Regional District entrusts HR Systems Strategies Inc. with first-ever HRIS software implementation.

An efficient five-person team manages human resources, payroll, and safety for the 230 municipal employees who keep things running at Comox Valley Regional District. While this busy group was managing with a spreadsheet-based system of employee profiles and other information for four different work sites, Ellen Jackson, the Regional District’s Senior HR Advisor, could see challenges ahead.

“Access to information was the main challenge,” said Ellen. “We really didn’t have a central repository for HR business partners to go in and look at employee profiles and information. Our HR support at other locations would have to rely on someone else to look up hard copy files and relay information, not to mention we would have to go to one spreadsheet for this piece of information and another spreadsheet for that piece of information. Pulling reports was literally impossible.”

The group decided it was time to implement a human resources information system (HRIS). After a rigorous RFQ and RFP process — with multiple presentations to the vendor qualification committee — a joint decision was made to implement info:HR software from HR Systems Strategies Inc. Factors that tipped the scales in favour of info:HR included the system’s user-friendly reputation, relatively gentle learning curve, and its proven link to iCity, the organization’s existing payroll system. The new system had to be relied upon to provide viable information to the organization and to the managers.

“Smooth implementation is always our goal,” said Andy Staniewski, President, HR Systems Strategies Inc. “But when an organization has never had an HRIS before, integrating with the current system is crucial and the learning curve has to be taken into consideration. I am really pleased that the Comox Valley Regional District is entrusting their first HRIS implementation to info:HR software.”

Scale and budget also came into play: “Being a smaller organization, implementing a huge HRIS platform just didn’t make sense for us,” said Ellen. “We needed something plug-and-play that works in our organization now and into the future. It’s the right fit for us.” info:HR’s modular, scalable construction means the Regional District can rely on the software to grow along with the team as they make plans to implement succession planning, further HR development, and workforce management.

While the integration process is ongoing, the feedback so far has been positive. After only a few training modules, the team is already noticing the ease with they can access information, customize reports, and turn on features like auto-notifications.

“Auto-notifications are a huge time-saver,” said Ellen. “Reminders go out automatically to the managers and HR about new hires or the end of a probationary period, which is great. Implementing a brand new system with a small team can be exhausting, but the HR Systems Strategies team have had nothing but patience for us and they’ve been great with all of our requests, questions, and verifications.”

Comox Valley Regional District (population 67,000) is comprised of three municipalities and three electoral areas on Vancouver Island’s central east coast. The members of the Comox Valley Regional District work collaboratively to provide services for the benefit of the diverse urban and rural areas of the Comox Valley.

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Wellington County has been using the info:HR HRIS system since 1998. Here, Andrea Lawson talks about how well-suited she feels info:HR is as an HRIS for municipal government HR administration.

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The County of Perth has been using info:HR since 2009. Here, Tricia discusses how they have used the employee/manager self serve module to provide staff with greater access to their personnel information.

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In her role with the Township she was exposed to more of info:HR and its functionality. Over the years she has become a strong user of the system, continuingly looking for better ways to take advantage of the system in her organization to streamline what were manual processes. Naturally, when the info:HR User Group began in 2014 Lorena was excited to join, saying “What a great idea for smaller organizations – we can celebrate our successes and get ideas from each other.”

This User Group began as a municipal client group and quickly expanded to include many of our clients from other business environments. The group meets quarterly to share ideas and ways in which each client is using the system in their respective organization. The group was started by clients and is run by clients; HRSS was invited to attend group meetings shortly after it began, providing users with immediate answers to questions raised during the meetings. “The group really helped me move forward to purchasing the new modules. It helped me plan out what I wanted to roll out and gave me a great picture of the end result, what I could expect. One of the other members has the exact same systems as I do,” stated Lorena.

In 2016 Lorena began a significant project, with the purchase of the ESS and Timesheets modules and an enhancement to her payroll interface currently in operation. “I was a little hesitant with such a large project at first. But, ESS was easier than I thought it would be to implement; I wish I had done it sooner. It has really helped me save a lot of time. Instead of entering all attendance manually I now simply audit the entries made by employees and approved by management,” she explained. Lorena has superior info:HR reporting skills and is able to use this knowledge to pull the data needed by payroll staff to manually complete payroll.

