First Engineering use HRCharter to help drive business improvement

Customer Case Study

Today's HR systems allow companies to hold significant amounts of information about their workforce; information that, were it readily available, could help line managers make better-informed decisions about day-to-day operations as well as longer term planning.

First Engineering has taken an innovative approach to delivering HR information to their managers, harnessing Cezanne Software's organisation charting systems to deliver data in a uniquely powerful visual context.

Created through a management buyout in 1996 from the former British Rail Scottish Infrastructure Service Unit, First Engineering offer a unique combination of rail infrastructure services, from rail maintenance to the design of sophisticated signalling systems. The company has around 3,900 employees and is part of the Peterhouse Group, a £600 million turnover international support services group.

First Engineering initially implemented the network version of Cezanne Software's organisation charting tool, HRCharter Professional, in August 2001. As John Logie, Head of Corporate Information for First Engineering explains, "At the time our requirement for charts was to help with organisation planning. We'd been using Microsoft ® Visio to manually generate charts but, because Visio wasn't integrated with our HR system, Workplace, we'd found that the charts created by various parts of the business weren't accurate."

"Workplace contains valuable information about people, positions and reporting relationships that could help with HR planning, but we could only access this information one screen at a time, or by creating reports. There was no graphical interface – and no way of automatically creating organisation charts."

First Engineering tried to address the problem by setting up a data extract from Workplace, which could be used by Visio to generate the charts. According to John, this proved to be an horrific experience. "For just one of our divisions with 1,200 employees, the whole process took 36 hours. I needed to plug the gap and get rid of Visio!"

First Engineering selected HRCharter Professional as the solution. John explains, "HRCharter Professional is designed to be integrated with HR databases, and can display virtually any of the information from this database. That meant we were able to improve the process of generating organisation charts and, at the same time, provide HR managers with more valuable information because we could present a wider range of information in the context of the chart."

John says the benefits of HRCharter were almost immediate. "Once HRCharter had been integrated with the data from Workplace, the process of generating charts dropped from hours to minutes and, since the data was drawn directly from the Workplace system, we could be confident that everyone shared the same view of the organisation."

HRCharter also helped First Engineering to identify issues more quickly. John comments "An advantage of HRCharter was the high visibility it gave to who was in what position – which flagged up data integrity problems. For example, one of the things we did was to create a chart box style that used the conditional mapping and colour coding capabilities of HRCharter to highlight people out of grade. Identifying this kind of information using standard reports is very difficult. With HRCharter anomalies like this are immediately apparent."

At the end of 2002, First Engineering decided to upgrade to the web version of HRCharter, HRCharter Enterprise. John comments, "We'd had a collaborative review with Railtrack (as it was then called). We'd identified that we wanted to take a new approach to competency management. Since line managers are responsible for the day-to-day allocation of resources to projects, a major challenge for us was to ensure that these managers were aware of what competencies were required for any particular task – and what competencies their staff had."

"We thought long and hard about how to deliver this information in a way that line managers could very quickly understand. We decided to use HRCharter Enterprise."

"We'd already demonstrated that HRCharter provided information in a way that had immediate visual impact, and that it could display virtually any data column from our HR database. By moving to the web version of HRCharter, we could make charts containing competency data available across our intranet, so line managers could gain secure access to the information through a standard web browser." He adds "We also knew that HRCharter was very flexible, so we felt confident that we'd be able to work with Cezanne Software to add the custom drill-down features we required."

"Our competency framework has around 200 core roles with their own specific competencies. Within these roles we also have positions, which may have different requirements. For example, signalling equipment can vary from location to location, which means signalling and telecomms maintenance teams need different training depending on where they are based. Within each team, we may also only need to have a certain number of people with particular skills. An example is vegetation control where, in a track maintenance team of ten, we may only need three people who can operate a chain saw. By including this information in the charts that are available to line managers, we can ensure that the right teams are put together."

From any position in the organisation, line managers can drill down to individual employees and look at a range of information relating to competencies. This means they can quickly see the competency requirements for any particular position and compare them with the skill set of the individual person. Managers are also able to review information about training; for example, the courses employees have been waitlisted for, courses they've been scheduled to attend and courses they've completed, together with their results. The charts also show where qualifications need renewal. This enables line managers to take a much more active role in ensuring that appropriate skills are developed.

First Engineering's Technical Director, Stephen Barber says he believes it's hard to put a value on this information. "This is a safety critical industry and competency management is a priority. HRCharter is helping us to proactively manage competencies in a way we couldn't do before."

It's also important to Stephen that HRCharter is integrated with their core HR information system. He explains, "Since HRCharter creates charts on-demand from our Workplace data, we share a single view of people, positions and competencies across the whole organisation. There's no danger of staff being overlooked. Integration is an enormous assurance of data integrity."

The training department is now updating the core HR system as soon as course assessments are complete, with the information being made available to HRCharter the next day. Stephen explains, "This means that the updated information is almost immediately available to managers and supervisors. This just wouldn't have been possible before."

Stephen says there have been other benefits. "By including position-based competency profiles in the charts, we make these profiles much more visible. Line managers and supervisors, who may well have been involved in agreeing the competency profiles, are constantly reminded of the criteria. This has encouraged a debate about how profiles can be refined and improved.

He adds, "We also used to maintain and distribute paper-based charts – which dated rapidly. Because we can provide company-wide access to the non-sensitive data in HRCharter, employees can generate their own organisation charts. Our whole process has become much more robust."

John says that he enjoys working with Cezanne Software "I've found them very proactive, they've listened to my ideas and come up with solutions. The installation went according to plan, and where we did have problems, they were quickly resolved."

First Engineering has more ambitions for HRCharter. "I'd like to develop it even further", says John, "So far we've concentrated on competency management but there are a range of other issues I'd like to address. We are currently implementing work management systems which will allow us to determine resource utilisation. I plan to make this information available in charts so that we'll be able to quickly see core staff utilisation, the agency staff usage and the performance of each part of the business. And, with the help of Cezanne Software, I intend to further develop the customised features of HRCharter to encompass more general HR aspects such as employee career history, payroll information, discipline, absence management, etc. The list is endless!"