Our Aims
Why do we need to do this?
Our current systems will soon no longer be fit for purpose.
- Payroll and HR are currently running on systems that are coming to the end of their useful life
- Business practices have moved on considerably since our current system was installed and it is now not flexible enough to meet the current and future demands of our HR and Payroll processes
Our current practices have become laborious and inefficient.
- In an attempt to work within these limitations, ad-hoc, department specific data capture processes have been developed in order to get the job done. Many of these are particular to the department or even person that developed them, so across the University there may be a number of different methods attempting to deliver the same end result
- Multiple systems which are not always compatible have led to a situation where data needs to be entered in one or more systems or data bases on multiple occasions leading to duplication of effort and increased margin for errors (of transposition)
Our ability to manage and review our data is compromised.
- The lack of integration severely hinders our reporting abilities and restricts our capacity to review and manage our data flexibly in turn reducing our capacity to use it efficiently and leverage better value from it
What do we want it to do?
In order to address these issues, as part of our specification, we requested the following features:
- Flexibility to provide a largely "future-proof" platform enabling continued improvements in HR and Payroll processes
- A system that can manage many different and possibly changing/evolving payroll types
- A modern off-the-shelf IT package that supports HR and Payroll processes with data entered once, as close to source as possible. This should be validated once, close to source, and then go on to be used many times
- The facility to enable the combination of supplementary systems (e.g. all departmental databases, spread sheets or other tools) used in HR/Payroll, departments or colleges to hold personal data (a primary objective of the project is to eliminate all stand-alone systems)
- A service that is accessible 24/7 providing a single true data set therefore reducing the reliance on multiple local ad-hoc systems
- The option of flexible access (where appropriate) so that managers can assess information across multiple areas and individuals can access their own records to allow an element of self-service
- The ability to interface with existing software
Will it affect me?
It has the capacity to affect all of us and we'll understand more about this once a supplier has been appointed.
How will it affect me?
To help us answer this, department and college contacts will work with the project team to get a better understanding of how you collect and manage HR and Payroll data at the moment. This will be vital in helping us ensure that activity that feeds into the new system is standardised where appropriate, without compromising the level of information we need to gather. It is inevitable that working practices will need to change as a result.
Until the final system is chosen we can’t say exactly how they will change but we do know that we will need to work differently from the way we do now. The important thing to be aware of is that our aim is to make the processes simpler and more efficient.
The tender process
To identify a suitable supplier, the University has gone through a formal tendering process, which in brief, was:
- Specification: we detailed what we want, with any restrictions we have
- Registration of interest: we gathered the details of suppliers who were interested in putting a tender in
- Assessment: we assessed those suppliers to make a short list who were then formally invited to take part and issued with the full specification
- Full tender assessment: we assessed the final tenders, invited suppliers in for demos and contacted current clients of these suppliers
- A recommendation of award to a supplier was made in the final business case
- The contract will be awarded to the supplier