Lorena is now in the process of implementing the Timesheet Module. Currently she is working on entering employees’ profiles. “This from experience seems to be the most difficult part of the launch,” Lorena commented. As with any implementation the planning is the most important step toward an effective execution. “I am looking forward to the time savings. If ESS is any indication, Timesheets are going to continue to save us more time,” she added. Currently payroll staff is responsible for manually entering paid time into the payroll system. When asked what she sees as a greater benefit she said, “Supervisors will be able to manage their employees’ timekeeping in a more efficient manner; this will also reduce the probability of errors. The system naturally creates audit checks – employees are responsible for entering time and managers for approving, from there we simply need to audit the hours entered”.

Transfer data to payroll

The last and final stage of the project is to automatically transfer the data to payroll. At this time the payroll interface transfers basic employee data, which works very well; without this feature there would be a requirement to manually enter employee data into the payroll system. Lorena pointed out, “My goal with the enhancement is that all hours to be paid are collected from ESS and Timesheets and will transfer to payroll. Again, my responsibility will be to audit check, removing the manual data entry of paid hours”.

The project has taken more time than Lorena has liked due to competing priorities, however when asked about the project’s completion Lorena concluded, ”I am excited to see this project complete. Timesheets have been rolled out to our full-time employees and my intention is to have the system rolled out to our part-time employees by the end of this year, with complete data transfer into payroll by early next year.”

Support

HR Systems Strategies provides support in various ways: from email, telephone and webinars to attending user-driven groups. We make every effort to reach out to our clients and assist them in any way possible. When asked about the support options available to her, Lorena enthused, “I have attended webinars in the past, and they are great. This year I will be signing up for any webinar related to ESS and Timesheets so that I can become more comfortable with the programs. They are a great way to get a refresher. The support I have received during this project has been wonderful. I have had lots of questions and I can usually get an answer in the same day. It is really comforting to know there is someone there to run scenarios with and guide me with such large project.”

As always, we at HR Systems Strategies encourage our clients to call on the expertise of our implementation specialists to maximize their use of info:HR, freeing up time to focus on value-added activities within their organizations. Webinars and User Groups are a great way to share the wealth of knowledge and experience of all the participants.

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The Town of St. Marys has been a long-standing client.  The Town was our inspiration for, and designer of, our Simple Timesheets feature now available to all Timesheets clients.  This feature simplifies the grid-style Timesheet, allowing the employee to select an attendance/absence reason code from a drop down menu and record hours against the reason code without entering into the grid format.

Dorrie Brenneman, Supervisor of Payroll & Benefits at the Town of St. Marys, began a project several years ago to automate some of their HR and Payroll practices.  The end goal was to remove the excessive paper and manual processes.  Understanding their organization’s needs,  Dorrie created a plan that began with launching ESS, then Timesheets and will culminate with a payroll interface. 

“We knew at the beginning that a slower, more gradual change for our employees would give us the greatest implementation success,” Dorrie said.

While working with the Timesheet module, it became clear some customization was required for St. Marys to get the most out of the program.  “Our employees have as many as 10 attendance reason codes that they record hours against in a day; that doesn’t include time-off request reason codes.  We found that the timesheet was just too large once we had built the Timesheet template,” Dorrie explained.  “We really needed something much simpler.”  Dorrie provided the HRSS development team with her ideas and a design of what she thought would work best. The team got to work; the new timesheet design was aptly named Simple Timesheets.

Dorrie engaged a test group of employees to use Simple Timesheets and is now rolling it out to the rest of the staff with a target for 100% completion this spring.  “The initial response is very positive: managers love the electronic Timesheets, and employees are generally accepting of the changes.  Simple Timesheets makes it much easier for them to enter their hours.  Our next and final step is the payroll interface; I hope to be working on that this spring as well.  We would not have been able to reach the end of this project without the Simple Timesheets in place,” remarked Dorrie.

Simple timesheets is a great example of a useful enhancement developed from a client’s need.  We get some of our best and most practical features that way.  They are the users – they know best what they need.

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