The city of Calgary’s new HR system will reduce the number of people required for administration as the city leaps into the Web-based world
Return-on-investment, considered by some the Holy Grail of HR technology, is very much within the grasp of Gilles Champagne.
Champagne, manager of employee services, human resources for the City of Calgary, doesn’t mince words when it comes to talking about getting every penny back the city spent in upgrading from PeopleSoft version 7.5 to 8.8.
“The upgrade will pay for itself in a year,” he said. “I have no doubt about that. That is our target, and we are positioning ourselves to be able to do that. We will have a 12-month ROI on the upgrade.”
That’s because one of the driving forces behind the implementation of the new Web-based system — and the city is one of the first organizations in Canada to tackle version 8.8 — is to cut costs in the HR department. Champagne said a decision was made last year to shift resources from the corporate services group, of which HR is a part, and move them to groups that serve citizens directly.
“We’re taking a budget hit in 2005, and that money will be flowing directly to the operating groups who deliver services directly to the citizens,” he said. “We are banking on (PeopleSoft) to be able to do things more efficiently to ultimately reduce the total number of people needed to manage HR services.”
To accomplish that, the city needed to move towards more self service and move its HR services to a Web-based platform to serve its 14,000 employees. Version 7.5, installed in 1999, was a client-server version which meant that software needed to be installed on every computer where it was accessed from. That made self service virtually impossible, he said. But now anyone with a secure Web browser can access the system.
“Going to the Web for us was critical,” he said. “We needed to get off the client-server version so we could expand the use of the product around the city. Our IT folks really were not keen on going out and installing software all over the city.”
The city also surveyed its employees to find out how many had access to the Internet. It showed about 85 per cent of them have access to the Web either from work or home, and HR is working on getting access to the remaining 15 per cent through the placement of kiosks.
Moving to 8.8 allowed the city to start using one of the PeopleSoft pieces it bought back during the initial implementation — time and labour. Champagne said up until 8.8 it never fully met the city’s needs so it maintained an old mainframe-based time capture system for employees who filled out timesheets to be paid.
The city was originally going to go live with a new system in April 2003 with version 8.3, but put the brakes on for a variety of reasons.
“I don’t think I’m telling tales out of school, but 8.3 — the previous version — had a lot of patches to it. We decided to wait until 8.8 because PeopleSoft made a commitment to the quality of the product and we decided to put our faith in that and delayed our upgrade,” said Champagne.
On Dec. 10, 2003, the city rolled out 8.8 to a test group of 400 employees. They are able to view current pay stubs online, view their compensation history as far back as 1999, change their addresses and view benefit summaries.
“We’re not allowing them to do any benefit changes right now,” said Champagne. “But they can view what they have and access who the carriers are. Very often we get calls in saying ‘I need to fill out this form, but I don’t know what my plan number is.’ So at least they can do some of those things now.”
Employees viewing pay stubs online still get a paper copy for now, but there are plans to give employees the option of not receiving one in the future. He said other organizations have cut off pay stubs without asking employees with good success — citing another Alberta firm that only had three per cent of its workforce ask for printed stubs back when it went to self service — but the city doesn’t want to do that.
Champagne said the self service being used is pretty inert at the moment, and they are only using about a quarter of the software’s capability.
But there are plans to move into the more ambitious areas of self service. Employees will soon be able to change their direct deposit information and by the end of this year will be able to enrol in benefits online. And manager self service is a big part of plans for 2005, though some of it is being brought in immediately, most notably when it comes to the recruitment realm. That’s because Calgary has a plan that will only let candidates apply for jobs online starting in 2005.
“Our demographics are that we stand to lose 40 per cent of our staff to retirement in the next four years,” he said. “That’s a lot of bodies.”
So the city is implementing PeopleSoft’s eRecruit module now in the 30 businesses the city runs to prepare for online-only recruiting, both from a manager’s point of view and from the jobseekers’.
“Anywhere there is a city office we may want to use one of our kiosks to let people go in and apply for any job,” he said. “But we need to streamline our processes and make sure our 30 businesses have the wherewithal to screen and pick the right candidate, so we need to have the systems in place to help them do that.”
HR is also facing a challenge in getting the word out to staff that self service doesn’t mean work is simply being dumped from the shrinking HR department onto other employees.
“There may be a misconception around what self service does,” he said. “A lot of people feel it means ‘you’re downloading your work to me’ and that is not at all what we’re trying to accomplish. Let’s say you need 10 different pieces of information to move someone from one department to another. Well, they have to tell us what those 10 things are anyway, so just fill it out online.”
To help with the implementation, the city brought in payroll and HR experts from PeopleSoft to supplement city staff.
