Datacentrix's Gregg Naude chats about project implementation in session hosted by platinum sponsor SAP.
With documents being the foundation of business knowledge, processes and relationships, many organisations are undergoing a migration from physical to electronic documents. On Wednesday 3 October, the first day of the inaugural HR Indaba, Gregg Naude, EIM Solutions Consultant at Datacentrix, presented a business case about their implementation of a document management project at Mediclinic International. The session was brought to the information-hungry attendees by Datacentrix, OpenText and platinum sponsor SAP, which was pivotal in the successful outcome of this scenario due to the integration with SAP SuccessFactors.
- Check out Gregg's presentation (pdf)
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Gregg said:
"In a company with 10,000 employees and a 15 percent turnover rate, you will be sitting at around 300,000 to 500,000 unique HR documents in your space which need to be stored somewhere, and a total of about 600,000 document transactions. If you have a case where there are 30 to 50 unique HR documents per employee, and about two transactions per document per year, seven to 30 years document retention time depending on the role - that grows to massive volumes."
“With sick leave, for example, where someone has to provide a note for being sick if they are away for more than a day, they have to get a sick note. If all employees do that three times a year, you are looking at 30,000 sick notes that need to be processed and stored. If you do that in a physical environment, you'll have to employer someone just to handle sick notes.”
Mediclinic - which has 33,000 employees all over the world in 106 hospitals, 10,400 beds all of which are spread throughout Switzerland the Middle East and Southern Africa - were looking for a lot more consistency in their HR data.
The company had been experiencing some difficulties from a legal compliance perspective, while the retention and maintenance of HR records was also a problem. One of their highest priorities was to eliminate paper from their entire system, which Gregg said was the case for most digital transformation processes.
In his talk he outlined the primary motivations and major challenges faced during the project. Letting go of hard copy files, for example, was the biggest challenge simply because of the change management aspect of the job, not because of the product or the technology but because of the people.
Said Gregg:
"Adapting to change can be troublesome. We set up a scanning station for people to scan physical documents and we put a shredder adjacent to the scanner and that was horrifying for HR managers who frankly didn't trust the digital format. They would ask questions like 'what happens if we can't read the digital format in 10 years time or the digital format is comprised in some way or another'. There is a lot of work that has to go into helping people let go of hard copy files."
Right document to the right person at the right time
Gregg said deciding on the importance of documents was a challenge because there was little agreement over what was kinds of documentation were to be prioritised over others. That discussion alone happened over a three-day session until they reached the conclusion that 15 documents should be viewed as mandatory as part of any digital employee workspace.
There are different types of documents that get generated as part of each stage of the employee life cycle, which goes from recruitment to exit or retirement. And that content needs to be stored in the proper context in order to better be able to deliver the right information to the right people at the right time. Onboarding documentation, for instance, needs be visible and accessible as part of the onboarding process as opposed to lying loosely because it can quickly become very unorganised.
Said Gregg:
"Document categorisation was a challenge in itself. Sitting with different HR processes from different hospitals meant we started we 300 different document types in the HR function alone. Through consolidation and standardisation, we were able to get that number down to 150, which is probably still too high a number. When we went live, the results were immediately visible because now everybody was speaking the same document language. When they spoke about a beneficiary nomination form, everybody in the organisation knew which document that was because there were only one of those types of documents."
The solution that Datacentrix implemented was integrated with SAP SuccessFactors, which was already live in Mediclinic's processes. In the end, it resulted in easy document access and permission controls, searchability for locating a document and supported document management processing from hire to retire, which allowed from SAP SuccessFactors to manage an employee throughout the life cycle from a structured data perspective.
