed a number of self service transactional tools for communication between line managers and back-office functions in HR and Payroll and wanted to assess the benefits of the solution. Attractor was asked to evaluate the changes delivered by the trust implementing new tools.

Using a combination of focussed interviews (with front line and back office teams) plus detailed process analysis with impact assessments, Attractor was able to demonstrate significant benefits in relation to customer service, information management, workflow and process cycle times plus reductions in transaction cost.

Time savings on tasks generally freed up time to focus on operational and strategic issues – for both line managers and backoffice staff. A limited amount of the time saved was capable of translating easily to cash savings from organisational budgets.