“We were one of the first ones in Canada to do 8.8, so the knowledge out in the marketplace with the consulting firms wasn’t really there for 8.8,” Champagne said. “We wanted someone to come in and help us understand exactly what this was and take advantage of it from a functional perspective so we went to PeopleSoft directly.”
The city also took advantage of a lab set up in Toronto by PeopleSoft to do some of the backend setup that staff didn’t need to learn about. Stephen Pratt, solutions delivery program manager with PeopleSoft, said the labs have been increasingly popular with customers.
“It’s a concept we developed several years ago where we can help customers speed up the process and reduce the cost of doing an upgrade from one release to another,” said Pratt. “We do the work primarily off-site in our solutions centre where we have dedicated professionals.”
Champagne said the city had PeopleSoft come in and mentor staff about the system, because they didn’t just want a technical expert to set everything up without transferring knowledge to city staff.
“One of the key requirements was that they could train and they could pass on their knowledge to our staff,” said Champagne. “So we used the lab to do the part that we didn’t need to know about — all that backroom stuff — and then we had a knowledgeable consultant who came in and mentored the technical group through the upgrade and helped them understand what they were doing.”
On the advice of PeopleSoft, the city separated its Web server from its application server and set up an independent database server.
“We have three physical boxes and we run nothing else on those boxes except PeopleSoft,” he said. “We wanted to make sure we had a stable product and a stable computing environment.”
He said a lot of the time spent implementing the new system between June and December was spent getting rid of a lot of heavy customization. He said when the initial PeopleSoft system was installed in 1999, the city didn’t change its business processes — it simply changed the software to accommodate what it had previously been doing.
“It was definitely more change the system than change the processes,” he said.
As a result, a lot of time was spent maintaining the system. Every time PeopleSoft sent out a new tax update or a release patch, the city had to re-address the customizations. But this time HR had a mandate to bring the system back as close to vanilla as possible. The old system had about 100 major customizations — the new version has about 43 and counting.
“We’re creeping back up I think, slowly but surely,” said Champagne. “As we deploy stuff, we’re having people that say, ‘we really need this, it wasn’t just a lark.’ So when people can make a case for it and it’s a business need, we’re not adverse to it if it makes the business side easier. But not just because it’s someone’s whim.”
And — knock on wood, he said — the system has performed flawlessly since the city flicked the on switch.
“It’s just so good. From the get go, we had anticipated problems,” he said. “We had tried to prepare our 400 users in saying, ‘you know, in the first couple of months there’s always some shakedown, always some glitches but we’ll try to keep them to a minimum.’ But there’s been absolutely nothing.”
Training staff on how to use the new version has also been a breeze, he said. Most of the administrators had been using 7.5 and didn’t need more than a half-day training session to be brought up to speed on 8.8. A majority of that training time was spent explaining the security in the system.
“One of our business units is police and we have to take extreme care in how we manage the information we track on individuals who are police officers,” said Champagne. “But the system is very intuitive. It’s like a lot of the other Web stuff. As long as you know how to use a browser, you’re pretty well there.”
The only negative he’s seen with the system so far is that it doesn’t really handle disability claims management.
“We can track accidents, we can track those kinds of things to an employee level, but a full claims management piece, this is not,” he said. “And that’s probably the only functional piece that we would like to have that it does not have. So we have a decision to make to either build it as a bolt-on or we go to the marketplace and buy it.”
But, at the end of the day, he said he’s extremely happy with the system and is confident his department will be able to weather the cost-cutting storm at city hall.
“We need to be wise about the use of our resources,” Champagne said. “If we can reduce the total workload and let people take charge of it and do it themselves in an environment that’s really straightforward to use, that’s our goal.”
At PeopleSoft, Pratt said the six-month implementation time for Calgary in moving from version 7.5 to 8.8 was fairly typical given the size of the organization.
“For a customer the size of City of Calgary and with the level of complexity within their processes, that’s probably a very realistically timeline,” said Pratt. “For smaller customers, they can do it much more rapidly.”
He said he’s seen Canadian organizations with 1,200 employees able to get the HR system up and running in as little as six weeks. And he is currently working with a large organization that is going to take one year.
Pratt said the typical size of an organization implementing version 8.8 can run from less than 1,000 employees to organizations the size of the City of Calgary and higher. Version 8.8 was released by PeopleSoft in the first quarter of 2003.
He said one of the trends he is seeing from PeopleSoft customers is something Calgary is grappling with — a growing concern over an aging workforce.
“We see a lot of customers right now that are very concerned about the average age of their workforces,” said Pratt. “They’re starting to do projections in terms of what that will mean for their workforce planning over the next few years and they’re looking for tools to be able to help them through that process.”
