Phase II Selecting an HRIS Application

Phase I – Business Assessment

Penny Williams

HRM: 520

Human Resource Information Systems

Dr. Golaub

Strayer University

April 22, 2018

Running head: Phase 1- Business Assessment 1

Phase 1- Business Assessment 5

Assess the current situation for the company, focusing on the issues that the HR manager is currently facing from not having an HRIS in place.

Simultaneous tasks administrator who is also the Human Resource director of Gladwell Grocery Stores (GGS), Tom Bell, had to set out once every week to its 10 stores, significantly investing more energy and fuel costs in his movements, to perform of enrollments and relations functions, e.g., selecting, hiring, and answering workers. Moreover, payroll is still being computed on Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and check printing software for their wages. The costs on time and travel are very high, impacting significantly on GGS’s profitability. Mr. Bell sought assistance in determining approaches that will increase efficiency in his human resources functions and cost-effectively.

Develop a business assessment for the company, focusing on managing employees from an HR perspective in a grocery store environment and retail industry.

HRM is a vital and far reaching function, which includes personnel administration at the work environment. In the advent of globalization, it has played an increasingly crucial role in the success and growth of companies in many sectors, including service-oriented retail, specifically food and grocery retailing, where GGS is currently operating from its New York head office. GGS offers merchandise to consumers for sale, constituting as the last step in the value chain; that is, the delivery of the goods to end-users.

GGS has 400 to 440 employees in ten locations in upstate New York with at least 180 full time employees. The rest of the employees are part time employed. In effect, each outlet has an estimated number of 22-part time employees and perhaps around 10 employees, based on an assumption that the head office has more, or consisting of all, full time employees than the outlets. Thus, GGS is a medium-sized operation with a growing complexity in administering employee matters. Employee records are maybe confined in folder files and no software that organizes these records.

Moreover, GGS’s majority of part time employees make it susceptible to higher rates of turnover, thus, necessitating a program of ongoing recruitment and manpower pooling (Sultana, 2014) to ensure smooth operations despite its turnover rate. Thus, its manpower is often unskilled, including available retail professionals, and must be trained in-house. Meanwhile, because GGS is not too large to afford a well-equipped human resources (HR) department and not too small to afford a manually operated HR system, performance appraisal is as subjective as its incentives, recognition, and rewards (IRR) program. Oftentimes, there is no standardized appraisal questionnaire or IRR system.

Moreover, the grocery retail industry is inherently challenged in procuring trained human resources, primarily due to the limited talent base because of greater working interests in larger grocery stores, such as Wal-Mart, than in smaller stores like GGS. Secondarily, formal education in retail management is also rare. Even formal vocational training is often unavailable.

Create a list of the key HR functions that you believe will be beneficial to the organization. From the list, choose one (1) HR function that will be the focus of your business proposal moving forward. Explain the main reasons why you chose that HR function and validate your reasoning with research and theory.

There are no less than five fundamental HR functions that must be made more productive to be useful to GGS, to be specific: human resources administration; manpower staffing; training and development; reparation and benefits; and performance evaluation (Hendry, 2012). However, the primary function that GGS needs to focus should be in the human resources administration function, which consists of storing and systematically retrieving employee profiles, attendance reports, tardiness reports, and other analytical reports that can support HR planning, particularly manpower staffing, as well as performance and benefits administration (Hendry, 2012).

The choice of the HR administration function as the focus of a proposal to Mr. Bell is based on the inherent cumbersomeness of this function. Historically, this function is paperwork-intensive, which appears still to be the case with GGS. Administrative management theory, along the line of Henri Fayol, proposed a focus on organizational efficiency, which is the central concern of Mr. Bell. From this view, efficiency can be achieved through planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating, and controlling. Although one important support that an HR-oriented software, often referred to as the Human Resources Information System (HRIS), can provide involves salary and administration, the bulk of the burden that this system can ease involves employee documentation, which it can make easily accessible electronically and maintain real time. For instance, instead of manually inputting employee time logs, the system can automatically record these logs from an electronic terminal and churn out reports per employee, including salary equivalents.

Explain two to three (2-3) reasons why the company would benefit from adopting an HRIS. Focus on how the HRIS would address the HR function you identified in your business assessment.

Advances in electronic innovation enhance immensely the effective administration of HR through the HRIS innovation. Subsequently, there are three reasons why GGS will benefit from adopting an HRIS. First, an HRIS will address the cumbersome and highly time-consuming HR function of personnel administration, not to mention other functions that are crucial and potentially prone to inefficiencies in HRM. Second, an HRIS is capable of efficiently gathering employee data from electronic terminals (e.g. biometric machine), which makes time keeping highly efficient, effective, and dependable. Contract end dates can be easily monitored, too. Third, an HRIS can generate with higher speed valuable reports that can support data-based decision making and planning. With an HRIS support, Mr. Bell does not have to go to each outlet for hiring activities as the system can process selection standards based on current employee profiles and performance records. Besides, salaries and benefits organization are likewise prepared faster (Maier, 2013).

References

Hendry, C. (2012). Human resource management. Routledge.

Maier, C., Laumer, S., Eckhardt, A., & Weitzel, T. (2013). Analyzing the impact of HRIS implementations on HR personnel’s job satisfaction and turnover intention. The Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 22(3), 193-207.