An Ultimus Customer Success Story
Background
Ultimus Client: Cuatrecasas Law Firm
Industry: Legal Services
Solution: New Employee Process, Human Resources
With a team of more than 1200 people, Cuatrecasas is one of the leading legal firms on the Iberian Peninsula specializing in the various areas of business law. By associating commercial legal practice and litigation with financial and tax practice, Cuatrecasas offers their clients comprehensive legal advice with a special emphasis on personalization and results. Cuatrecasas offer their services through a solid network of integrated offices, providing cooperation, knowledge and knowhow with the “single office” system. The development of office automation and knowledge management technology provides the possibility of substantially improving traditional management tools and complementing the intellectual work of the attorney.
Goal: Reduce lag time, improve responsiveness and increase transparency
To further improve efficiency and effectiveness of the company, Cuatrecasas started investigating into solutions that would help them not only to optimize their business processes, but also to automate them. After extensive research, Cuatrecasas selected Ultimus as their Business Process Management solution since it has a powerful forms designer and graphical design environment, allowing for fast and efficient synchronization of the OrgChart with Active Directory and perfectly supporting the Microsoft System Architecture Cuatrecasas have in place. Due to the completeness and quality of the product, they were convinced the solution would be capable of handling all their present and future requirements.
Ultimus' Approach
In fast growing companies and large enterprises, human resources account for most inefficiencies in administration as these processes are often not very transparent and traceable and therefore have a very large potential for improvement. Broken flows within the set up process for new hires cause frustration, inefficiencies and prevent, for example, newly hired employees from being productive from the start due to missing login information, computers, telephones, etc. Also in terms of, for example, vacation requests much potential for optimization of human resources processes is feasible. The IT department was therefore the key driver of process definition and automation as they realized the large benefits regarding greater efficiency, standardization and quality assurance. The move from internal vertical IT systems integration to the global direction of horizontal processes was used by Human Resources aiming to standardize the new employee process. They started off with the new employee process with the goal to have everything set up in time, improve coordination between all tasks required for setup and have access to status information at any time. Without a proper process automation system in place, new starters would have to be added manually to every system they would be involved with, which used to be particularly timeconsuming. Therefore, application integration and maximum automation was the main requirement, integrating Ultimus with META4, their HR Application, Hummingbird DM, their document management system, ELITE Enterprise, their Marketing and Contacts Module,
Solution: New Employee Process
Once a new employee is hired by Cuatrecasas, their personal information is entered into the system and a process is started. This then kicks off a number of parallel flows that manage the set up of the new user in the various systems, the assigning of computers, telephones, working space and a secretary to the new hire. Another flow manages that different departments are notified about the new employee. Once all steps are taken, the process comes to an end and the employee is ready to start working on the first day. Moreover, the HR department is now aware of the status of the various procedures at any time and is therefore assured that everything will be ready at the first working day of the new employee. At the same time, manual errors are eliminated, since plausibility checks are included and synchronization with the various applications is conducted automatically without human interaction. In case of overdue steps, a notification is sent out that allows employees to be aware of any unforeseen events.
Especially for the new employee process, the big challenge Cuatrecasas was faced with was its horizontal complexity. To overcome the challenge of having to synchronize data coming from several people, departments and organizational units, there was a need for application integration with Ultimus. This could be easily performed with the help of either the respective application’s standard Web Services (as in the case of ELITE) or in-house developed Web Services. Ultimus’ ability to define responsibilities and to facilitate coordination across parallel flows and different levels of the Cuatrecasas’ organizational structure has proven very useful with regard to its integration capability with their HR system META4. For example, one part of the new employee process was the integration between META4 and the Ultimus OrgChart so that the new employee is immediately a new user and part of the OrgChart. In this case, the use of the Ultimus OrgChart enables faster process design, better coordination between departments and optimization of process lag times. Another important integration aspect was the Ultimus’ interfacing with Cuatrecasas’ single-sign-on portal in order to simplify user authentication so that they are recognized within all their systems.
Implementation
Apart from fully integrating and automating the new employee process, another critical aspect was to implement additional rules to manage special conditions and errors. Thereby, the integration code is configured so that it sends a notification to Ultimus whenever an error occurs. By giving exact information about what exactly failed, Ultimus then notifies the user who then has the opportunity to correct the error manually. Sending and receiving notifications through Ultimus therefore allows for fast and efficient information and correction management of errors and special conditions. Not only for the new employee process but especially for the vacation process, Ultimus’ capability to interact with external applications was extremely important. The automatic launch of the workflow from an external application (for example META4) and the notification capabilities via email (integrated with MS Outlook) was crucial, especially for the assignment of tasks within the new employee process. As far as the vacation process is concerned, this capability proved even more useful as it is launched from a web page of HR services and moves through policies inside Cuatrecasas’ portal. Appropriate form design was important for the proper approval of the vacation request because the forms also include information about the vacation situation of the global team. As a consequence, Ultimus’ capability to interact with external applications enables Cuatrecasas to centrally manage vacation coordination for the global team.
Business Benefit
From a business perspective, there are numerous advantages due to the automation of the processes. Since the systems synchronize automatically, resources are allocated efficiently within the enterprise and are consequently more productive than ever before. Having the new starter set up in time allows the enterprise to benefit from the additional staff member from the start, thus being more efficient and effective. Previously the new employee setup process took 2 to 3 weeks and sometimes was “incomplete.” With Ultimus handling the automation, process completion is guaranteed within one week including performance of all tasks involved. However, the largest benefit is generated in the IT department, as previously it took several hours to add the new user to the various systems which is now conducted automatically by Ultimus.
Click here for the PDF Version
<<Back to Ultimus Case Studies