He said succession planning software can help organizations identify positions that will need to be filled in the next couple of years and who the best candidates are for filling those positions.
Champagne, manager of employee services, human resources for the City of Calgary, doesn’t mince words when it comes to talking about getting every penny back the city spent in upgrading from PeopleSoft version 7.5 to 8.8.
“The upgrade will pay for itself in a year,” he said. “I have no doubt about that. That is our target, and we are positioning ourselves to be able to do that. We will have a 12-month ROI on the upgrade.”
That’s because one of the driving forces behind the implementation of the new Web-based system — and the city is one of the first organizations in Canada to tackle version 8.8 — is to cut costs in the HR department. Champagne said a decision was made last year to shift resources from the corporate services group, of which HR is a part, and move them to groups that serve citizens directly.
“We’re taking a budget hit in 2005, and that money will be flowing directly to the operating groups who deliver services directly to the citizens,” he said. “We are banking on (PeopleSoft) to be able to do things more efficiently to ultimately reduce the total number of people needed to manage HR services.”
To accomplish that, the city needed to move towards more self service and move its HR services to a Web-based platform to serve its 14,000 employees. Version 7.5, installed in 1999, was a client-server version which meant that software needed to be installed on every computer where it was accessed from. That made self service virtually impossible, he said. But now anyone with a secure Web browser can access the system.
“Going to the Web for us was critical,” he said. “We needed to get off the client-server version so we could expand the use of the product around the city. Our IT folks really were not keen on going out and installing software all over the city.”
The city also surveyed its employees to find out how many had access to the Internet. It showed about 85 per cent of them have access to the Web either from work or home, and HR is working on getting access to the remaining 15 per cent through the placement of kiosks.
Moving to 8.8 allowed the city to start using one of the PeopleSoft pieces it bought back during the initial implementation — time and labour. Champagne said up until 8.8 it never fully met the city’s needs so it maintained an old mainframe-based time capture system for employees who filled out timesheets to be paid.
The city was originally going to go live with a new system in April 2003 with version 8.3, but put the brakes on for a variety of reasons.
“I don’t think I’m telling tales out of school, but 8.3 — the previous version — had a lot of patches to it. We decided to wait until 8.8 because PeopleSoft made a commitment to the quality of the product and we decided to put our faith in that and delayed our upgrade,” said Champagne.
On Dec. 10, 2003, the city rolled out 8.8 to a test group of 400 employees. They are able to view current pay stubs online, view their compensation history as far back as 1999, change their addresses and view benefit summaries.
“We’re not allowing them to do any benefit changes right now,” said Champagne. “But they can view what they have and access who the carriers are. Very often we get calls in saying ‘I need to fill out this form, but I don’t know what my plan number is.’ So at least they can do some of those things now.”
Employees viewing pay stubs online still get a paper copy for now, but there are plans to give employees the option of not receiving one in the future. He said other organizations have cut off pay stubs without asking employees with good success — citing another Alberta firm that only had three per cent of its workforce ask for printed stubs back when it went to self service — but the city doesn’t want to do that.
Champagne said the self service being used is pretty inert at the moment, and they are only using about a quarter of the software’s capability.
But there are plans to move into the more ambitious areas of self service. Employees will soon be able to change their direct deposit information and by the end of this year will be able to enrol in benefits online. And manager self service is a big part of plans for 2005, though some of it is being brought in immediately, most notably when it comes to the recruitment realm. That’s because Calgary has a plan that will only let candidates apply for jobs online starting in 2005.
“Our demographics are that we stand to lose 40 per cent of our staff to retirement in the next four years,” he said. “That’s a lot of bodies.”
So the city is implementing PeopleSoft’s eRecruit module now in the 30 businesses the city runs to prepare for online-only recruiting, both from a manager’s point of view and from the jobseekers’.
“Anywhere there is a city office we may want to use one of our kiosks to let people go in and apply for any job,” he said. “But we need to streamline our processes and make sure our 30 businesses have the wherewithal to screen and pick the right candidate, so we need to have the systems in place to help them do that.”
HR is also facing a challenge in getting the word out to staff that self service doesn’t mean work is simply being dumped from the shrinking HR department onto other employees.
“There may be a misconception around what self service does,” he said. “A lot of people feel it means ‘you’re downloading your work to me’ and that is not at all what we’re trying to accomplish. Let’s say you need 10 different pieces of information to move someone from one department to another. Well, they have to tell us what those 10 things are anyway, so just fill it out online.”
To help with the implementation, the city brought in payroll and HR experts from PeopleSoft to supplement city staff.
