Raglan Housing Association
Integrated HR and Payroll - Raglan Housing Association streamlines HR and Payroll administration with ResourceLink.
The company
Raglan Housing Association owns and manages 11,000 homes across Southern England and the Midlands. The organisation is committed to providing affordable housing in areas where it is needed most, with an ongoing development programme that focuses on building family housing to rent or buy. Around 400 staff are employed by Raglan across six regional offices, the head office in Poole, Dorset and a variety of housing schemes.
Background
“We were using a system that didn’t enable our HR and Payroll functions to easily meet Raglan’s needs,” explains Steph Anthony, Raglan’s Payroll & HR Systems Manager. “The system couldn’t, for example, calculate back pay and there were also shortfalls in handling employee sickness. We had to do far too much manually.
“The system also couldn’t deal with the multiple employment contracts for individual employees. That was a problem for us, as many employees work under more than one contract, for example when they simultaneously fulfil two or more roles. Add the fact that the supplier didn’t give us proper support and you can see why we had to change.”
Solution
With these problems to address, Raglan chose NorthgateArinso’s ResourceLink solution after a thorough supplier selection process. As well as addressing the problems mentioned above, the new solution also needed to provide especially rich and easy-to-use reporting functionality.
Steph Anthony explains the reporting problem and how it has been solved: “The old system limited our ability to generate meaningful reports. For the first time, we now have access to a detailed employment history for each employee and the ability to report on that history.
“We can generate monthly reports for payroll and HR, providing us with vital information such as turnover, sickness, absence and overtime. Ad hoc reports are also easy to produce and everything can be presented via charts and graphs that make analysis quick and simple.”
IT Manager Mark Wilson is also positive about the reporting capacity: “ResourceLink integrates very well with both our Business Objects reporting tool and Raglan’s general ledger. This means that we can support HR and Payroll while concentrating on our core business applications rather than having lots of new systems to deal with. We were already using Business Objects on a number of other applications and it was really helpful to extend this to ResourceLink.”
Efficiency from HR self-service and improved Payroll accuracy
Another area of functionality that will be implemented is self-service for both employees and managers. This will enable employees to manage their own personal data and managers to view staff information, including things like holiday entitlement and sickness.
Extra efficiency has also been delivered in the Payroll area, especially because the previous system’s accuracy issues meant that a lot of manual checking was required after each pay run. Now the Payroll team say they are much more confident in ResourceLink’s accuracy.
New recruitment processes support the ‘employer of choice’ objective
The recruitment module is letting the HR department streamline record keeping throughout the recruitment process. This includes being able to transfer records of successful candidates straight on to the HR and Payroll systems. More importantly it takes away the constant flow of time consuming repetitive tasks within the recruitment process and automates them. This allows more time to analyse recruitment information and focus on recruiting the best candidates for the organisation.
“It is anticipated that online recruitment will be implemented in the near future which will allow us to advertise our vacancies to a new audience of e-candidates,” says Steph Anthony. “In doing so we can process applicants directly into ResourceLink from the internet to significantly reduce the administration which is currently involved. Furthermore, the online recruitment functionality is focused on providing more time for candidates to get their application right, thus improving the quality of information we are transferring into ResourceLink.
“We will also be looking to deploy recruitment short listing to managers through self-service. Managers will be able to look at applicant information, and process and shortlist specific applicants that may be suitable. This approach will directly reduce the time and cost spent on recruitment administration. At the same time it will allow us to offer a more flexible service to our candidates, with a more personal touch to the way we recruit employees, because our time won’t be spent bogged down in paper.”
Developing employees for the future
Raglan has and will be seeing some significant changes over the coming years in terms of how services are provided to its customers. So developing employees is key to how the change is managed and how the organisation can adapt and grow.
There is also a specific focus on becoming an employer of choice so a training system is needed to allow tracking of employees’ qualifications, whilst also ensuring that their training plan is aligned to corporate objectives. The ResourceLink training module will therefore be used to proactively manage the development of Raglan’s employees, through scheduled courses and performance management processes including appraisals and objectives.
The aim is to ensure the organisation continues to evolve and employees continue to benefit from the investment in them, which will ultimately ensure Raglan continues to offer high quality services to its customers.
A positive relationship
Steph Anthony summarises the way that a good working relationship with NorthgateArinso has been central to the success of the ResourceLink implementation: “We started to build a strong relationship with NorthgateArinso during the evaluation period. They responded quickly at all times and were very willing to run hands-on demonstrations of the systems and let us see ResourceLink in use with their existing customers.
“That relationship has extended into the delivery and use of the system itself. Despite the large size of NorthgateArinso we get a very personal service. The support is excellent, with a dedicated account manager, help desk and extranet support, access to the ResourceLink User Group and the availability of consultants to help us tailor the system as our needs change.”
