Solution Profile Spotlight: Employee Performance Review

Employee Performance Review

While important, conducting employee reviews is often a challenge in organizations. Human Resource (HR) employees invest a significant amount of time in preparing, managing and ensuring performance evaluations are delivered on time. Instead, companies need to focus on identifying and developing human capital to remain competitive and to grow profitability. To be successful, it is important for HR employees to shift focus from unproductive routines to developing intellectual assets for their organization.

When the employee review process is paper-based, supervisors and HR departments lose visibility as to where the review stands in the approval process, resulting in inefficiencies and additional work.  Process automation is key to ensuring future success of the employee review processes.

Key Benefits of Process Automation:

1.)   Improved operational efficiency of HR

• Reduce administrative and managerial overhead
• Automatic transfer of data to related systems, eliminating rework and making it instantly available to human resources and payroll

2.)   Increased visibility into operations

• Instant access to operational data, such as amount of reviews conducted, overdue, escalated and outstanding, ratings and pay raises suggested and approved, time elapsed for each step and from start to finish, etc. that provide insight and can trigger corrective actions
•  All information is readily available in real-time and without any manual work.

3.)   Greater control, reliability and quality

• Tasks are conducted on time by authorized people and are documented auditable. Companies control document related challenges like lost reviews, incorrect or incomplete information and lack of audit trail.
• Human resources no longer have to monitor performance reviews and take corrective actions that can be easily handled by predefined procedures.

By automating employee review forms, companies will see this process run much more efficiently and effectively.   Process automation will ensure accuracy of information, connect company departments and divisions, and assist HR departments with record-keeping.  End users will appreciate the ease-of-use and visibility with each automated employee review. 

                                              Screenshot – Employee Performance Review

To learn more about the Ultimus Employee Review Process, click here.  For additional information or questions as to how this process can benefit your company, please email info@ultimus.com.

Looking at The BP Oil Situation From a Process Perspective

The BP Oil situation in the gulf is a headline story for every major news outlet.  While everyone has their own opinion about off-shore drilling and the impact it has on the environment, I truly hope the "top kill" procedure works as the people and wildlife in the region need relief immediately.  I see in the news that BP has set up a formal claims process for people who have incurred damage from the spill.  As my perspective of the world is from the "process view", I immediately wondered in what ways BP has set up such a process.  Here is what I see from reviewing their claims submission web pages:

• No understanding of how the process flows
  • BP does provide some textual explanations of how parts of their process are to be handled, but there is general description of the master process itself.
• No process visibility
  • After filling out the claims form, it is sent to a BP claims processing center. There is seemingly no way to understand where in the process the claim is, without making a formal request into BP for an update (or hearing from BP themselves
• No understanding of how fast the process will execute
  • On their claims web page, BP states this "Submitted claims will be processed promptly." "Promptly" seems pretty vague to me.

 

These three points are arguably "BPM 101" errors.  Errors like these cause frustrations with process users and, in fact, corrode confidence in the process itself.  If I was in the role of Chief Process Officer at BP, I would immediately make the following changes:

• Provide a graphical representation of the process on a customer facing web page. Most people I talk with immediately latch onto pictures rather than long passages of text.
• Provide a customer service style web page with the following features:
  • The ability to retrieve the claim information by entering in the claim number
  • An audit trail listing of all activity that has occurred with the claim to date
  • Updated information on which steps are left to complete the claims process
  • A feedback section where claims filers can comment on their claims process experience
• Provide electronic updates to claim filers giving them information on planned next steps (where the updates could be configurable for specific email addresses, social networking sites (if desired) and how often should the updates be sent)

I understand the number of people filing claims with BP will be large and an argument might be that the number of options you provide in a process could imply the process will be harder to manage.  But I do not agree with this argument.  In fact, if the process has a large number of people involved in it, then not being informative and flexible makes the process harder to manage. This situation is a perfect example of where a BPM Suite can play a significant role and fits into the management of real world events.

 

Relevant Links:

The Greater Good of BPM: Taking a Step Back

BPM- A Sustainable Strategy for Your Company

Process Automation- Think Outside the Box

 

Chris Adams
VP Product and Technology
Ultimus

BPM- A Sustainable Strategy for Your Company

Many people misinterpret Business Process Management (BPM) for just a basic automation tool that helps you complete tasks and processes quicker and more efficiently; however, BPM is much more than just a tool, it is a strategy for sustainability.

Part of being a sustainable organization is scalability- being able to retract spending and processes during tough economic times, and expand on opportunities during periods of economic growth. Having insight into the processes that enable your company to function and, more importantly, having control over these processes is essential. The greater your awareness of your processes, and day-to-day activities, the better equipped you are to recognize changes in the market place that affect your usual business activities and productivity.

BPM, providing visibility into your core processes, enables executives this knowledge and insight. Using such features as Interactive Business Activity Monitoring (iBAM) Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can be easily tracked and reported on. The advanced reporting capabilities found in a BPMS better position decision makers with improved forecasting capabilities for future planning - the kind of planning that can mean scaling back or aggressively moving forward and, ultimately, can be the difference between success and failure.  

The "Great Recession", that began with the financial crisis of 2008 and has been compared to the Great Depression of the 1930s, has been a true test of sustainability for businesses around the world and in every industry. Many, such as GM, Linens ‘N Things and Circuit City have experienced the fate associated with a lack of sustainability. Given the insight a BPM Suite can provide, it makes you wonder how the fate of these companies may have been different had they implemented a BPM system years before?

Building on BPM as a strategy facilitating sustainability, companies should have corporate sustainability plan prepared and ready to enact to them survive volatile changes in the market.

 

Relevant Links:

Chris Adams Responds to "BPM VIEWPOINT: The Opportunity in Unstructured Business Process Management"

Flexibility in a BPMS is Essential

Chris Adams Responds to "BPM: How Optimized Are Your Financial Processes?"

Leverage BPM to Bridge the Gap in Difficult Economic Times

 

Mary Katherine Strupe
Marketing Coordinator
Ultimus

Response to "BPM: How Optimized Are Your Financial Processes?"

A common thread in each of the finance companies reported as failing in 2000/2009 is lack of visibility and awareness of the day-to-day processes and operations. Without having a clear understanding of how efficient and effective your critical business processes are, at best, you can only hope the bottom line figures you are handed are both accurate and truthful. It is hard to believe anyone would run a business on "hoping" the summary reports are correct.

By using modeling, reporting, and optimization features in a business process management suite (BPMS), you will have full visibility into your business processes, be able to identify inefficiencies in those processes, understand the costs associated with those inefficiencies, and then make improvements to your business processes to resolve the inefficiencies. Moreover, by optimizing your processes, you will also control the implied costs of executing the processes in themselves.

To read the original article, click here.

 

Chris Adams
VP Product Marketing and Management
Ultimus