Amy Rule

For several years now we've been hearing that the future of HR is to move from a transaction-based administrative function to a more strategic role, with the VP of HR position elevated to the executive level helping the company meet its objectives by better managing its human capital assets.

Web technology, specifically employee and manager self-service tools, was supposed to be the enabler of this revolution. Once HR was freed of the day-to-day drudgery of data entry, we were supposed to then be able to engage in all this strategic analysis.

While sometimes it seems that this is more dream than reality, it can happen, and not just at the Fortune 500 level. Sturman Industries is a perfect example of a small company using technology to re-focus the work of its HR staff.

Founded in 1989 by inventor/engineer Eddie Sturman and his business-savvy wife Carol, Sturman was intended from the start not to be "business as usual". It is an engineering R&D company working mostly in the automotive industry. As a research-oriented company, it wants its employees to be a creative as possible. As President, Carol has designed a corporate culture focused on respect, innovation and teamwork, and encourages associates to lead and to live the culture every day.

Thanks to this culture, Sturman is one of the few companies who really believes it when it says that its employees are its greatest asset, and it put its money where its mouth is. When it outgrew its initial facilities in an warehouse park in California, it went on a nationwide search to find a physical location that would help it attract and inspire the kind of employees it wanted.

Today the company's facilities sit on 600 acres of prime Colorado beauty with Pikes Peak visible out the windows. The R&D/HQ building is built of wood, stone, and glass, and looks more like an expensive ski lodge than a corporate building. But it's a high-tech environment. Even those employees who would be traditionally considered "blue collar" - for example, machine shop personnel - have computers. If the views out the windows aren't enough, external voice and data ports allow employees to take their computers and work outside.

So what does a company like this do to effectively manage these human capital assets? Like many smaller organizations, they had a simple HR-type database that dated back to the days when there were 30 employees, and payroll was outsourced. Nancy Ochsner was the original "People Coordinator" who handled the multitude of paperwork. The culture has a great effect on the Human Resources function. There are no job titles except for Carol's legally required title of President. Everybody else is organized into functional and project-based teams. Team leadership is not frozen into a hierarchy; some teams rotate the leadership role, others find interesting alternatives; nothing is dictated by HR.

Now at 170 employees, they began to see the need for more sophisticated tracking of all corporate data. Nancy came across a Watson Wyatt white paper on eHR and the Internet and determined that the Web was the way to go. Given the wide availability of computers, they were well positioned to take advantage of self-service capabilities. The company already has its own Web site (www.sturmanindustires.com) and it wanted the recruiting capabilities of the system to be able to easily integrate with the corporate site.

In the meantime, Nancy hired Sherry Pearson to help with the daily work of HR. Sherry had previously worked with a HRMS system that was proprietary and not user-friendly. She definitely wanted something quite different. Sturman knew it wanted a system that was full-featured, yet still easy to implement. It knew that its unique culture would likely require customization to any system, so it looked for a vendor who had the technology to make this customization easy.

Sherry began a search and talked to a vide variety of vendors, from traditional market leaders Abra and Spectrum to larger systems such as Ulti-Pro. After rejecting all these due either to functionality or price, she found an ad in HR Magazine for Mangrove Software. While not a widely known vendor, Mangrove proved an ideal match for this unique company. Its HR2O system was available in an ASP model, delivering both HR and Payroll functionality via the Web. Mangrove proved very willing to work with Sturman to accommodate the unique aspects of the corporate culture into the system. Implementation of the system was "a slam-dunk" in the words of Paul Zugay, Mangrove's VP of Professional Services.

While many high-end HRMS systems seem designed to maximize the amount of consulting time needed during the implementation, Mangrove is intentionally designed to minimize implementation. Many of its first clients were local payroll service bureaus who need to be able to add new clients fast. So Paul and Mangrove's developers built a number of tools to make the process as quick and smooth as possible.

First the New Company Wizard guides the user through the initial software setup. Every required table in the system is presented to the user for acceptance or modification. Many codes come standard, so the user can simply accept those offered, or add their own and eliminate any built-in ones he doesn't use. Once the tables have been set up, the Employee Loader and Payroll History tools are used to import data. The client is given a simple spreadsheet format (First Name in A, Last Name in B, SSN in C, etc.). As long as it can provide the existing data in that order, it can easily be imported into Mangrove. The Employee Loader takes the data and automatically creates New Hire transactions for each employee listed.

Possibly the most important aspect of the system implementation was PODS - the tool set built into the Mangrove software to allow easy user tailoring of the system. Unlike systems where any customization requires programming changes, PODS allows an end-user to easily modify screens, tables and processes. The system generates the revised objects without the user having to do any programming at all. This allowed the system to very quickly be adapted to the unique culture at Sturman.

So what are the results? First of all, thanks to the tools built into Mangrove, the entire implementation took less than two months. Then, thanks to the enabling technology of the base system, Sherry was easily able to handle all the day-to-day HR functions. And now that they are rolling out the self-service modules, she is planning to take an advanced reporting class soon so that she can be better able to supply the data requested for strategic decision making. Her biggest disappointment in the project? That its benefits providers are not yet ready to accept the direct data transfers the new system makes possible. "We're ahead of the curve," says Sherry. This is an area where larger employers have an advantage. About three years ago, media giant AOL presented a case study of its implementation of similar functionality. It simply TOLD its benefits providers that if they wanted to keep AOL's business, they had to get up do date technologically. Today, many large vendors are set up to accept direct data transfers. However, smaller providers are often lagging behind in this area. Thus, Sherry still has to manually communicate benefit election changes to her providers, a task she's eager to hand over to technology as soon as her providers will take it.

In the meantime, Nancy has moved into the executive office suite with Carol and Eddie, and is focused on keeping the business/people balance at the forefront of corporate decisions. This is clearly a case where the technology did enable HR to become more strategic. Certainly without the technology, HR would still be mired in paperwork. But it is also an example of why this doesn't happen everywhere this technology is applies. Sturman started from the beginning with a unique corporate culture, which values its human assets. As they roll out expanded ESS and MSS roles, there is very little employee resistance, since their associates are already used to taking responsibility. The technology has merely allowed HR to take the role it was meant to have.

So it seems that the biggest barriers to HR's move towards a strategic role lie in the cultural, rather than technological realm. The technology is available for even a small company like Sturman to achieve this goal, if it is willing to embrace the culture that has to accompany it.

Author

Amy Rule

Amy Rule has worked in the HRIS Field since 1990 as a system administrator, vendor implementation consultant, vendor sales consultant, and now with her company HRIS To Go works directly with small to mid-sized companies helping them select, implement, and effectively use their HRIS systems. She is an active member of IHRIM, authoring a regular column in IHRIM.Link magazine targeting issues of interest to small/mid-sized companies.

amyrule@comcast.net