Completely Automated

by Taylor Leighton on Thu, Sep 09, 2010 @ 04:00 PM

Usually we try to position Ultimus as a Human Centric BPM Suite. And truly, Ultimus does provide strong human centric capabilities such as collaboration, activity monitoring and reporting.

However, in some cases Ultimus can be used to replace dull and repetitive activities performed by people. This will free people to perform meaningful activities while eliminating errors caused by human interaction and different types of costs.  In one such case, one of Ultimus’ customers, let’s call it ACME Global, which had a large number of employees (over 10,000) decided to automate an Employee Performance Review Process. A version of this process is available for you to test drive.

Every month, the 31 department heads wanted to know which employees in their respective departments had their reviews upcoming in the following month. The reasoning behind this is so that the department heads could began to prepare for the review by doing research with peers and other managers who interacted with the particular employee.

Consequently, every single month, 31 different people contacted the HR department requesting a list of the employees whose performance reviews were due in the next month. I don’t have to mention that, except for the HR and IT managers, none of them had access to the HR system. These requests required that an HR employee manually generated paper reports and sent them via intercompany mail. This consumed about 20 hours a month of an HR employee, plus the cost of printing and physically sending all the files to each manager. Sometimes this request wouldn’t be completed for 2 weeks, which ultimately caused delays in the start of the performance evaluation (generating even more work to HR and Payroll for calculating pro-rated raises and so on).

The challenge for Ultimus was to come up with a solution to automate this entire process. Ultimus did so by creating an “auto-launched” process on the 1st of every month which would read the HR database for each department’s employees who had performance reviews due in the next month, generating an easy to read Excel document and attaching it to an e-mail for each department head.

Process Automation resized 600

So as a result, on the 1st of every month each department head received an automatic e-mail containing the same information that previously took one person 20 hours a month to produce.

The benefits of this process are clear and evident. No more errors, no more delays, no more printing and transportation costs while freeing 20 hours a month of one employee.  The amount of time it took an experienced Ultimus consultant to build, test and implement this process was around 36 hours.

 

By the Numbers:  

Time savings / month:

HR System Staff = 20

HR Staff answering follow-up calls for requests = 20

Dept Heads = 31 * 3 = 93 (assuming each department head spends 3 hours requesting and chasing the info from the HR Director)

This equates to 133 hours savings for each month.

Assuming that the average hourly salary across the employees is $25 / hour, the company is saving $3075 / month. Transportation/mailing savings adds $100/month.

.....resulting in a yearly company savings of $38,100.00.

 

Relevant Links:

Process Automation: Thinking Outside The Box

Don’t Just Consider Complex and Complicated Processes for Automation

Top 5 Reasons You Need To Automate Your Processes in 2010

 

David Almeida

Director, North America Product Management

Ultimus

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This post was written by Taylor Leighton