“We were one of the first ones in Canada to do 8.8, so the knowledge out in the marketplace with the consulting firms wasn’t really there for 8.8,” Champagne said. “We wanted someone to come in and help us understand exactly what this was and take advantage of it from a functional perspective so we went to PeopleSoft directly.”
The city also took advantage of a lab set up in Toronto by PeopleSoft to do some of the backend setup that staff didn’t need to learn about. Stephen Pratt, solutions delivery program manager with PeopleSoft, said the labs have been increasingly popular with customers.
“It’s a concept we developed several years ago where we can help customers speed up the process and reduce the cost of doing an upgrade from one release to another,” said Pratt. “We do the work primarily off-site in our solutions centre where we have dedicated professionals.”
Champagne said the city had PeopleSoft come in and mentor staff about the system, because they didn’t just want a technical expert to set everything up without transferring knowledge to city staff.
“One of the key requirements was that they could train and they could pass on their knowledge to our staff,” said Champagne. “So we used the lab to do the part that we didn’t need to know about — all that backroom stuff — and then we had a knowledgeable consultant who came in and mentored the technical group through the upgrade and helped them understand what they were doing.”
On the advice of PeopleSoft, the city separated its Web server from its application server and set up an independent database server.
“We have three physical boxes and we run nothing else on those boxes except PeopleSoft,” he said. “We wanted to make sure we had a stable product and a stable computing environment.”
He said a lot of the time spent implementing the new system between June and December was spent getting rid of a lot of heavy customization. He said when the initial PeopleSoft system was installed in 1999, the city didn’t change its business processes — it simply changed the software to accommodate what it had previously been doing.
“It was definitely more change the system than change the processes,” he said.
As a result, a lot of time was spent maintaining the system. Every time PeopleSoft sent out a new tax update or a release patch, the city had to re-address the customizations. But this time HR had a mandate to bring the system back as close to vanilla as possible. The old system had about 100 major customizations — the new version has about 43 and counting.
“We’re creeping back up I think, slowly but surely,” said Champagne. “As we deploy stuff, we’re having people that say, ‘we really need this, it wasn’t just a lark.’ So when people can make a case for it and it’s a business need, we’re not adverse to it if it makes the business side easier. But not just because it’s someone’s whim.”
And — knock on wood, he said — the system has performed flawlessly since the city flicked the on switch.
“It’s just so good. From the get go, we had anticipated problems,” he said. “We had tried to prepare our 400 users in saying, ‘you know, in the first couple of months there’s always some shakedown, always some glitches but we’ll try to keep them to a minimum.’ But there’s been absolutely nothing.”
Training staff on how to use the new version has also been a breeze, he said. Most of the administrators had been using 7.5 and didn’t need more than a half-day training session to be brought up to speed on 8.8. A majority of that training time was spent explaining the security in the system.
“One of our business units is police and we have to take extreme care in how we manage the information we track on individuals who are police officers,” said Champagne. “But the system is very intuitive. It’s like a lot of the other Web stuff. As long as you know how to use a browser, you’re pretty well there.”
The only negative he’s seen with the system so far is that it doesn’t really handle disability claims management.
“We can track accidents, we can track those kinds of things to an employee level, but a full claims management piece, this is not,” he said. “And that’s probably the only functional piece that we would like to have that it does not have. So we have a decision to make to either build it as a bolt-on or we go to the marketplace and buy it.”
But, at the end of the day, he said he’s extremely happy with the system and is confident his department will be able to weather the cost-cutting storm at city hall.
“We need to be wise about the use of our resources,” Champagne said. “If we can reduce the total workload and let people take charge of it and do it themselves in an environment that’s really straightforward to use, that’s our goal.”
At PeopleSoft, Pratt said the six-month implementation time for Calgary in moving from version 7.5 to 8.8 was fairly typical given the size of the organization.
“For a customer the size of City of Calgary and with the level of complexity within their processes, that’s probably a very realistically timeline,” said Pratt. “For smaller customers, they can do it much more rapidly.”
He said he’s seen Canadian organizations with 1,200 employees able to get the HR system up and running in as little as six weeks. And he is currently working with a large organization that is going to take one year.
Pratt said the typical size of an organization implementing version 8.8 can run from less than 1,000 employees to organizations the size of the City of Calgary and higher. Version 8.8 was released by PeopleSoft in the first quarter of 2003.
He said one of the trends he is seeing from PeopleSoft customers is something Calgary is grappling with — a growing concern over an aging workforce.
“We see a lot of customers right now that are very concerned about the average age of their workforces,” said Pratt. “They’re starting to do projections in terms of what that will mean for their workforce planning over the next few years and they’re looking for tools to be able to help them through that process.”
He said succession planning software can help organizations identify positions that will need to be filled in the next couple of years and who the best candidates are for filling those positions.
