Members of the ESTF Planning Committee will be visiting institutions or organizations which exemplify "best practices" in the HR area. To assure that information valuable to the charge of the ESTF is gathered, a structured approach to solicit feedback from these exemplars will be used. The following areas will be discussed during their visits:

1. How many employees does the company have? How does the company operate, e.g., are their operations centralized or de-centralized? Do departments, divisions, and companies support HR operations or are all operations supported centrally? What size staff does it take to support systems that are run centrally?

 

2. What is the profile of the employee base (regular career-type employees versus the diversity of shift-working, student, academic, medical personnel found within the University)? How easily does the system accommodate this diverse a population?

 

3. What are the sites' operating system or technical platform issues? For example, must all the users of the application(s) run on a 32-bit Windows platform (either '95 or NT)? Did they have to convert any users from one platform to another during the implementation of the application? How many platforms do they support? Are application systems run centrally or locally? Are they vendor packages? If so, to what extent are they modified (customized)?

 

4. How are the sites' application interfaces handled? For example, how does their Payroll Application interface with their Human Resources application or with a Financial application? Are HR and Payroll integrated or separate? Do they see advantages to separation or combining these two systems? Do they have a data warehouse? If so, what data is included in it and how is the data interface (or source feed) processed?

 

5. How are retirement and/or benefits issues handled? For example, how can a defined contribution plan and/or defined benefit plan member find out his/her retirement balances, e.g., via web, IVR, kiosk, fax, statement (paper) mailing?

 

6. How are employee records, in general, accessed and updated from both the employer and employee perspective? For example, how would an employer find out how many years of service an employee had? How would the employee find out that same information? How would an employee update beneficiary, W-4, and health enrollments?

 

7. How complex are the sites' administrative policies? For example, do they have large number of unions and/or union member participation? Do employees have multiple appointments? How many payroll cycles do they support? How much customization was required to address the required cyclical processing, e.g., to support the variety of payroll schedules? Do their systems effectively handle the required transaction volumes as well as variety of transaction types?

 

8. What types of salary administration issues does the site face? For example, how does the site support incentive based pay? If so, are these systems able to calculate the incentive pay figures? Are salary surveys and/or modelling done? Is succession planning done? If so, what systems support it?

 

9. How do the central offices manage documents? For example, are they stored offsite or all converted for electronic storage? Are all of an employee's records accessible to whoever needs them from across the organization? How is retrieval of documents facilitated? What kind of workflow processes are utilized?

 

10. What kind of historical recordkeeping is maintained for employee data? For example, what kind of ad hoc reporting capabilities are supported for central office needs?